Dennis Ross's Mythology (2)

Further on Dennis Ross's blame-Arafat argument:

If American errors contributed to the collapse of the peace process in 2001, Ross's own part in it may have been what Palestinians viewed as his unfair and patronizing approach to them and especially to Arafat. Ross's failure to hold the trust of both sides--a prerequisite for any successful mediator, I would say--might have been due to a shortage of empathy for Palestinians or a refusal or inability to appreciate Arafat's historical role in their long struggle. At least that seems a fair reading, partly based on Ross's own 2004 account of his career as a Middle East peace negotiator, The Missing Peace.

Arafat had too much blood on his hands and made too many mistakes in judgement to be another Mandela much less a Gandhi, but it's undeniable that he was the father of Palestinian nationalism, a leader who represented his suffering people to the end. In his book, while Ross briefly describes the "disaster" that befell Palestinians in 1948, Ross's main take on Palestinians concerns what he sees as their love of playing the victim, feeling of entitlement, abdication of responsibility and lack of empathy for Israeli needs. As for Arafat, Ross describes him largely through the cliches publicized by his enemies, rivals and detractors--he was manipulating, deceptive, irrational, unpleasant. Ross writes almost as if the U.S. was doing Palestinians a favor by talking to Arafat--no matter that Arafat, like it or not, was an essential partner for achieving a historic settlement of a devilishly complex, 50-year-old dispute of profound political, economic, social and religious significance. Ross, toward the end of the negotiations, for example, lectured Abu Alaa on one of the consequences of not agreeing to U.S. peace proposals before the end of Clinton's term: "I will be gone...You know that I understand your problems, your needs and your aspirations very well. You know that I often explain them better than any of you do. You won't have me anymore..." In 840 pages from the American official who should have best understood Arafat, there is scant insight into Arafat's remarkable life or the treacherous Palestinian and Arab politics within which he operated for four decades. Instead, in Ross's simplistic conclusion that Arafat was incapable of making peace--"he could not compromise or concede"--he reveals zero understanding of the gradual, difficult, bloody evolution in which Arafat, like the Palestinian nation itself, came to abandon his dreams and accept Israel's right to exist. In finally agreeing to the Oslo accords in 1993, Arafat signed away 78% of historic Palestine--by his people's reckoning, if not Ross's, a massive compromise--with the future of the remaining 22% to be determined in the talks where Ross came to dominate the picture. (The U.S. and Israel, by the way, underwent similar evolutions in reverse: it was only after the first intifadeh in 1987 that the U.S. and later Israel grudgingly recognized Arafat's PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people; only after the second intifadeh in 2000 did an American president publicly support Palestinian statehood--something the U.N. had voted a half century earlier, in 1947.)

Ross's attitude was hardly lost on Arafat. I first learned about Arafat's mistrust of Ross in the spring of 1997 during a visit to Gaza when several of his most senior aides badgered me on the subject. Arafat, they told me, felt that Ross was unreasonably biased toward Israel and made a habit of looking for ways of twisting Arafat's arm. Arafat's advisors were telling him to suspend his dealings with Ross as a way of sending a message to Clinton that his mediator was part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. Arafat seems to have rejected the advice, concluding that Ross was Clinton's choice and picking a fight over the envoy could risk Arafat's hugely important relationship with Clinton. "Sometimes I feel that we get more by talking to the Israelis directly than by talking to them through Ross's mediation," Nabil Shaath told me, in one of the more reserved criticisms I heard at that time. (None of the aides mentioned the episode to me then, but Ross's book reveals that he had acted with disrespect if not contempt toward Arafat during a meeting a few months earlier. Ross and Arafat got into a dispute over some details that prompted Arafat to provoke him several times, "Are you calling me a liar?" Ross retorted, "If the shoe fits," then got up and flung a briefing binder at a table knocking over a pitcher of grapefruit juice. "I was furious and I wanted everyone to know it," Ross writes, as if throwing a tantrum at an elected national leader who is a party to international negotiations is a standard tactic for an American negotiator.)

Arafat's posture in the negotiations was thus shaped by a number of factors, from his historical view of himself as father of Palestinian nationalism to his wariness of Ross. There was also his frustration over Israel's failure to fully withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza and Israel's expansion of illegal Jewish settlements in the territories. In the end, he felt he was railroaded into poorly prepared talks at Camp David to finalize all the major, ultra sensitive issues, like Jerusalem. Arafat didn't act wisely in those negotiations, but he sought and wanted a deal. One imagines that a skilled diplomat would have laid a better foundation that maximized the chance that Arafat would go through with it and minimized the odds he wouldn't. Ross, of course, is entitled to believe that Arafat would never do a deal, but he needs to answer the next two obvious questions. Why did Arafat negotiate then; as a tactical ploy before an ultimate war of destruction against Israel? If that was the case, why was Clinton, Ross's boss for eight years, as well as no fewer than three Israeli prime ministers, so naively foolish as to negotiate with Arafat in the first place?

By Scott MacLeod/Cairo