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

Dennis Ross is now dean of a small band of dedicated American professionals who have spent decades seeking peace between Arabs and Israelis. Son of a Jewish mother and a Catholic stepfather, Ross grew up in a secular household and came to government service after graduate work in Soviet studies, arms control, and the Middle East at the University of California in Los Angeles, where he served as a teaching assistant for Malcolm Kerr, a leading scholar on the politics of the Arab world. Visits to Israel and several Arab countries strengthened Ross's identification with the Jewish people and nurtured his conviction that peace could be achieved only on the premise of a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship.

Despite his faith and his deep affection for the Israeli people, Ross as a negotiator managed to convince many different Arab interlocutors of his evenhandedness and trustworthiness. Indeed, Ross managed the impressive feat of simultaneously gaining and retaining the confidence of all sides, including successive Israeli leaders and both his Republican and his Democratic bosses. He achieved this rare accomplishment through an analytical, unemotional style of argument, a workaholic life style, and an extraordinary degree of empathy for the pain and needs of both Israelis and Arabs. Ross also managed to submerge his private liberal convictions while in government, demonstrating professionalism, creativity, and an outward nonpartisanship along with a profound commitment to achieving Arab-Israeli peace. Although he exhibited at times a realistic skepticism about certain parties to the peace process, especially Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, and about the tactics employed by both Prime Ministers Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, Ross always retained a stubborn conviction that peace among Israel, Syria, and Palestine is inevitable in the long run and could be achieved if the United States remained fully engaged-albeit to a degree well beyond that of the current Bush administration.

All of these themes are reflected in The Missing Peace. Only rarely can a nonfiction work of 800 pages be called a page-turner, and this book is no exception. Packed with detailed accounts of intricate, long-distance telephone negotiations with a bewildering array of Israeli and Palestinian actors-Uri, Avi, Eli, Saeb, Shlomo, Hassan, Yasir, Oded, Uzi, Dani, and Rajoub-parts of this book will interest only devoted aficionados of Middle Eastern history. But it represents an important, and often colorful, addition to the historical record.

Perhaps the most dramatic part of The Missing Peace is its 14-page prologue, which describes the climactic moments on January 2, 2001, just before Arafat arrived at the White House to reject Clinton's final comprehensive peace proposals (which Barak had already accepted in principle). This opening sets the stage brilliantly for the first chapter that follows: a perceptive, balanced description of why Israelis, Arabs, and Palestinians see the world the way they do. That chapter alone should become required reading for anyone venturing into the Arab-Israeli morass. Its sensitivity reflects Ross's empathy for both sides of the cultural abyss that divides the peoples of the Holy Land.

The rest of the book is, in fact, two books. The first is a comprehensive, detailed account of how the peace negotiations under George H.W. Bush and Clinton unfolded at many levels and locales, on three fronts: Syrian, Palestinian, and Jordanian. The other is a personal memoir of Dennis Ross's role in these momentous events, and a postmortem interpretation. Melding these two strands inevitably produces many sentences written in the first-person singular. Ross frequently refers to the work of his American colleagues, such as Ambassador Martin Indyk (whose own book is due out later this year), but only in passing. There is no reason to doubt the central role Ross assigns himself in the complex negotiations he recounts, nor how often his advice and game plans were followed by Secretary of State Warren Christopher or Clinton. Indeed, Ross also occasionally points out how Clinton and others ignored his advice, something Ross recounts ruefully in some cases, admiringly in others. And he is liberal with his self-criticism when the scenarios he carefully designed did not evolve as he had planned. Still, it is interesting to compare The Missing Peace to the pages of Clinton's just-published My Life that deal with the same events in the Arab-Israeli saga: Clinton mentions Ross's role much less than his own-when, that is, he mentions it at all.

In the prologue to his book, Ross writes that he is telling his story in such complete detail in order "to debunk the myths that prevent all sides from seeing reality and adjusting to it. Indeed, only by telling the story can we hope to learn the lessons from the past and ... shape a different future." Ross identifies the "missing pieces" that "have perpetuated the conflict" as the lack of public conditioning for peace, the reluctance to acknowledge the legitimacy of the other side's grievance and needs, the inability to confront comfortable myths, the difficulty of transforming behavior and acknowledging mistakes, the inherent challenge of getting both sides ready to move at the same time, the unwillingness to make choices, and the absence of leadership, especially among Palestinians.

By telling his story as he lived it, Ross hopes to remind the current administration and those that follow of what went wrong the last time Washington tried to make peace in the Middle East, and how to do it better next time.

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