Just a few days ago, I was fortunate enough to receive an unsolicited, unpublished but well-written and provocative review of former US-Middle East diplomat Dennis Ross’ 2004 book The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace. While I have not yet had the opportunity to read this rather long book, I have read quite a few reviews of it in the mainstream media (this link at website Metacritics will take you to many of them if you are so inclined). Additionally, this interview between Mother Jones and Ross provides some background on the former ambassador’s views on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
But this review by freelance journalist Justin Soutar is likely the most critical analysis I’ve come across so far. I don’t agree with many of Soutar’s conclusions: I think that while Ross may indeed have been biased in his support for Israel, much of the blame for the ongoing violence can be laid at the Palestinian leaders’ doorstep as well as Israel’s. I am convinced that many readers who have strong opinions as to the Israel-Palestine conflict (and who doesn’t) will be forced to reconsider some of their assumptions and perhaps gain a new perspective on this maddeningly complex tragedy. I’m publishing it on my blog in the spirit of presenting controversial arguments, even those that strongly contradict my own beliefs, so that other opinions other than my own can be debated.
If you are interested in submitting a manuscript for publication, be it a book review, news analysis or something else that fits with the editorial content of this blog, see this FAQ for instructions. I am less concerned with whether I agree with your opinion; what really matters to me when I am making my decision is that your arguments are both logical and strongly supported by factual evidence (from reliable sources) and that your ideas are expressed both coherently and eloquently. Length can be anywhere from 500 words to 5,000.
So please feel free to let me know what you think of Soutar’s article in the comments section and enjoy!
By Justin Soutar
There is no lack of books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, but few achieve the depth and rich detail of Dennis Ross’ The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace. No serious student of the conflict should pass it by. During the twelve years (1988 to 2000) that Ross enjoyed the status of preferred US peace diplomat for the Middle East, he acquired a wealth of invaluable experience. Under President George Bush as Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department, and then under President Clinton as Special Middle East Coordinator, he became intimately acquainted with the problems and hopes of the different Arab and Israeli peoples.
The resulting book is based on his painstaking memoirs and offers a goldmine of unknown, behind-the-scenes historical information you can’t find anywhere else: bold attempts, secret successes, discarded ideas, engaging anecdotes, and disturbing failures involved in the peace process. Like a stained-glass window, these bits of history together compose a detailed picture of the Arab-Israeli conflict—and why peace is “missing”—from the perspective of one seasoned diplomat.
Ross offers insightful, if not always accurate, descriptions of the personalities involved in the peace process. President Clinton is represented as an eager mediator who champions the cause of Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat and becomes a hero to the Palestinian people while attempting to keep the Israelis happy. Secretary of State Madeline Albright comes off as thoughtful, persuasive to both sides, deferential to Arafat, and rather enigmatic. Clever tactician and manipulator operating at several levels, swayed by the opinions of his subjects, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad gradually, partially “came around” to regular peace talks with Israelis, through Ross’s efforts.
The reader has to admire Ross’s intense determination to settle the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. No matter what difficulties or reverses bedeviled the peace process, he refused to give up. He could always wrestle at least a miniscule bit of progress from one side or both, as in the March 1991 “two-track approach” that restarted direct talks between Israel (then ruled by the uncompromising Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir) and the Palestinian people. Another example recounted in detail in the book is how Ross squeezed a 13 percent Israeli troop movement from the Palestinian West Bank, brief delays in illegal settlement construction, and release of uncharged Palestinian prisoners out of Israel’s stubborn Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Throughout his career as a peace negotiator, the indefatigable Ross made hundreds of trips around the Middle East, often working around the clock and in the middle of vacations to solve disagreements between the parties.
Nevertheless, Ross’s ideological slant represents a major weakness. He subscribes to the extremist worldview that dictates an illegal and unjust, joint Israeli and American domination of the Middle East politically, economically and militarily as the only viable response to “Islamic” terrorism. Playing dumb is the method he uses to disguise and push this radical ideology. For example, he claims Yasser Arafat “made up stories about Israeli atrocities”, then a few pages later wonders why “[t]here wasn’t a new day, just a repetition of Arab hostility toward Israel.”
He does not see fit to acknowledge that frequent Israeli crimes provoke Arab hostility. In his mind, the Arabs are an insincere, weak, childish, dishonorable and innately aggressive lot. When Syrian President Hafez al-Assad demands his people’s rights to territorial sovereignty, he is pictured as “throwing a tantrum”; but when Israeli Prime Ministers demand their people’s rights to territorial sovereignty, they are pictured as “refusing to give in to terror.” These double standards are clear instances of racism designed to exonerate Israel and justify its continued denial of Arab human rights.
