Dennis Ross's Mythology (3)

After some background interviews in the Middle East this week, I'm now becoming persuaded that Condi Rice is cranking up the first serious peace initiative since Bill Clinton left office six long years ago. She spent four days in the region last week and won agreement by Israeli Prime Minister Olmert and Palestinian President Abbas to hold exploratory talks with her next month on the endgame rather than merely on security issues. It won't be easy, but she deserves support for trying. If she hasn't learned that the U.S. has to play with a full deck in dealing with Israelis and Palestinians, however, then she won't get anywhere.
In his Haaretz article yesterday, Akiva Eldar had an anecdote which, if true, indicates that Clinton blamed Arafat for the "failure" of the Camp David peace talks in 2000 because Barak asked him to do so for political reasons--i.e., Barak needed to escape blame and put the onus on Arafat so it would help Barak's re-election as prime minister. Eldar says he heard the anecdote from Palestinian negotiator Saab Erekat, who says he got it from Clinton himself in 2004.
Though his book The Missing Peace postulates that Camp David failed because of Arafat, Clinton's mediator Dennis Ross oddly fails to mention that Clinton broke what Ross termed an unfortunate promise made to Arafat prior to the summit that he would not be blamed if it failed to produce agreement. In his meticulous 840-page account, Ross glosses over the fact that Clinton did indeed blame Arafat immediately after the summit--in a White House press conference, when he praised Barak more than Arafat, and then more directly in an interview with Israeli television soon thereafter. Privately, Ross notes in The Missing Peace, he and Clinton regarded Arafat as "the skunk of the party."
Ross explains in his book that he felt Barak needed to be praised for domestic political reasons and, echoing what Clinton reportedly told Erekat in 2004, Clinton felt it was important to shore up Barak to keep the peace process alive. Ross doesn't say so, but it was a fatal mistake not to have had the same concerns about shoring up Arafat politically as well, given Arafat's well-documented struggle against Arab and Palestinian forces, from regimes that tried to kill him to potent Islamic fundamentalist opponents like Hamas.
In his desire to help Barak by making Arafat the skunk, Clinton effectively encouraged Arafat to take his own political cover in his old role as revolutionary rather than his new role as peacemaker. That certainly did nothing to prevent the intifadeh that was unleashed two months later, which was indicative of widespread Palestinian frustration with the lack of results from Arafat's peace efforts. Barely a year after Arafat's death in 2004, of course, Hamas swept his Fatah party from power. In Ross's logic, however, it's all Arafat's fault because he irrationally refused to agree to what Ross wanted him to according to Ross's preferred time-table. Palestinian public sentiment is irrelevant to the outcome, apparently, as are broken presidential promises. In prepping for the new peace talks, Rice and her team should check out accounts of what happened other than Ross's self-serving tome, such as Yossi Beilin's The Path to Geneva and Clayton E. Swisher's The Truth About Camp David.
Eldar, by the way, mentions the blame-Arafat story in a column about Clinton's wife Hillary, who the Jewish left, Eldar says, accuses of a "flip-flopping attitude toward the Israeli-Arab conflict." Eldar recalls that while Hillary once upset the Jewish establishment for comments supporting a Palestinian state, she became cooler to the Palestinian cause when she ran for the U.S. Senate. "Senator Clinton stirred longings for First Lady Hillary" among her friends on the Jewish left, Eldar says.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo