Martin Indyk, US diplomat who played a key role in Israeli-Palestinian talks

One of Martin Indyk’s first acts as US ambassador to Israel in November 1995 was to attend Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral after his assassination by an Israeli right-wing extremist. Sitting next to him was Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud party leader who would defeat Rabin’s successor Shimon Peres in elections held in May 1996. As the funeral cortege passed he recalled Netanyahu telling him: “Look, look at this. He’s a hero now, but if he had not been assassinated, I would have beaten him in the elections, and then he would have gone into history as a failed politician.”
Two years before, as President Clinton’s special adviser on the Middle East, Indyk was elated at the signing of the first Oslo peace accord, sealed with a historic handshake between Rabin and the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat. “At that moment it looked like peace was really possible,” Indyk recalled. “Rabin and Arafat had reached an understanding about how to deal with each other.”
For someone who 20 years earlier had decided to devote his life to the notion that the US could help Israel to achieve peace, it was a moment when the planets aligned. “Rabin had been elected prime minister, the Soviet Union had collapsed, Saddam Hussein had been thrown out of Kuwait, the US was the dominant actor in the whole region and all of the Arab states and Palestinians were sitting in direct negotiation with Israel.” On top of all of that Clinton was popular with the Israeli public.
Indyk did not discount the huge opposition to the peace deal from the Israeli right but he believed that had Rabin not been assassinated in 1995 a lasting peace could have been achieved. “Rabin had Arafat’s number,” he said. “He understood him. He knew that he was manipulative but he knew how to deal with him,” said Indyk, a straight talker who had come to Clinton’s attention after founding a Washington think tank on Middle Eastern affairs. “They had grown to trust each other. He found a way to help Arafat with his political needs and Arafat had reciprocated. And I think that basis of trust would have been really important in making the final deal. Taking out Rabin was a devastating blow from which the peace process really hasn’t recovered.”
Martin Sean Indyk was born in London in 1951 to Mary and John, a surgeon. The family had Polish-Jewish heritage. They emigrated to Australia and Indyk grew up in Castlecrag, Sydney, graduating in international relations at Sydney University in 1972.
Indyk was studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when an Arab coalition launched a surprise attack on Israel on the holiest day of the year in Judaism — Yom Kippur — on October 6, 1973. He described it as a “defining moment” in his life. Bursting with patriotic Zionism, he volunteered on a kibbutz in southern Israel. He came to realise how vulnerable Israel was from all sides and how dependent it was on US military aid, and he dropped thoughts of becoming an Israeli citizen. “I just decided that I would help Israel to achieve peace with its neighbours, and the Palestinians in particular, and that the only effective way of doing that was via the US, so I decided to go to Washington to help Israel and the Arabs make peace.”
After finishing his PhD in international relations in Australia, he spent some time at Columbia University in New York and moved on to Washington as a researcher for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobby group. Deciding that a different path was required, in 1985 he founded a think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
An observant Reform Jew who studied the Torah, Indyk came into the ambit of the Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton, who took a liking to the Australian. After winning the presidency in 1992 Clinton appointed him as an adviser on the Middle East with a place on the US security council. “I like having you around Martin because you and I both have funny accents,” Clinton told him. In the same year Indyk became a US citizen and was appointed US ambassador to Israel in 1995, the first Jewish person to hold the post.
Clinton recalled him to Washington in 1997 to become assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. During this time he built on the relationships he had made as ambassador to help negotiate the 1998 Wye River Memorandum between Netanyahu and Arafat, under which Israel would pledge to return 13 per cent of the West Bank to the Palestinians eventually in return for actions to suppress terrorism.
Indyk was sent back to Israel for a second stint as ambassador in 2000, charged with smoothing the way towards the Camp David peace talks at which Clinton hoped to secure a deal before his presidency ended. It was an unhappier stint; he was investigated after it emerged that he was working through sensitive material on an unclassified computer during a flight to prepare for meetings with foreign delegates. Meanwhile, the talks between Arafat and the left-wing Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who had defeated Netanyahu in elections in 1999, ended in 2001 without an agreement.
Indyk returned to Washington, where he became executive vice-president of the Brookings Institute think tank. He had dealt with detractors from both the left and the right of Israeli politics, but was praised as a fine diplomat who combined scholarship, wiliness, decency, honesty and candour. The latter was demonstrated in 2009 when he published Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East, which provided often humorous insights into Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, but also explained how difficult it was for westerners to understand the motives and intentions of Middle Eastern leaders and how to recognise those rare moments when they were willing to act in ways that could produce breakthroughs.
Indyk passionately advocated a two-state solution as the best way to ensure the long-term survival of Israel. In 2013 he still believed the two-state solution was possible when President Obama appointed him US special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
He later admitted that Obama had made the job harder by “putting some daylight between the US and Israel and currying favour with the Arabs and the Muslims” in the belief that it would “enable him to actually help Israel … but it didn’t work because the Israelis turned against him”.
At the same time he became increasingly convinced that Netanyahu, who had returned as prime minister in 2009, wanted to annex the West Bank despite making a speech in 2009 supporting a two-state solution. Indyk accused Netanyahu of approving settlements during the negotiations. He resigned after the last direct Israel-Palestinian talks broke down. “At the end of that nine-month encounter, the two sides were further apart on all the core issues than when we started,” he said.
Thereafter he was a vocal critic of the policy of allowing Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2020 he said: “Hard as it is for me to admit it, a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem is not a vital American interest. It is a vital Israeli interest if the country wants to survive as a Jewish and democratic state … [The US] should encourage it to hold open that possibility by avoiding West Bank settlement construction or annexation that would make territorial compromise with the Palestinians impossible.”
Indyk is survived by his second wife, Gahl Hodges Burt, a former aide to Henry Kissinger who worked at the White House during the Reagan administration. He is also survived by a daughter, Sarah, and son, Jacob, from his marriage to Jill Collier, which ended in divorce.
He continued to comment vociferously, latterly as a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. In recent years he praised President Biden for encouraging Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to co-operate in the revitalisation of the more moderate Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority.
Ailing with cancer, he reflected on the October 7 attacks by Hamas and Israel’s retribution in Gaza, accusing Netanyahu of dragging out the war and hostage negotiations for political purposes. “The US is pressuring Israel in ways it hasn’t done before and demonstrators are coming out on to the streets against the government,” he said. “Tens of thousands are calling for Netanyahu’s overthrow and that has the potential to become widespread civil disobedience.”
In a post on Twitter/X on May 22, after a proposed ceasefire deal was rejected, he urged Israelis to “wake up”, because the country’s government “is leading you into greater isolation and ruin”.
Faced with the possibility of Donald Trump returning as president with an administration that would be more supportive of Israel’s current policy, Indyk urged Biden to make a televised address: “The president should speak from the Oval Office to Israelis, Palestinians and Americans to explain his vision and lay it out in a way that is non-threatening and provides hope for all sides that there is a way forward to a two-state solution and try to tackle the issues that Israelis most fear about a Palestinian state: demilitarisation, security arrangements, testing periods that the UN and the international community can be involved with. The timing would be right for that if we can get a ceasefire.”
He never gave up on peace: “I really believe in the end that Israelis do not want a future of never-ending war and occupation for their children and grandchildren.”
Martin Indyk, diplomat, was born on July 1, 1951. He died of oesophageal cancer on July 25, 2024, aged 73