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Books: Victor Davis Hanson on The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace by Dennis Ross
Dennis Ross.
The Missing Peace. The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 840 pages. $35.00 For some 13 years under three presidents, Dennis Ross served
honorably as a U.S. envoy to the Middle East, and thus knew
intimately the disappointments of the Madrid, Oslo, Paris, Wye, and
Camp David protocols. Indeed, Ross had the unenviable task of
reconciling the various proposed solutions of an exasperated Ronald
Reagan, George Shultz, George H.W. Bush, James Baker, Bill Clinton,
Warren Christopher, and Madeleine Albright with those of most of
the key Israelis — Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak,
and Sharon — while dealing, of course, with the perennial
specter of Yassir Arafat. Leaders come, leaders go; but the late Arafat always remained —
recalcitrant in his 1960s headdress and holster, his former Marxist rhetoric superseded
by trendy public allegiance to Islamic fundamentalism, and resplendent
in the bemedaled uniform of a general without either an army or a
single victory.
Indeed, the billionaire gangster Arafat emerges
as the antagonist in Ross’s account of the endless search for
a comprehensive Middle East peace. He peeps out on every page
predictably obstructing each new initiative that followed after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the plo support for Saddam in the Gulf War, failed
intifadas, and the election victories of the Israeli left. That the
Europeans and many weary Israelis were eager to empower Arafat as a
serious leader, despite his military impotence and rampant
corruption, is perhaps understandable given his tribal connections
on the West Bank and his long terrorist activity. But why the
Americans ever recanted and worked with this pathological criminal
remains unanswered by Ross’s 800 pages of fascinating, but ultimately
depressing, detail. While most of Ross’s efforts appear in
retrospect as naïve, if not a colossal waste of time, the
reader can only admire his stamina, an uncanny ability to size up
interlocutors, a real allegiance to truth and fair play — and
plenty of ambition and confidence without an overweening ego.
The
political survival skills that allowed
the “lifelong Democrat” Ross to serve in both the
Reagan and first Bush administrations and then champion
Clinton’s new initiatives explain how he could outlast — and so often outlive — almost all the
major players with whom he started out in 1988. Henry Kissinger’s rightly praised memoirs are the
obvious literary models for The Missing
Peace. Yet if Ross’ engaging prose
does not quite match Kissinger’s wit and repartee, his excurses
about everything from top restaurants around the world to stories about
his kids enliven what finally becomes a classical tale of a bellum
interruptum, one that cannot be settled other than by absolute
separation or the radical democratic reform of the Palestinians.
The world is obsessed with the so-called
occupied territories in Palestine, but not from any abstract
principle of postbellum equity or worry over civilian deaths.
Otherwise un resolutions,
European subsidies, and American envoys would have been focused on
occupied Tibet or Lebanon, or the killing of tens of thousands of
innocents in Rwanda and Darfur. So Palestine is not so much a moral
issue as a political lightning rod that involves Arab oil, Arab
global terrorism, Arab fundamentalist violence in and beyond the
Middle East, and Arab anti-Semitism that finds resonance in Europe.
While Ross understands that the Middle East is critical to world
peace, he never quite explains why this small strip of land should
be — and thus never fully elucidates why diplomats like Jim
Baker and Colin Powell essentially renounced the frenetic efforts
of their predecessors as vain and counterproductive.
There is a depressing monotony to Ross’s
pilgrimages to the Middle East. With his hard work, undeniable
diplomatic talents, and canny reading of the role of pride, envy,
and honor in the region, he sets up a series of what seem to be
reasonable plans of mutual concessions. Thus, in 1993, 1998, and 2000-01 we hear of the
accustomed roadmaps, quartets, back, front, and side channels,
secret Swiss meetings, working points, the Mitchell Plan, the Saudi
Plan, the Zinni missions, un mandates and resolutions, and all the other
multifaceted ways of avoiding the terrible truth that Arafat was an
unrepentant liar and terrorist. “You should,”
“you could,” “you must,” appear in each
chapter as Ross’s patient and standard admonitions to Arafat
in hopes that he might grasp the “last” or
“best” Israeli concession. In the end, of course, he
never missed “an opportunity to miss an opportunity,”
and so refused to chop off the tentacles of the maternal terror
octopus that had engendered, empowered, and enriched him.