Ross begins the first chapter by pointing out, “There is little prospect of mediating any conflict if one does not understand the historical narratives of each side.” Unfortunately, Ross does not understand either the Palestinian or the Israeli historical narratives very well. The chapter’s title, “Why Israelis and Palestinians See the World the Way They Do”, hints at his method: to learn the factors building each side’s attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, and actions. Working to carefully alter those factors in the right direction, Ross contends, is the key to peace. Thanks to his fanatical “Israel-first” ideology, his grasp of the Palestinian side is superficial and distorted.
The most glaring example of inconsistency is provided by the issue of Palestinian refugees. Throughout the book, Ross derides their inalienable right of return to Israel as a “perceived right” and brands Arab insistence on it as “bad behavior”, supporting their illegal permanent displacement. Israel’s forcible expulsion of one million Palestinians from both Jewish and Arab areas of Palestine in the late 1940s is to the Palestinian psyche what 9/11 is to us Americans: a catastrophe to be marked for all generations on their historical narrative. Yet Ross blames the Palestinian refugees themselves for their problem. In fact, the evicted Palestinians are still the legal and rightful owners of all the so-called Jewish “settlements” planted inside and outside Israel—and that until this stolen property is returned, the conflict will persist.
Ross’s Israeli extremism leads to denial of other Palestinian rights as well. During the book’s account of talks over control of the historic Jewish city of Hebron in the mid-1990s, Arafat points out a discrepancy. In the draft understandings, Palestinians living in designated zone H-1 of the ancient city were forbidden to keep and bear arms, while Israeli tanks could invade it at any time. This obvious injustice demonstrated Israel’s aggressive thrust, but Ross lumps the innocent Palestinian majority and the Palestinian terrorist minority into one giant menace to Israel to justify its illegal ban on Palestinian arms.
In addition to the 1948 evacuation of Palestinians, the reader should be aware that internationally documented Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people include the expulsion of 150,000 more Arabs from the Syrian Golan Heights in its 1967 war; cutting down Palestinian orchards and capping their wells to sabotage the Palestinian economy; chasing the entire Palestine Liberation Organization into Lebanon as punishment for the terrorist attacks of a few Palestinians, then subjecting Palestinian and Lebanese civilians alike to indiscriminate bombing raids during the 1980s Lebanese civil war; using poison gas during the generally peaceful 1987 Palestinian demonstrations; and bulldozing thousands of Palestinian homes from 1967 to the present.
All of these misdeeds—which are just the tip of the Israeli iceberg—have contributed to the longstanding Arab hostility toward Israel. What is more, the anti-Americanism of Palestinians and Arabs is a result of longtime, massive and disproportionate US military and economic support for Israel, which has enabled it to carry out these offenses. But none of these facts figure into Ross’s equation for building trust and commitment between the two sides. A peace divorced from history and the real world is no peace at all.
“In the zero-sum world of Arab-Israeli relations”, Ross notes that “every advance brought new problems.” Why? Because Ross lacked the willingness to confront Israel’s Zionist extremists just as firmly as he denounced Palestinian extremists. Every time he helped orchestrate a concession to the Palestinian or Syrian people, Israeli radical Zionists would howl with protest and agitate against it, some even perpetrating terrorist crimes. Then the next time around, Ross would typically back-pedal and strive to lower the expectations of Arab leaders, which would lead to increased Arab civilian terrorism, which in turn would prompt tighter Israeli security over Palestinian territory and punitive measures, finally deadlocking the peace negotiations and necessitating a fresh start.
Holes in Ross’s radical American-Israeli worldview are inescapable. On page 199, for example, he relates an experience in Israel that he says made him feel “uneasy”. He had helped establish a “Cairo channel” of talks between Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres, Egyptian foreign minister Amre Moussa and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat on the subject of Palestinian elections. Upon arriving in Israel to assist those negotiations, Ross was greeted by violent demonstrations: radical Zionists seizing Arab territory, blocking traffic and committing terrorist attacks on innocent Palestinians in several villages to stop the peace process.
But he forged on with negotiations, which would soon lead to the 1995 Taba agreement—and win Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin his subsequent assassination at the hands of one such Zionist terrorist. In an unusually candid admission, Ross notes that the Israeli government was either unable or unwilling to fight Israeli terrorism. The implications of that statement are enormous, not the least of which is that a state permitting terrorist crimes by its own citizens cannot possibly make lasting peace with its neighbors. By failing to address this massive and disturbing reality, Ross generates an equation for peace that doesn’t add up.
He claims that Arafat chose to adopt his status as a victim, which “meant that the international community or the United States should assume responsibility for resolving the conflict, and relieve him of it.” Not so at all. To the end Arafat did his utmost to resolve the conflict, despite running into Israeli brick walls (such as radical Zionist terrorism) at every turn. That’s what earned him the undisputed acclaim of the Palestinian people.
