Dennis Ross: The Missing Peace

I see that Dennis Ross has a memoir of his role in the Israel-Palestine fiasco: The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). At 840 pages, I don't anticipate reading it any time soon. However, I'll cheat by pulling out a few quotes from Ethan Bronner's review in The New York Times Book Review. It starts like this:

In December 1999, as Israel and Syria seemed suddenly to be making real progress toward a peace agreement, President Bill Clinton called President Hafez al-Assad with a request. Israel, he said, had rock-solid information on the location in a Damascus cemetery of the remains of three Israeli soldiers who had gone missing in action during the Lebanon war of the 1980's. Would Assad permit an American forensic team to extract the remains? Such a gesture, Clinton noted, would go a long way toward persuading the wary Israeli public that Syria was serious about opening a new era of peaceful relations. Assad, who historically had rejected all steps designed to reach the Israeli public, said yes. The team flew to Damascus, received full Syrian cooperation and dug up the remains. They were not, however, those of the missing Israelis.

This story is presented (presumably by Ross) as evidence of Syria's willingness to settle with Israel, but several other things strike me about the story. First, there's "rock solid information" that turns out to be dead wrong. If we were talking about American Intelligence that would be par for the course, but note that Israeli Intelligence is just as bad. Second, this is just one of many examples where Clinton went out of his way to appease alleged concerns about Israeli public opinion and wound up looking like an Israeli shill rather than an honest broker. Third, the whole request is bizzarre -- one of those non-issues that negotiators who don't want to face up to an agreement drag up to procrastinate. (Japan's preoccupation with its citizens who were kidnapped by North Korea is a similar thing thrown up to avoid talking about the much more serious problem, which is that the two nations and their allies are posed for war.)

To the question of what went wrong, Ross offers two answers, one simple and one messy but no less true or important. The simple answer is that in the end Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was the principal cause of the failure. Ross illustrates this in numerous ways. The most important and dramatic is an account of late December 2000, when, with only a few weeks left in his administration, President Clinton suggested a set of guidelines to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israeli cabinet accepted the framework with several reservations that were within the guidelines laid out by the president. Arafat did not. Ross recounts watching Clinton tell Arafat that by not responding to the American ideas, "he was killing Barak and the peace camp in Israel." Arafat did not budge. As Ross puts it: "A comprehensive deal was not possible with Arafat. . . . He could live with a process, but not with a conclusion."

Ross has some insight at the end, which makes me wonder when he figured it out, and what (if anything) he tried to do about it. A somewhat more disinterested observer might point out that Arafat was never offered a conclusion that he could live with. The point where Arafat seems to be most culpable is that he never made a real counteroffer to anything Barak and/or Clinton proposed. I figure that was because he made such lousy deals at the start of the Oslo Peace Process that he was terrified of making another one at the end. On the other hand, you have to wonder why Ross and Clinton never went to Arafat to find out what he needed in a settlement, and why Ross and Clinton never leaned on Barak to accommodate his needs. The best guess is that Clinton, in particular, so identified with Barak that he never considered Arafat's needs -- or for that matter that the Palestinians' grievances were rooted in an injustice that had to be recognized before it could be compromised.

As for the late December 2000 Clinton plan, the claim that Barak accepted it and Arafat rejected it isn't clearly supported from other accounts. The Taba negotiations were based on the Clinton plan, which was itself based on the Beilin-Abu Mazen understandings from 1995, and they were broken off by Barak. The Geneva Accords, in turn, came about as an unofficial extension from Taba, supported by Arafat and negotiated by Israelis in opposition to Ariel Sharon. The biggest problem with the Clinton plan is that it came in December 2000, when Clinton's presidency was at its end, Barak's government was on its way out, and Arafat was being torn both ways in the Intifada. Barak had been elected two years earlier with a strong peace mandate, but didn't start negotiating with Arafat until he had screwed up the Syrian peace treaty and found his government unraveling. And when Barak did start to negotiate, he wanted to restart from scratch rather than from the previously agreed understandings, and Clinton backed Barak up rather than try to broker a compromise.

The second explanation, the messier one, is that neither side had taken sufficient steps to grasp the needs and neuroses of the other. Ross says "the Israelis acted as if all decisions should be informed by their needs, not by possible Palestinian needs or reactions." Regarding the Arabs, he writes, "The kind of transformation that would make it possible for the Arab world to acknowledge that Israel has needs has yet to take place." As for the American role, Ross puts it this way: "Our great failing was not in misreading Arafat. Our great failing was in not creating the earlier tests that would have either exposed Arafat's inability to ultimately make peace or forced him to prepare his people for compromise."

Ross cuts himself a lot of slack here. The last sentence reminds one of something Barak said many times, which is that he wanted to put Arafat into a position where he would prove once and for all whether he is a "partner for peace" -- something Barak said with obvious indifference to the outcome. But try recasting the last sentence with the whole series of Israeli leaders: Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak. The U.S. failed to insist on any tests to prove whether the Israelis had any intention of a peaceful solution: the most obvious such failure was in allowing the settlements to be expanded.

The messy explanation is, of course, much closer to reality than the easy Arafat one. The fact is that all three nations had complex problems in internal politics which interfered with every effort to secure peace. In a recent review of Clinton's book, Gary Wills tried to tie the failure of the Camp David peace talks to Clinton's Monica Lewinsky scandal. In doing so he muffed most of the details and timing, but it seems likely that if Clinton had not had to deal with that scandal in 1998 he might have gotten a leg up on bringing Oslo to a reasonable close. That was the time to lean on Barak, and Clinton wasn't able or willing to do it. But even if Clinton had been willing to do what needed to be done, Israel's peculiar political alliance with the U.S. limited his options. Clinton did manage to lean on Netanyahu hard enough to get Wye River signed, but he never put similar pressure on Barak, and Barak was, at best, schizophrenic on peace. Israel's own political dynamics were working against him, and Barak's instincts were uncannily self-destructive. Otherwise, what would have served Barak best would have been for the U.S. to shove a solution down Israel's throat -- since in the end Barak didn't have the guts to do what needed to be done himself. To some extent Clinton did manage to appreciate Barak's dilemma, which is no doubt why he sided so pointedly with Barak. But what neither in any way understood was the internal politics of the other nation, the Palestinians. Arafat never enjoyed the political clout of Sadat or Assad, which meant you could never deal with just him. Arafat was really just the middleman: his job was to sell a peace deal to the Palestinians, and his ability to do that depended desperately on how well the peace deal met his public's needs. Israel gave him a bum deal to start out with, with the promise of something better later, then never delivered. He screwed up too, erring on the side of saving his own hide which at times made him defy Israel. Stricter tests might have helped, but ultimately the deal he sold to his people had to be delivered. Israel never delivered that deal, and the U.S. never twisted an arm to make it happen. Ross was in the middle of this when it most mattered. I think he wanted to make it work, but he didn't, and in that he deserves some measure of blame himself.

posted 2004-08-09