Cold peace

• 1. Introduction

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  Cold peace is a condition few people think to name, yet it shapes some of the most consequential relationships in modern history. The phrase describes a state in which two countries are no longer at war, a formal treaty stands in place, but the government or the public of at least one side treats that treaty with vocal, open disgust. Not a cold war, not a hot one. Something in between, and in some ways more corrosive than either.

  The term itself came from a single man, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who coined it in late 1982 while serving as a junior foreign minister of Egypt. He would later become Secretary-General of the United Nations. He introduced the phrase to capture a specific, frustrating reality: peace existed in name, but genuine cooperation between populations was limited or deliberately held back.

  What makes cold peace different from a cold war? In a cold war, rival states fund proxy conflicts, supporting each other's enemies. Cold peace avoids that. The mistrust is just as deep, the domestic hostility just as fierce, but it stops short of proxy wars or formal incursions. A signed agreement holds the line. Public sentiment seethes behind it.

  The examples Boutros-Ghali had in mind when he coined the phrase were close to home. Egypt and Israel had signed the Camp David Accords and a formal peace treaty. Technically, the war was over. But what followed in the years after would test every assumption behind that achievement.

• 2. Egypt and Israel

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  Egypt and Israel had fought five wars before the Camp David Accords brought them to the table. By the time those talks concluded and a peace treaty was signed, the populations on both sides were exhausted by the cost of those conflicts. The accords and the treaty were seen as a high point of Middle Eastern diplomacy.

  Then came 1981. Anwar Sadat, who had made the treaty possible, was assassinated. The following year, Israel invaded Lebanon. Egyptian popular support for the peace treaty collapsed, and it never recovered. The drop did not fully translate into government policy. Sadat's successor, Hosni Mubarak, kept the letter of the treaty intact from 1981 until his own ouster in 2011. But Mubarak's government simultaneously used state media to stoke hostility toward Israelis and Jews among the Egyptian public.

  After Mubarak fell and a military junta took power, protesters in Egypt called loudly for the 1979 treaty to be annulled. An Israeli military response to attacks by Palestinian militants resulted in the deaths of five Egyptian security personnel in the Sinai. Egypt withdrew its ambassador.

  Behind these flashpoints lie deeper roots. Pan-ethnic solidarity with Palestinians, religious sympathies, and Egyptian nationalist feeling that predated Israel's 1948 independence all feed the public's alienation from the treaty. Most of the treaty's formal terms have been respected. What has not been fulfilled, in the view of many, is the spirit of normalization that its architects intended. That gap between the letter and the spirit is where cold peace lives.

• 3. The Mossad Affair in Jordan

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  On the 27th of September 1997, eight agents from Israel's Mossad entered Jordan carrying fake Canadian passports. Their target was Khaled Mashal, a Jordanian citizen and head of Hamas, the militant Islamist Palestinian group. King Hussein had been preparing for a 30-year Hamas-Israel truce just three days before the attempt, following two Hamas attacks in Jerusalem.

  Two of the agents followed Mashal to his office and injected poison into his ear canal. Mashal's bodyguard caught them. The two agents were taken by Jordanian police; the remaining six took shelter inside the Israeli embassy.

  King Hussein met with an Israeli delegate and was given what he called, in a public speech, a situation in which someone had "spat in his face." He demanded an antidote to save Mashal's life. Benjamin Netanyahu, who had become Prime Minister of Israel the previous year, refused. Jordan threatened to storm the Israeli embassy and seize the rest of the Mossad team. Israel argued this would violate the Geneva Conventions. Jordan replied that the Geneva Conventions "do not apply to terrorists."

  A special operations team led by Hussein's son Abdullah was readied. King Hussein called President Bill Clinton directly, threatening to annul the peace treaty if Israel withheld the antidote. Clinton intervened and extracted Israel's agreement to reveal the antidote's name. His private assessment of Netanyahu: "This man is impossible." Khaled Mashal survived. Israel agreed to release 23 Jordanian prisoners and 50 Palestinian prisoners, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in exchange for the six Mossad operatives. Israeli requests to reach King Hussein after the incident were met with silence.

• 4. A Cold Peace Getting Colder

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  King Hussein described his experience of the aftermath as a bitter disappointment. His son and successor, King Abdullah II, inherited that disappointment and gave it a name: cold peace. In a 2010 interview, King Abdullah II said that Jordan-Israel relations had "reached the lowest point since the peace treaty." In a separate interview, he described the relationship as "a cold peace that keeps getting colder."

  The treaty contained a land arrangement that made this chill visible in a very practical way. After the peace agreement, Israel transferred a portion of land near the moshav of Tzofar to Jordanian control. The area is known in Jordan as Al Ghamr. Israel then leased the land back, allowing Israeli farmers from the moshav to continue working it. The lease was set for 25 years, renewable, with an expiration in 2019.

  On the 21st of October 2018, King Abdullah II announced publicly that he would not renew the lease. Under the treaty, Jordan could only exercise this right by giving one year's prior notice, which the announcement satisfied exactly. He stated that from the 10th of November 2019, Israeli farmers would be barred from the Al Ghamr enclave. During late April 2020, the land was formally returned to Jordanian control.

  In December 2022, following the inauguration of a new Israeli government, King Abdullah II gave an interview to CNN in which he warned Israel against changing the status of Muslim and Christian holy sites. His words were direct: "If people want to get into a conflict with us, we're quite prepared."

• 5. Other Cases

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  The Egypt-Israel and Jordan-Israel examples are the most documented instances of cold peace, but they are not alone. After the Iran-Iraq War ended in a truce, neither Saddam Hussein's Iraq nor the Islamic Republic of Iran moved toward normalized relations. That deadlock held until the Ba'athist regime was brought down by the Iraq War.

  India and Pakistan represent a different configuration. After numerous clashes over Kashmir, the two countries arrived at a long-term ceasefire near the Line of Control. A minimum level of communication between the sides was maintained. But the relationship stopped well short of warmth or genuine normalization, fitting the pattern Boutros-Ghali described decades earlier in a very different part of the world.

  What unites these cases is the persistence of the underlying antagonism. The formal architecture of peace holds, but the sentiment beneath it does not follow. Boutros-Ghali's phrase, coined in late 1982, turned out to describe a durable condition rather than a temporary phase, one that the language of international relations had lacked a precise word for until he supplied it.