During his campaign, Rowhani promised to ease tensions with the West, allow greater press freedom and reduce government interference in people’s lives

In 1991, former emir Khalifa bin Hamad al-Thani expressed his support for the Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid, engaging Qatar in bilateral relations with the state of Israel. His successor, Hamad bin Khalifa was present at the signing ceremony of the ’Oslo 2’ agreement in 1995 between the Israelis and the Palestinians, giving his support to the peace process. This political support initiated several trade ventures between Qatar and Israel, leading to a warming of relations between the two countries. Qatar became the first Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) state to grant Israel de facto recognition, when the first Israeli trade office in the GCC opened in Doha, following a visit by the Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres in 1996.

The Israeli government has frequently reiterated the stance taken after its creation in 1948, namely that ‘UN Resolution 194, like all other resolutions of the UN, is not binding and that there is no basis in international law for the right to return’.

Often – and routinely in the 1980s – Syria used violence as a foreign policy tool and, although it paid a price in Western political and economic sanctions, this undoubtedly boosted the international perception of Syria as a state that could not be ignored.

The imposed borderlines had reduced historical Palestine to about half of its original size. A further dramatic reduction would occur in consequence of the recommendation of the United Nations in 1947 to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state.

An overview of Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli jails, hunger strikes, and the 2011 prisoner swap deal between Israel and Hamas.

Immediately after Hamas’ seizure of power, Israel imposed a blockade of the Gaza Strip. No border crossings were allowed, and only goods that served humanitarian purposes (according to Israel) could pass into Gaza. The economy in Gaza came to a standstill. Contraband could only reach the population by way of underground tunnels from the Egyptian border.

From the documents it becomes clear that the Palestinian negotiators were willing to make far-reaching concessions. Conversely, the documents also reveal that the Israeli negotiators refused to comply with these proposals put forward by the Palestinian negotiators.

Before 1967, the Green Line – established in the 1949 Armistice Agreements – was in fact the eastern border of Israel. Back then, Israel’s territory encompassed 78 percent of the land of the pre-1948 British Mandate for Palestine. However, neither Israel nor its neighbouring Arab states had ever recognized the borders of this territory as a formal state border, although most of the international community did in fact consider the Green Line as such.

Barack Obama, Bush’s successor as US president, was inaugurated in January 2009. Obama considers it one of his priorities to restore the damage done to the position of the United States in the Middle East during the Bush presidency.