The Receding Horizon: The Endless Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace

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Author Dennis Ross

Publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Year 2004

Pages 800 pp.

ISBN 374199736

Price $35.00

In 1949, the legendary diplomat Ralph Bunche established what would become a gold standard for U.S. mediators in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Acting under the banner of the newly created United Nations, Bunche gathered Arab and Israeli diplomats together in a hotel on the island of Rhodes and managed to extract armistice agreements from them, effectively ending Israel's war of independence. Bunche accomplished this through a technique that came to be known as "proximity talks": he circumvented the Arabs' refusal to meet with Israelis directly by bringing the parties into nearby rooms and then shuttling between them, a tactic that has remained a fixture of negotiations in the Middle East and elsewhere ever since.

The armistice agreements were meant to serve as preludes to the proper peace treaties that, it was assumed, would soon be worked out. Hopes for a formal peace, however, quickly proved illusory. It would be 30 years before Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin would join President Jimmy Carter on the White House lawn to sign the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty, and 15 more years before King Hussein of Jordan and Israel's Yitzhak Rabin would meet with President Bill Clinton to follow suit. Since 1994, hopes for similar peace treaties with Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians have risen high and fallen hard several times. Today, the prospects for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace seem almost as remote as ever.

This failure should not be blamed on the United States, however. No other major power in history has expended so much diplomatic effort, over so many decades, to try to mediate peace among foreign nations. Since the mid-twentieth century, Bunche's heroic exertions have been followed by those of a long succession of U.S. presidents, secretaries of state, special emissaries, and personal envoys. None has served longer than Dennis Ross, whose record, and his new memoir, deserve the highest praise.

If the mediation seems endless, that should come as no surprise: the contemporary phase of U.S. efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East dates from 1969, when UN envoys failed to achieve implementation of Security Council Resolution 242 in the wake of the 1967 Middle East war. The end of that conflict had left Israeli forces unexpectedly occupying the West Bank and all of Jerusalem, the Golan Heights (plus some Syrian territory beyond them), Gaza, and all of the Sinai Peninsula up to the Suez Canal. The history of the Levant since that time has centered around U.S.-led efforts to achieve Israeli withdrawal from most, if not all, of those conquered areas in exchange for genuine, comprehensive peace with all of Israel's Arab neighbors.

There have been notable diplomatic successes: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's shuttle mediation yielded partial withdrawal agreements with Egypt and Syria in 1974-75, for example. Carter and his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, brokered the Camp David accords and the Israel-Egypt peace treaty in 1978-79. Secretary of State James Baker convened the groundbreaking Madrid Peace Conference in 1991, leading to the first official face-to-face peace negotiations among Israel, Jordan, Syria, and the Palestinians. And Clinton helped midwife the Oslo accords in 1993, which achieved formal recognition between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and cleared the way for the Jordan-Israel Peace Treaty in 1994.

But U.S. mediation has also often failed: for example, the talks between Egypt and Israel in 1979-81 were meant to achieve autonomy for the West Bank and Gaza as called for by the Camp David accords of 1978, but they went nowhere. Washington's attempt to work out a treaty between Jerusalem and Beirut after the 1982-83 Lebanon war was torpedoed by Syrian opposition. Two major efforts to achieve a peace treaty between Israel and Syria also failed, as did, most recently, the Herculean efforts by Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and Ross to close a final deal between Israel and the Palestinians. To date, President George W. Bush has not made a similar effort. Meanwhile, bloody Palestinian-Israeli clashes have destroyed the fragile trust laboriously built up during the Oslo process, and the prospect for serious negotiations anytime soon has dimmed.

All this complex diplomacy has spawned enough memoirs, scholarly tomes, and think-tank projects to fill a small library. Unfortunately, most of the authors are American or Israeli; serious Arab scholarship on these subjects remains meager, and memoirs by Arab participants in the diplomacy are either polemical or extremely wary. Until now, the most comprehensive, well-researched record of the United States' enormous investment in Arab-Israeli peacemaking has been that produced by Professor William Quandt, now at the University of Virginia. A key member of the National Security Council staff under Presidents Gerald Ford and Carter, Quandt's series of volumes, culminating in his revised edition of Peace Process in 2001, summarize, analyze, and critique the whole effort through the end of the Clinton years.

Now Ross's book has added to the literature, covering in exquisite detail the history of Arab-Israeli negotiations from the preparations for the Madrid Conference in 1991 to the final hours of the Clinton presidency and the de facto end of the Oslo process in January 2001. Ross's own involvement in nearly every aspect of these events, his detailed personal notes on conversations, the candor with which he describes both events and personalities, and the fairness he displays in writing about many sensitive and contentious moments all combine to make The Missing Peace a major contribution to the diplomatic history of the twentieth century.

MAN IN THE MIDDLE