Still, as relish to the main narrative, Ross
offers some fascinating details along the way. How did the late
Sheik Yassin, the blind and crippled spiritual leader of Hamas,
ever get back into Gaza from his ostracism in Jordan? After Israeli
agents botched a hit on Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, Bibi Netanyahu
was forced both to hand over the antidote for the slow-working
poison and to offer reentry for Yassin in order to placate an
incensed King Hussein. When a crisis with Iraq loomed over
President Clinton’s insistence on the return of the weapons
inspectors, the Palestinian Minister of Health asked that the
Israelis offer those on the West Bank gas masks for fear that their
patron Saddam’s wmd-laden missiles might take too many Palestinians
along with the targeted Israelis. It is one thing to dance on your
rooftops in hopes of seeing Jews gassed, quite another if the wind
carries the nerve agent back your way. Clinton seemed to have
disliked Bibi Netanyahu, and in one sharp exchange, when the
Israeli leader suggested that Arafat could keep his commitments by
making sure Gaza police chief Ghazi Jabali
“disappeared,” our president was heard screaming,
“This is just chickenshit. I am not going to put up with this
bullshit” before he stormed out — but, in Clintonian
fashion, only for the staged moment.
While
the israelis on occasion were
stubborn and irritating, finally they were willing to give up most
of the West Bank for any sort of real guarantee of a secure peace.
Nowhere is this desperation for resolution clearer than in the case
of Ehud Barak — the tragic figure of Ross’s narrative
— who at Camp David was resigned to granting almost all of
what the Palestinians had demanded for a quarter century before
being humiliated and destroyed politically. And in almost every
near miss, at the eleventh hour of discussion, minutes before the
final signing, during the penultimate ceremony or the final staged
photo-op, the Syrians or the Palestinians would back out, often
gratuitously insulting or embarrassing Bill Clinton, who in turn,
almost on spec, would “let it rip” or “stalk
out” on singularly unimpressed Palestinians.
So his memoir by needs is replete with
unintended humor — full of miffs and scowls like
“Enough was enough, Asad had to learn that the process would
stop.” “This was bullshit.” “I was furious
and wanted everyone to know it.” “I refused to take the
call.” “I was angry.” “I was ready to have
us walk away.” “I was stunned.” “Violent
demonstrations were one thing, but these kind of clashes
another.” All this angst is punctuated at last on page 756 with “Alas,
Arafat was not up to peacemaking.” Should we laugh or cry?
Little wonder question marks characterize so many of the
book’s subsections — “Breakthroughs in
Gaza?” or “Shouldn’t we have known about
Arafat?” — the reader always knowing in advance the
answer to these dead questions — except for the only one that
really mattered but was never asked: “If Arafat did not
exist, would he have to be invented?”
Ross was always attuned to Assad’s and
Arafat’s perceptions of slights — their
passive-aggressive backing off the moment their offers were
accepted in fear that Israeli acquiescence meant they could have
gotten more; their hissy fits and feigned tantrums; their constant
desire to be pursued and courted by a U.S. president; their
snubbing or photo-opping him by turns, depending on the particular
pulse of the Arab Street. A bomb goes off in Tel Aviv and, presto,
Arafat is on his way out of the country, incommunicado as the
inevitable American censure looms. An American secretary of state
wants badly to produce a breakthrough — and is left to cool
his heels on the Damascus tarmac: Thus the old cutthroat Assad
makes Warren Christopher sweat for an audience. Throughout
Ross’s patient description, we are unable to ignore the
Orwellian nature of it all: anti-Western zealots checking in for
medical treatment at American or European hospitals, Mrs. Arafat
fighting the intifada from Paris fashion shows, or a diplomat busy
on shopping sprees in big city malls before assuming the mantle of
the pan-Arabist fatwahist for consumption back home on
state-controlled television.
