WASHINGTON – Time was running out when Secretary of State George P. Shultz returned home in April 1988 after flying 16,000 miles in a failed mission to persuade Arabs and Israelis to negotiate their differences.
Shultz said he would keep trying. “Who’s afraid to struggle against odds?” he asked. And so he did, in futility, until the Reagan administration ended in January 1989 without putting the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel on a course to a settlement.
But he shaped the future by legitimizing the Palestinian Arabs as a people with a defensible stake in determining their future.
Shultz, who died Saturday at age 100, was one of America’s most respected 20th-century statesmen. He served in President Richard M.