Terms in the “Israeli sociology” which Ross describes such as “unquestioned strength”, “creating facts on the ground”, and “self-reliance” are euphemisms for “arrogance”, “oppression” and “violation of international law”. Instead of merely recounting the experiences of a disinterested diplomat, the book’s highly professional yet readable style seems calculated to give Ross’s extremist ideas a moderate cover and to indoctrinate them, together with his bigoted way of thinking, into the unsuspecting reader’s mind. As the primary architect of the Middle East peace process for twelve years, Ross never swayed from this overarching doctrine: to advance the foremost strategic, political, economic, and military interests of the US and Israel.
Together, the final chapter “Learning the Lessons of the Past” and epilogue sum up Ross’s overall view of why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unresolved to date—and how he thinks it should be resolved. He expresses outright arrogance: “It will always be Israel’s Arab partner, and not Israel, who decides if a deal can be done.” Ross seems to forget that Israeli terrorism and injustice has long endangered the peace process.
Just as unfair is his portrait of Arab leaders. While he is correct that Hafez al-Assad of Syria, King Hussein of Jordan, and others were not democratically elected, to say that they lack legitimacy with their peoples is a bald-faced lie. Even Iraqis preferred the repressive rule of Saddam Hussein to chaos and war. In another piece of propaganda, Ross says that leaders of Arab nations refuse to accept Israeli rights and needs. The fact of the matter is that Arab leaders receive and confirm their legitimacy by standing up courageously for the basic human rights of their people. The remarkably tight bond between most Arab leaders and their subjects demonstrates their legitimacy and proves Ross wrong.(*** Emphasis added for these two sentences; please see the end of this post for editorial comments)
On page 726, an important clue to Ross’s political philosophy is inadvertently revealed. He claims that fairness is ultimately a “subjective” idea. If that were true, organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting would be no fairer than their enemies, and Fox News could be “Fair and Balanced” for you but not for me. On the contrary, this appeal to subjectivism is designed to advance American-Israeli global interests by sneaking around the universal principles of justice laid down by God in the human heart. Such a trick allows Ross to define what is fair and just. Anything that impedes American-Israeli domination of the world is unfair and unjust—in Ross’s eyes. To say that nothing will stand in our way, not even God’s inalienable principles of justice, is classic extremism. The Palestinian right to return, statehood, and the international character of Jerusalem are all sacrificed to the pride and unrestrained appetite for wealth and power of these two dominant nations.
Despite his fervent support for the “War on Terrorism” and especially the war in Iraq, Ross airs plenty of criticism of President Bush’s strategy for peace in the Middle East. He notes with dismay that the US president did not appoint a peace envoy to replace him. Furthermore, he explains how the Bush administration made a number of fallacious assumptions and blunders which have collectively halted the peace process, including its defeatist refusal to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to discuss peace with Yasser Arafat.
Ross explains that the administration’s obsession with Iraq has dominated our entire policy toward the Middle East; involving the EU, Russia, and the UN in America’s “road map” to Middle East peace was in fact designed to gain their support for the Iraq war; he strongly criticizes this approach. Moreover, persistent misunderstandings doomed the “road map” from the beginning: “It was almost as if the administration felt that the “road map” to peace would be self-implementing. But how could it be? It had not been negotiated with the parties. It had fifty-two paragraphs, and each side interpreted each one differently.”
The book’s abundant incoherence and hypocrisy come together in the final chapter and epilogue. To distract the reader from the book’s extremist “Israel-first” worldview, a sufficient number of true statements are woven through these conclusions (just as they are sprinkled throughout the volume). While Ross maintains previously that terrorism “could not be appeased” and repeatedly warns against “giving in to terror”, in the end he capitulates to Israeli fundamentalists: “domestic Israeli politics dictated appeasing the settlers.” Ross contends Israel should withdraw from the occupied territories and “some” settlements; but if Palestinians had taken chunks of Israeli land, he would certainly demand every inch of it back. He says that “Arafat never went through any transformation at all” and promoted hostility to Israel, yet Ross witnessed him recognize the state of Israel in the Oslo Accords against Palestinian terrorist protests in 1993.
Most contradictorily of all, he defends the 30-foot high Israeli apartheid wall, which he terms a “fence”, being constructed in the middle of the Holy Land to protect Israel from Palestinian terrorism. Ross’s acceptance of this wall is a metaphor for his acceptance of Israeli extremism. Though he is right to insist that terrorism must stop, a wall cannot stop either Palestinian or Israeli terrorism. It will impede, not facilitate, the transformation of attitudes and policies which he prescribes as necessary for peace. Furthermore, he states Israel must surrender control over much of the occupied territory (which it has appeared to start doing), but the wall tightens that control.
