He calmed Gaza, aided Israel’s Arab ties and preserved hopes for peace

In his nearly six years as the top United Nations envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Nickolay Mladenov worked quietly behind the scenes to help keep the Gaza Strip from boiling over, preserve the possibility of a two-state solution and build support for Israeli-Arab normalization as a vastly preferable alternative to the Israeli annexation of West Bank land.

Mladenov, 48, whose last day on the job was Thursday, is returning to his native Bulgaria, having abruptly bowed out of another assignment to contend with what he described as a serious health problem.

In a two-hour exit interview, he recalled being surprised at how irrelevant he initially felt upon arriving in Jerusalem in 2015 as UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process — a post created in 1999, when there still was a peace process. His predecessors had by and large functioned as gadflies, experts said, firing off statements that tended to criticize Israel but seldom venturing from the sidelines.

“This mission was very much isolated from any sort of high-level interaction,” Mladenov said. “Nobody took it seriously. Basically, one side expects you to just repeat what they say; the other side expects you to go away, and that’s it.”

He did neither.

In 2016, he wrangled the Middle East Quartet of mediators — the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations — into issuing a groundbreaking report on concrete steps that could preserve the possibility of a two-state solution.

Taking action in the absence of negotiations ran contrary to diplomatic doctrine at the time, which held that resuming peace talks was the way to solve everything.

His approach has since gained widespread acceptance.

Last spring, insiders say, Mladenov was among the first officials to conclude that no deterrent would stop Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel from making good on his promises to annex West Bank territory but that it might be possible to induce him to drop annexation for a bigger prize: normalization with Arab states that had long shunned Israel.

Mladenov did not claim credit for the subsequent deals Israel struck. But he worked to build a constituency for the idea of using normalization as a carrot to reward Israel for dropping annexation and said that the changes underway were creating exciting possibilities for his successor as UN envoy, Norwegian diplomat Tor Wennesland.

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