David Makovsky, a member of the State Department’s Middle East peace team, is returning to his think tank position.
The departure of Makovsky, announced last week by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is the latest signal that the Obama administration is retreating from its intensive efforts to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
Talks collapsed in April and, over the summer, team leader Martin Indyk also quit and returned to the Brookings Institution, the think tank that employed him before he joined the effort in 2013.
Other team members have left in recent months and were not replaced.
The team, numbering over a dozen at one point, was considered large for such an effort and represented Secretary of State John Kerry’s interest in brokering a deal. — jta