Ross goes on to make the specious claim that Palestinian terrorism is not a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He says it serves as a “pretext to divert attention and anger away from internal failings and onto the US and Israel,” which the Arab media makes “responsible for every conceivable ill.” In Ross’s imaginary world, scheming Arab leaders stir up hatred of Israel and America among their people, leading to terrorist acts, which are then used to deflect attention from their own criminal government. However, the US and Israel are largely responsible for perpetrating the conflict. And Palestinian terrorism is a reaction to injustice, not a game of follow-the-leader.
But on the positive side, after dismissing the radical “Israel-first” ideology, I found The Missing Peace more readable and informative than I had anticipated. Given its sheer bulk, I thought it would be endlessly technical, but Ross’s prose flows in a simple, jargon-free style. Catchwords and technical terms are promptly defined. The depth of historical information it contains about the Arab-Israeli dispute during the relatively quiescent period between the Cold War and the September 11th tragedy is truly invaluable.
Nevertheless, it’s crucial to read between the lines when studying this volume, since hundreds of polished sentences are highly deceptive and misleading. Far from the truth-teller or myth-dispeller he claims to be, Ross is a knowledgeable historian and talented propagandist. A little critical thinking pulls apart at the seams the extremist worldview which infects the entire book. In sum, The Missing Peace is an absorbing narrative of the epic conflict of our time–and how the radical American-Israeli ideology threatens to dash all hope for peace.
***Frankly, I don’t think this argument is sustained by the facts, although I would be willing to review and publish as an update additional supporting evidence. Well-respected and unbiased human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have for many years documented Middle East dictators’ numerous violations of international law with respect to the human rights of their citizens, let alone war crimes committed against Israeli civilians. See here, here, here and here for just a few examples.
-Steven Josselson
Furthermore, given the fact that the leaders of these countries are more often than not not democratically elected by their citizens, nor do citizens enjoy basic civil rights such as freedom of speech or assembly in many cases, it is unclear how one could definitively claim that their autocratic rule is somehow legitimized–without coercion–by public opinion. It seems even more dubious that these dictators stand up for their “subjects” (ironically Mr. Soutar’s word choice, not mine) human rights given the aforementioned evidence.
I would stress that I am not implying that Israel isn’t also responsible for the commission of human rights violationsvis-à-vis the Palestinian people who live in desperate conditions in the Territories; but I do think as a matter of intellectual honesty it is important not to simply give the dictators of Arabic countries surrounding Israel with a free pass in response.
Update: Soutar responds:
I just want to clarify what I said about Arab leaders. You stated: “I would stress that I am not implying that Israel isn’t also responsible for the commission of human rights violations vis-à-vis the Palestinian people who live in desperate conditions in the Territories; but I do think as a matter of intellectual honesty it is important not to simply give the dictators of Arabic countries surrounding Israel with a free pass in response.”I apologize if I did not articulate well enough my position on the subject of Arab leaders’ legitimacy. Nowhere do I give the Arab leaders a free pass. I admitted, for example, that the rule of Saddam Hussein was “repressive”. In addition, the approval ratings of anti-American leaders by their own people–throughout the Middle East as a whole–tend to be favorable by a landslide. Moreover, the legitimacy of particular leaders can change drastically. The fiercely anti-American Ayatollah Khomeini was wildly popular when he flew into Iran in 1979, but he quickly became so ruthless that by 1982 the people were opposed to his rule.
As a general rule, the legitimacy of an Arab leader is inversely proportional to his support for American and Israeli foreign policies. That is certainly not the only factor in rendering a leader legitimate, but in the modern Middle East it is the key factor. As much as the US government has tried to hide the fact, the American-leaning rulers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan are repressive and seriously unpopular in their respective countries–yet they all are hanging onto office.
One last thought: a leader need not win an election by popular vote in order to be legitimate. The Arabs have had monarchies for thousands of years, and if that is the kind of government that suits them, let them have it.
Update #2: Soutar can be reached via email at justin_86 [at] earthlink.net.
Although I am biased and have strong opinions on the territorial conflict at issue, I consider myself to be sympathetic to Israelis and Palestinians alike. I find it abhorrent and offensive when I read an article or review such as the instant one, which focuses on deriding the Israeli government for its actions or “support” of “Zionist terrorists” and ignoring or justifying the acts of Arab terrorists. Terrorist acts are not justifiable under any circumstances, yet Mr. Soutar attempts to do just that. I find it ironic that Mr. Soutar uses his book review to blame the United States and Israel for the reason peace won’t ever be achieved, when in reality, it is people like Mr. Soutar who stand in the way of a lasting peace in the region. Mr. Soutar is clearly an educated, well-read and intelligent man, and until men and women like him are able to see, acknowledge and move past the history and atrocities on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian equation, then there is no hope for peace.