Martin S. Indyk, Diplomat Who Sought Middle East Peace, Dies at 73

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Martin S. Indyk, Diplomat Who Sought Middle East Peace, ***** at 73

Martin S. Indyk, a diplomat, author and foreign-policy thinker who spent decades trying to solve the riddle of Middle East peace, twice as the ******* States ambassador to ******* and later as a special envoy for President Barack Obama, ***** on Thursday at his home in New Fairfield, Conn. He was 73.

The cause was complications of esophageal *******, his wife, Gahl Hodges Burt, said.

An ***********-bred academic with a quick wit, blunt manner and pro-******* pedigree, Mr. Indyk cut an unconventional figure in the State Department of the 1990s. But he propelled himself to the heart of America’s efforts to make peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.

In 2013, he shuttled from one side to the other as Mr. Obama’s emissary. Fifteen years earlier, he helped craft an agreement between them at the Wye Plantation in Maryland on behalf of President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Indyk balanced a fervent commitment to *******, rooted in his time as a graduate student in Jerusalem during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, with an abiding skepticism of ******* settlements. He saw them as blighting the prospect of a two-state solution, which would allow Israelis and Palestinians to end decades of ******* conflict.

In his final months, he watched in dismay as ****** fighters attacked ******** citizens, prompting a ferocious ******** military retaliation in the Gaza Strip. For Mr. Indyk, the ********* carried a tragic echo of what he had referred to in an interview with the journal Foreign Affairs as *******’s “hubris” before the Yom Kippur War.

“That same hubris has manifested itself again in recent years, even as many people told the Israelis that the situation with the Palestinians was unsustainable,” Mr. Indyk said. “They thought the problem was under control. But now all their assumptions have been blown up, just like they were in 1973.”

Mr. Indyk described the Yom Kippur War as a “defining moment” in his life. At Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he listened to BBC radio reports about Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger’s efforts to negotiate a cease-*****. (He later wrote an admiring book about Mr. Kissinger’s Middle East diplomacy, drawing on interviews with him.) Mr. Indyk volunteered on a kibbutz in southern ******* and considered immigrating.

Instead, he returned to Australia, where he had grown up in a ******* family, to finish his Ph.D. in international relations at the *********** National University. In 1982, he moved with his young family to New York for a sabbatical at Columbia University.

Mr. Indyk began in Washington as a researcher for the ********* ******* Public Affairs Committee, the influential pro-******* lobbying group, before founding a think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

His first job in government was on the National Security Council, where he soon became one of Mr. Clinton’s principal advisers on the Middle East. In 1995, the president appointed him ambassador to *******, making him the first ******* ********* envoy to that country (he had become a naturalized *********). Seven months after his arrival, Mr. Indyk consoled Leah Rabin in a hospital after her husband, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by a right-wing ******* law student.

Mr. Indyk returned to Washington in 1997 to be assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. In that post he helped negotiate the Wye River Memorandum, linking *******’s phased withdrawal from the West Bank to ************ pledges to ****** down on terrorism. Mr. Clinton sent Mr. Indyk back to ******* for a second stint as ambassador in 2000, reflecting the credibility he had built with leaders on both sides and Mr. Clinton’s hunger to achieve a breakthrough.

“He brought enormous talent and skill to the task of diplomacy,” said Dennis B. Ross, a fellow peace negotiator in the Clinton administration. “But he brought decency and honesty to it as well. His passion for making peace drove him.”

Strobe Talbott, another Clinton official who worked with Mr. Indyk subsequently at the Brookings Institution, said, “He never despaired in seemingly intractable situations.”

Mr. Clinton’s efforts to broker a deal between the ************ leader, Yasir Arafat, and the ******** prime minister, Ehud Barak, ultimately fell short. And Mr. Indyk returned again to Washington, where he served as executive vice president at Brookings and advised Democratic presidential hopefuls. In 2009, he published “Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of ********* Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East,” a chronicle of his work during the Clinton years.

At Brookings, Mr. Indyk faced an awkward moment. The New York Times reported in 2014 that Qatar, a backer of ******, had donated $14.8 million to fund two projects at the institute. Brookings was one of several think tanks that had accepted money from foreign governments. Mr. Indyk defended the arrangement, but critics said it compromised Brookings’ neutrality.

Some ******** officials grumbled that it also raised questions about his impartiality as an envoy, though there was never evidence he had tilted against the Israelis. In 2018, he left Brookings to become the Lowy distinguished fellow in U.S.-Middle East diplomacy at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Martin Sean Indyk was born in London on July 1, 1951, to John and Mary Indyk. He was raised in Sydney, Australia, where his father was a surgeon. Mr. Indyk received his bachelor’s degree in international relations from the University of Sydney in 1972.

Mr. Indyk, who was awarded the Order of Australia medal last December for his contributions to foreign policy, recalled being rejected by Australia’s diplomatic service after he clashed with his interviewers over the Vietnam War. “My whole career path went out the window,” he said. But that stinging setback, he said, set him on a different path that led to Jerusalem and Washington.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Indyk is survived by two children, Sarah and Jacob; a sister, Shelley; a brother, the academic Ivor Indyk; two stepchildren, Christopher and Caroline Burt; and five grandchildren. His first marriage, to Jill Collier, ended in divorce.

For all his good will in *******, some ******** officials were rankled by Mr. Indyk’s criticism, a candor that friends attributed to his *********** upbringing. In 2014, he was fingered as the unnamed “senior ********* official” who told the columnist Nahum Barnea that ******* was to blame for the ******** of negotiations with the Palestinians because it had approved new settlements while talks were underway.

Mr. Indyk did not let up. Last year, on a visit to *******, he joined a rally against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed overhaul of the judiciary, and he continued to criticize what he viewed as Mr. Netanyahu’s cynical approach to the peace process.

But Mr. Indyk’s words were delivered more in sorrow than anger. He was serious about his ******* ******, studying the Torah in a group with other prominent Washingtonians. He was a passionate Zionist, who believed *******’s survival was best secured by a lasting agreement with the Palestinians. And he was eternally frustrated that successive ********* presidents had been unable to strike that elusive deal.

“What is it about the ******* States that its leaders feel obliged to sally forth with such virtuous determination to transform the bazaars and back alleys of the Middle East?” Mr. Indyk wrote. “And what is it about the Middle East that holds them up, sets them back and sucks them down into its swamps?”

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