Dennis Ross's Mythology (4)

Dennis Ross, the former U.S. peace negotiator, has some advice for Condi Rice's landmark talks next week with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: don't worry too much about a final deal, concentrate on a cease-fire. While Ross's Washington Post Op-Ed Thursday sounds perfectly reasonable, it shows the anti-Palestinian bias that contributed to his own notable lack of success.
After six years of American lip service to peace during the Bush administration, Rice deserves credit for bringing Abbas and Olmert together for exploratory talks on what she calls the political horizon--the core issues like Jerusalem, Israeli settlements, Palestinian refugees and acceptable borders that stand in the way of a final deal. Pity that Rice wasn't dealt the royal flush that Ross picked up when the Israelis and Palestinians secretly negotiated the Oslo Accords with the help of a Norwegian mediator. That interim agreement was signed at the White House in 1993, and it was left to Ross to negotiate its implementation. Instead of working the parties through to a comprehensive agreement that established a Palestinian state at peace with Israel, Ross's efforts crashed and burned in his final months as peace negotiator.
As Rice picks up where Ross left off, he warns her that "in Middle Eastern terms," it is not logical or possible these days to push for anything more than an end to Palestinian infighting and calm between Israelis and Palestinians. Driving for a final deal that involves major Palestinian concessions to Israel, he explains, will surely "threaten intra-Palestinian peace." Ross wants Rice to focus instead on a cease-fire, which Hamas as a partner in the Palestinian government would be sworn to enforce despite its commitment to wage an armed struggle until Israel is eliminated.
Ross's real game here is not to negotiate peace but use American diplomacy against the tremendous political gains of Hamas, the fundamentalist, death-to-Israel party, which, incidentally, has soared in popularity since the collapse of the Ross-brokered peace negotiations in 2000. What Ross seems really worried about is last week's Mecca agreement on a national unity government between Hamas and Abbas's Fatah group. That pact may produce a more united, harder Palestinian line for future negotiations, which will make it more difficult for Israel to win the concessions it seeks from the Palestinians. As Ross puts it, "For the Israelis, an intra-Palestinian peace that entails accommodating Hamas (and that does not require Hamas to change its hostile posture toward Israel) is hardly a basis for reaching out to Palestinians..."
Ross doesn't explain how Rice ever gets from his envisioned cease-fire to her serious negotiations on the core issues of the conflict. But he has some additional advice in that regard. Ross says that talks on core issues should be "designed to pursue the vision that Olmert originally campaigned on"--no matter that that vision, though proposing a substantial withdrawal, is vague in its terms and unilateral in its approach. Ross tells Rice that she will need to get Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan "to publicly embrace basic trade-offs" because "Olmert must show that the Arab world has adopted unprecedented compromises."
As in his career as a mediator, Ross the Op-Ed writer shows comparatively little interest in the Arab side of the equation. It is noteworthy, for example, that Ross expects negotiations to be based not merely on Israel's vision but on that of a prime minister whose miscalculations--notably Olmert's disastrous war in Lebanon that ended with Hizballah's "divine victory"--as well as his legal problems have raised questions of how long he'll even be around to lead the country let alone a negotiating team. In contrast, Ross makes no mention of the 2002 initiative by 22 Arab governments, derived from U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, that calls for a full comprehensive peace with Israel in exchange for Israel's withdrawal from Arab territories. In his Op-Ed, Ross expresses no concern for what Palestinian and Arab leaders "must show" their constituencies by way of Israeli "unprecedented compromises"--like a freeze on illegal Israeli settlements.
Rice will have no easy time bringing peace to the Holy Land. The Palestinian unity government may not work out; Olmert may refuse to negotiate with it. It would be vastly preferable if Hamas would just recognize Israel, renounce violence and get on with it. In or out of elected office, Hamas can be expected to oppose any final deal that Abbas eventually manages to reach. Abbas can make it stick if it is supported by the Palestinian people, the Israeli government, all Arab governments and the international community. It's sure a long shot to get there, but that's the hand that Rice was dealt.
Yet at this critical juncture, Ross advises against tackling the core issues, preferring that Rice trade the prestige of her office for a cease-fire that can be broken at any time by an Tehran-backed splinter faction, or a trigger-happy gunman. If she did that, nobody in the region would take her efforts very seriously. As Ross might recall from his own bitter experiences, cease-fires eventually break down in the absence of a political agreement or at least meaningful progress on the basic issues. Ross's idea for focusing on a cease-fire is a way of putting the onus in Rice's peace process all on the Palestinians-- and making Hamas the easy culprit if anything goes wrong.
Why would an experienced ex-negotiator suggest setting up the Palestinians to fail? Recall Ross's simple explanation for his own lack of success in brokering Israeli-Palestinian peace: "Yasser Arafat."

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo