Marwan Muasher is a key political figure in Jordan. The chief spokesperson of Jordan’s delegation at the 1991 Madrid Middle East peace conference, he was subsequently the first Jordanian ambassador to Israel.

He was then minister of information, ambassador to the United States, foreign minister and deputy prime minister. For about the past year, he has been a senior vice-president of the World Bank.

And now he has written an important  and timely book, The Arab Center: The Promise of Moderation (Yale University Press), in which he describes his role as a peace envoy and a force for constructive change in the Arab world.

Muasher, a liberal reformer who abhors Islamic radicalism, admits that Jordan’s 1994 peace treaty with Israel was “a leap of faith for his country and himself.” Although he considered himself “a champion of Arab-Israeli peace,” he hesitated before accepting the ambassadorship to Israel, his relatives having encouraged him to turn down the job.

His first impression of Israel was that it was more developed than Jordan, but  that it was by no means a superpower. Tel Aviv struck him as a melange of old Beirut and Europe.

He was determined to speak about the Arab-Israeli dispute candidly, but not in a spirit of confrontation. Still, he wanted Israelis “to know that peace with Jordan could not substitute for a permanent agreement with the Palestinians and that all the problems with the Arab world had not been solved.”

During his first few weeks in Israel in 1995, he worked out of the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv, receiving a flood of Israeli Arab visitors. Muasher, a Christian whose mother is a Palestinian from Jaffa, had a special interest in Israel’s Arab minority and visited almost every Arab community in his 10 months in Israel.

Among Israeli Jews, he recalls, he was “an instant celebrity,” being invited to their homes, functions and events. As a result, he formed lasting friendships with Israeli Jews.

He learned that Israelis live with a deep sense of insecurity and constantly seek reassurance. He also discovered that many Israelis are from Arab countries and appreciate Arab culture, a fact he should have known had he done his homework. In the end, he found Israelis to be “very defensive [and] aggressive.”

Muasher has a firm grasp of the issues and states his opinions clearly.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, he notes, Jordan stepped up its efforts to promote “a model of tolerant Islam” and sought “to rally the silent moderate majority” of Muslims into rejecting “radical teachings.” Later in his book, he refers to Al Qaeda’s “deviant form of Islam” and its “crime against humanity.”

Mostly, though, Muasher deals with the dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, whose details he has mastered.

Jordan’s policy was to facilitate peace by means of relevant United Nations resolutions, he says. “The old notion of wiping Israel off the map was deemed unrealistic, not only by Jordan but also  by Egypt.”

He charges that Israel was not really serious in negotiating with the Palestinians until the 1993 Oslo accords, saying that its web of settlements in the West Bank pre-empted the land-for-peace formula, as set out in UN resolutions 242 and 338.

He adds that the Labor party’s “Jordanian option” and the Likud’s “Jordan is Palestine” mantra was nothing less than a “conspiracy” to establish a Palestinian state outside the Palestinians’ historical homeland in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip at Jordan’s expense.

Muasher explains that King Hussein severed legal and administrative ties with the West Bank in 1988 to ensure that the effects of the first Palestinian uprising would not spill into Jordan.

In his view, the Palestinians only agreed to participate in the Madrid conference thanks to Jordan’s persistence.

“Madrid was a watershed in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” he observes. “The conference was the sum of decades of efforts by the moderate Arab countries and the international community to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the conflict.”

He believes that Israel’s participation was “not genuine,” claiming that the Israeli prime minister of the day, Yitzhak Shamir, used it to “buy time to build more settlements in the occupied territories.”

The Oslo accords, he writes, took Jordan completely by surprise. Jordan was initially apprehensive, fearing that Israel and the Palestinians had “cooked up something against Jordan’s interests.” But once the dust settled, he acknowledges, Jordan realized that Oslo could be beneficial for the Palestinians and itself.

According to Muasher, King Hussein and then-Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin laid the basis for the Israeli/Jordanian peace treaty at a meeting in London in May 1994.

Rabin assured King Hussein that Jordan’s vital interests, particularly concerning Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees, would be taken into consideration. “This set the stage toward resolving other pending issues – borders and water being the most prominent.”

As foreign minister, Muasher worked assiduously to ensure that the Oslo process would succeed. One of his first objectives was to convince Yasser Arafat, then president of the Palestinian Authority, “to take serious action against suicide bombings,” which, he thinks, hurt the Palestinian cause. “Arafat gave us nothing,” he laments.

Muasher takes credit for having convinced U.S. President George W. Bush to adopt the 2003 “road map” peace plan, which eventually fizzled out. He blames Israel and the Palestinians for the failure.

“The Palestinians could and should have done a lot more to deal with the security situation by closing the arms factories, confiscating illegal weapons, freezing funds that were going to illegal organizations, closing the cross-border tunnels through which arms were being smuggled, and implementing a comprehensive security plan.”

Israel violated the spirit and letter of the road map, he says, by launching incursions into the West Bank and by refusing to ease measures at checkpoints, release far more Palestinian prisoners and halt targeted assassinations.

In particular, Muasher is critical of Ariel Sharon, the then-prime minister who, he says, was “not interested” in a “permanent solution.”

Condemning Israel’s separation barrier, he says it has “severely damaged the prospects of a two-state solution and continues to stymie negotiations today.” Its true purpose, he says, is to unilaterally establish Israel’s new borders.

In the final chapters, Muasher talks about the urgent need of Arab governments to promote such long overdue reforms as good governance, economic well-being and inclusive decision-making. He warns that “radical ideologies” will triumph unless these reforms are implemented.

Arguing that reform has been impeded by the Arab-Israeli dispute, he urges “the Arab and Israeli centres” to defeat the extremists.

For peace to prevail, however, Israelis and Arabs must agree on a solution that meets the needs of both sides.

Easier said than done.