Aside from the Cold War, no other modern geopolitical issue has confounded, frustrated, and consumed the world’s interest to this day like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a religious territorial dispute seemingly without end. The Human Factor, however, takes us back to a brief period in the 1990s when it really felt like a pathway to a two-state solution was within reach following the signing of the Oslo Accords. Tragically, a combination of assassinations, cynicism, and political hubris laid the template for the circumstances Israel and the Palestinian Authority find themselves in today.

At the heart of director Dror Moreh’s provocative documentary are interviews with various U.S. negotiators from the presidential administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, including Martin Indyk, Daniel Kurtzer, and Robert Malley. Their conversations reveal the innate difficulty of bringing together two warring political states unwilling to acknowledge the other’s legitimacy. Yet even with Chairman Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s skepticism of any deal and Israel being at odds with Syria over the Golan Heights occupation, the United States felt a moral obligation to mediate as it entered that decade as the world’s sole superpower. In doing so, the U.S. government built up a process to start peace talks without considering what peace meant for both parties individually.

Three eras of Israeli prime ministers are examined, each one demonstrating a radically different relationship with Arafat and the U.S. presidency. The most hopeful of the bunch was Yitzhak Rabin, who agreed to a full peace deal despite his initial hesitation to work with the PLO leader and the recognition of blowback in Israel. It was hardly a perfect deal. In fact, the film admits how the Oslo Accords’ ambiguous writing came back to haunt future talks and how Rabin and Arafat’s iconic 1993 handshake at the White House required fulfilling numerous demands and agreements to get them in the same room together. Yet no one could deny what the handshake felt like at the time, a Herculean watershed moment that seemingly broke barriers of foreign policy and boosted America’s status as a global negotiator.

As we all know, the honeymoon phase didn’t last. Subsequent Palestinian suicide bombings against Israel and Rabin’s assassination produced a more cynical age under Benjamin Netanyahu’s first term, whose more forceful approach toward Arafat and other Arab leaders foreshadowed Israel’s embrace of a hardline right-wing agenda. Ehud Barak, who took office in 1999, had many peace plans, only to undermine them with his insistence on striking a deal with Syria’s government first. Rabin’s successors didn’t so much work with Palestine but around it, courting Middle Eastern leaders and the United States as partners while leaving the party they were meant to be negotiating with out to dry, a disrespect of authority Arafat did not take lightly.

Beyond its interview segments, The Human Factor stands out for providing a nuanced analysis of American, Israeli, and Palestinian leadership from this era. Mixing 3-D photo replicas of the individuals and locations with archived audio, it creates the surreal impression of being in the room with Bill Clinton and the Middle Eastern leaders during their negotiations, which helps establish the film’s unspoken B-plot: Clinton’s legacy.

Rabin’s death burdened the 42nd president with a desire to make this peace deal work by the time he left office, the failure of which stemmed in part from a mix of political feuds beyond his control and personal ambition. As invested in Palestinian freedom and frustrated by Israel deadlocking negotiations as he was, Clinton was also thinking about his historical record, especially once his administration was rocked by the threat of impeachment. The film paints the negotiators as flawed men who wanted the same goal but ultimately couldn’t overcome existing biases to reach an ironclad agreement.

This documentary isn’t a story about good guys and bad guys but rather what one negotiator calls a “history of missed opportunities.” You can regularly imagine scenarios in The Human Factor where, had things played out differently, the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations could have united its warring factions and produced a lasting co-existence. Instead, the vagueness of peace through “constructive ambiguity” ironically paved the way for the violence, occupation, and diplomatic stagnation that have defined both parties’ options for the past 20 years.