The author of The
Missing Peace seems to be waking up
to relearn the ways of the world each morning, as if for all his
intellect and erudition Ross cannot quite accept the asymmetry of
it all. On one side is a liberal democratic society, under audit by
an independent judiciary and free press. On the other a kleptocracy
atop a tribal society that is illegitimate in every sense of the
word, nursed on victimization born out of failure and humiliation.
The lesson of Sadat lingered with almost every Syrian and
Palestinian interlocutor — how, like Egypt, to get back all
the land lost after repeated failed attempts to destroy Israel but
without making the concessions for normalization that ultimately
left Sadat riddled with bullets.
Thus, it is no accident that Ross deals with a
Shamir, Netanyahu, Rabin, Barak, but always only an Arafat on the
other side, winner of one rigged election one time. And just as
Netanyahu or Barak realize that there is a life after electoral
defeat, Arafat knows that in a lawless society there are no laws in
which to take refuge. For the Palestinians, compromise abroad might
well lead to insurrection and a mob’s noose at home. The
“Arafat answer” (La-Na’am, “no and
yes” in Arabic) is pitted against Rabin’s determination
“to fight terror as if there were not a peace process and to
pursue peace as if there were no terror.” Ross’s
narrative reminds us of the Europeans’ vain attempts through
much of the late 1930s to mollify Hitler’s incessant demand for the return
of “stolen” territory — liberal elected
politicians in vain parleying with a dictator who saw every
concession as appeasement and thus an invitation for still more
abuse.
Winally,
even ross, the perennial optimist,
sensed that irony: Though he criticizes a disengaged Bush
administration for entering office with a determination to keep
Arafat out of the Lincoln bedroom, he used such toughness on the
horizon as a warning to Arafat to cut a deal while he still had a
lame-duck but compliant Clinton. Ross concludes with all sorts of
fair and judicious outlines for a comprehensive settlement based on
the premise of land for peace, something akin to the 95 percent or so of
the West Bank offered up at Camp David. But the data supplied by
his comprehensive narrative often refute his own conclusions and
hopes — and de facto argue for an alternative roadmap more
attuned to the lessons of history than the social science of
conflict resolution theory.
Peace comes, whether in Germany, Japan,
Vietnam, or the Falklands, when victory and defeat adjudicate the
issues at hand. Thus, there will be no settlement in the Middle
East until the Palestinians accept that the effort to destroy
Israel leads not to political advantage but to their own
destruction, a realization that might just discredit the corrupt
tribal apparatus of the Palestinian Authority. The present cold war
of sorts, akin to our own struggle with the Soviet Union, will
eventually lead to a day of reckoning for the Palestinians after
Israel has finished its fence, withdrawn from Gaza, and
consolidated remaining settlements in line with its own strategic
advantage.
So time is not on the Palestinians’ side.
The world elsewhere tires with the creepy global image of the
masked jihadist as it continues to move toward open markets and
free societies. Meanwhile, Palestine is closing itself off from its
only window to the West, its tribal government free instead to
trade and exchange ideas with the likes of Mubarak’s Egypt or
the Assad dictatorship in Syria.
While George W. Bush gets few high marks from
Dennis Ross for his relative distance from the minutiae that
comprise this 800-page book, his larger post-9/11 vision of democratizing the Middle East may do
what thousands of shuttle missions by the dutiful and honest Ross
could not — if the virus of democracy let loose in
Afghanistan and Iraq finally infects the West Bank. After all, the
real problem in the Middle East has never been just a few thousand
acres of disputed land. Instead, as was true during the Cold War,
strife arises from the complete absence on one side of a legitimate
government — as well as the subsidized mythologies of
Palestinians that they could win from the Jews through suicide
murder the honor, prosperity, and victory that they could never
otherwise obtain through outright war or endemic tribal
dictatorship.
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