When George Mitchell returned from the Middle East after two years as special envoy for President Obama, the silence was deafening. Not a single major news outlet ran an analytical story, and aside from a few television interviews, the public heard little about an effort that included visits to 14 heads of state and the first direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians in five years.

The reason was obvious – diplomacy that began with hope, at the very beginning of a new administration, had “failed.” Mitchell, who had brokered the Good Friday agreement in 1998 that brought peace to Northern Ireland, had not achieved similar results in one of the world’s most intractable trouble spots, which has seen open warfare since the founding of the state of Israel in 1947.

Characteristically, Mitchell accepted that assessment unflinchingly in a recent interview, though he qualified it. “The reality is if you try to get a peace agreement, and you don’t get one, then you failed to get an agreement,” he said. “If that’s the case, then 10 presidents, 19 secretaries of state, untold number of envoys and emissaries, and many Israeli prime ministers have all failed. Because we’ve been trying to get agreement since 1947, and there isn’t any agreement yet.”

A year after he returned from the Middle East, though, Mitchell finds hopeful signs in the region – and several alarming ones, though not necessarily the ones featured in New York Times and Washington Post reporting.

For one thing, if you consider peace as the absence of violence, then there has been significant progress, particularly in the West Bank where Palestinian security forces have taken over from the Israeli army much of the responsibility for keeping the peace. There are fewer rocket attacks, fewer suicide bombers, less disruption of trade and commerce. More children are in school. Palestinian businesses are growing.

That’s a huge contrast from Mitchell’s previous Middle East diplomacy, when he conducted a fact-finding mission for President Clinton after the – yes – failure of the 2000 Camp David talks between Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, which Clinton conducted personally. At that time, Arafat was holed up in a bombed-out presidential compound in Ramallah, subject to Israeli shelling as the second intifada – Palestinian rebellion – raged outside.

Mitchell remembers that security was so tight that, at some points, he was protected by U.S., Israeli and Palestinian security forces simultaneously.

Now, the West Bank is beginning to look very different – “dramatic” is the word Mitchell uses. “There were cranes all over the place, construction of new buildings and infrastructure,” he said. “It’s still a difficult life because they’re under occupation, but the circumstances have improved dramatically.”

The key to those changes, Mitchell believes, was the election of Arafat’s successor as president and leader of the Fatah party, Mamoud Abbas, in 2005, and later Abbas’ appointment of a technocrat, Salam Fayyad, as prime minister in 2007. Fayyad is beholden to no political faction, and has concentrated on rooting out corruption and providing basic services. As a result, millions of dollars in economic assistance from Europe and the United States has finally been devoted to improving daily life.

Mitchell said one key difference between Arafat and Abbas should have reassured Israelis. “While Arafat said he had renounced violence, there’s no doubt that he did not adhere to that fully,” Mitchell said. By contrast, Abbas “ has been clear and outspoken throughout his tenure in opposing violence, and stressing that the only way forward is through peaceful negotiation.” And with Fayyad as prime minister, Palestinians, at least in the West Bank, are beginning to hope for normal, peaceful lives.

Over the last five years the prime minister has made impressive progress, Mitchell said. “He set forth targets for the establishment of the institutions of government that would be ready to take over in the event an agreement was reached and they got a state.” When the World Bank was asked last year if a Palestinian state would soon be feasible, its report said that it was possible now.

Unfortunately, despite those encouraging “facts on the ground,” Mitchell believes he was unable to help bridge the gaps between the two sides because each has deep internal divisions.

Between Abbas’ election and Fayyad’s appointment, a parliamentary election was won by Hamas, a party the United States considers a sponsor of terrorism. In the ensuing gridlock, Hamas has taken control of non-contiguous Gaza while Fatah continues to rule the West Bank.

The Israeli side is no more united. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed a coalition government shortly after Mitchell started work, and has maintained it by taking an increasingly hawkish stance. His call for possible air strikes on Iran is, for instance, firmly opposed by his own military and security chiefs, who see it as reckless.

Netanyahu’s fierce rhetoric is directed not only toward the Palestinians, but toward the Obama administration, which he charges is insufficiently friendly toward Israel.

Mitchell rejects that contention. U.S. policy has in fact been remarkably consistent, he says. One point of contention was Obama’s call for a settlement freeze in the occupied territories, which Mitchell said “has been the policy of every U.S. president since 1967, including George W. Bush.” The other was an Obama speech saying that a “two state” agreement would divide territory along the lines of Israel’s 1967 boundaries, before it occupied the West Bank and Gaza.

Mitchell cites a speech Bush gave just days before leaving office in 2009 in which he said, “The point of departure for permanent status negotiations is clear. There should be an end to the occupation that began in 1967.”

Mitchell also finds the charge that Obama is endangering Israeli’s safety groundless. “One of the ironies of the criticism of the president is that the U.S.-Israel security relationship is the best it’s ever been,” he said. The Obama administration “has provided extraordinary assistance, particularly in helping Israel to build and deploy an anti-missile system.”

That’s important, Mitchell said, “because the real threat to Israel now doesn’t come from suicide bombers, it comes from missiles.” Hamas has such missiles, and Iran has also deployed solid-fueled rockets capable of reaching Israel – a point often missed in the long-running debate over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

So despite improved conditions of daily life in both Israel and the West Bank, Mitchell does not see the prospect of negotiations resuming any time soon. A developing partnership that he found and nurtured in Northern Ireland among parties once sworn to each other’s destruction simply does not exist between the Palestinians and Israelis.

Since returning from abroad, Mitchell has slowed down a bit, but not much. He is chairman emeritus for DLA Piper, the law firm he joined after retiring from the U.S. Senate in 1995, which is now the world’s largest. Of the firm’s 4,200 lawyers, two-thirds are located outside the United States, so Mitchell keeps up a busy schedule of international travel. On a trip in April, he also joined a European-wide conference devoted to studying how the Northern Ireland agreement was achieved, including a speech in Dublin.

He hopes to spend all of July and August at his home on Mount Desert Island with his wife, Heather, and two children, something he couldn’t do during his months of shuttle diplomacy.

One project for the summer is getting a serious start on a memoir, for which he recently signed a contract with Random House. Mitchell has previously written about the Iran-Contra scandal with Sen. William Cohen (“Men of Zeal”), the Good Friday agreement (“Making Peace”), the fall of Communism (“Not for America Alone”) and global warming (“World on Fire.”) The new, more personal memoir, he said – in contrast to many lengthy tomes produced by ex-politicians – “will not be a long book.”

Mitchell said he has no regrets about taking on the Middle East mission, noting that he was asked to do it even before President Obama took office, and departed on his first trip just two days after the inauguration. “I couldn’t imagine saying no to a president in a situation like this,” he said. “I think everyone should serve their country when the opportunity arises.”

While cautioning that the situations in Northern Ireland and the Middle East were very different, Mitchell does think there are some basic principles that can be applied to conflicts wherever they appear.

One is that the situation is never static, always dynamic. That’s what worries him about the Middle East – that political leaders on both sides are not taking advantage of the “lull” that could end with a new eruption of violence. “We grow older each day,” he said. “We change each day — and that’s true of countries as well as people.” Even a small incident in Jerusalem, epicenter of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he said, could spiral into war, especially given the instability of many governments following the “Arab Spring” uprisings.

Another observation concerns the dangers of unilateralism – the belief that one side, generally the more powerful one, can impose its will on the other. In this sense, Mitchell contrasted Israel’s withdrawal from the “protection zone” it had established in Lebanon, and the pullout from Gaza in 2005 with its negotiations with Egypt over the then-occupied Sinai Peninsula that led to the first-ever peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state.

The Lebanon and Gaza withdrawals, he said, were “difficult decisions, but right decisions for the Israeli leadership” that led to “unfortunate consequences” in the form of ongoing terrorist movements. With Egypt, however, negotiations “produced a much more stable and peaceful result.”

Making peace, finally, is not for the faint-hearted, Mitchell believes. While the success in Northern Ireland has been lasting, and much celebrated, what Mitchell also remembers is how close those talks, too, came to failing.

“Fifteen minutes before the parties voted to sign the agreement, we didn’t know what was going to happen,” he said. That decision “took enormous courage by the political leaders of Northern Ireland … and many of them have paid very dearly for it. It ended their careers.”

That kind of courage has been lacking among many, though not all, Middle Eastern leaders. Each side must agree to give up something it wants in order to reach agreement, he said, “and I don’t think either side believes in the willingness of the other to do that.”

Mitchell’s concerns extend also to what he hears from some American politicians, particularly concerning Iran. “There’s a lot a reckless talk about war,” he said. “We’ve just completed nearly a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and here you’ve got people in this country saying, ‘Bomb Syria!’ “Bomb Iran!’ just like it’s not a major thing. It’s a huge thing to become involved in a war in this region.” Mitchell added that he supports Obama’s stance. “It’s very clear his policy is that Iran is not going to have nuclear weapons.”

He hasn’t given up hope that, some day, peace will come to the Middle East, but only when all sides are willing to engage with each other. It will come about not through idealism, but because of pragmatic concerns, he believes. “It will cause intense political difficulty and pain for the leadership on both sides, but I think the pain of not getting an agreement will be much greater for both societies. And that, eventually, will drive them.”

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