Dennis Ross's Mythology (5)

Let it be remembered that in 2007, the United States missed what may be a last chance in many years to negotiate a final peace settlement between the Israelis and the Arabs. That failure, if it happens, will keep the Middle East on boil for more years to come, leading to further bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians, probably between Hizballah and Israel, and possibly between Palestinians themselves. In such a climate, Iran's nuclear ambitions, the fallout from the Iraq invasion and the regrouping of Al Qaeda may push us into another global crisis.

Not that Condi Rice isn't trying. Overcoming an incomprehensible six-year freeze on Bush administration engagement in the peace process, she has made three trips to the region in three months and managed to get Prime Minister Olmert and President Abbas thinking again about "final status" issues like the shape of a Palestinian state and the fate of Jerusalem. Yet, it is becoming apparent that her efforts lack a big vision or a commitment on the part of President Bush, which may amount to a historic abrogation of U.S. responsibility given the significant opportunity offered in the Arab League's occupied-land-for-full-peace initiative of 2002 relaunched at the Riyadh summit last week.

American leadership is crucial, yet Bush refuses to take a clear stand on what a fair and just Israeli-Palestnian settlement should look like, and then use America's influence in the region and the world to sell that bold vision to the concerned parties. Unfortunately, this fits into a well-established Washington pattern, perhaps best exemplified by the ubiquitous views of Dennis Ross, the U.S.'s main Middle East envoy between 1989-2000.

Take Ross's latest Op-Ed in the Financial Times, which proposes a 3-point plan effectively limited to the modest aims of crisis-management and a scheme to undermine Hamas, the anti-Israel party that happened to win Palestine's parliamentary elections last year. Ross calls for a U.S.-brokered cease-fire, a vague "political objective" that he does not spell out and international support for the pro-peace Fatah party so it can pressure Hamas to "transform itself or fail."

Is this really the best America can do? Absent from Ross's thinking is any notion that America should exert some bold leadership, or, for that matter, give due respect to the courageous albeit belated efforts of Arab leaders to meet Israel half-way.

In presenting his plan, Ross starts by scoffing at Fatah's recent decision to enter a national unity government with Hamas. Instead of seeing it as a way of bolstering the politically weakened Abbas and perhaps luring Hamas toward peace, as the Saudis did when they brokered the Palestinian agreement in Mecca, Ross is quick to see "a return to the pre-Oslo period when diplomacy was based on rejection and denial."

Ross seems grudging in his view of the Arab peace initiative, in which, for the first time since the start of the conflict in 1948, all Arab states declared they would sign a peace agreement with Israel in exchange for Israel's withdrawal from Arab territories that remain occupied since the 1967 war. The Arab peace offering scarcely gets a mention in Ross's 840-page account of his career as an envoy The Missing Peace. In his Op-Ed, Ross says it "provides an opening" but in the next breath complains, falsely, that Israel would get peace "only after Israel has taken all the steps the Arabs want." In fact, the Arab offer is a reciprocal deal of peace for land.

Ross rightly says that negotiations and tangible steps must fill the current vacuum. But he describes a process in which the Arabs have to make further, immediate concessions, and is weighted in favor of Israel's bargaining position from the start. For example, he takes it for granted that the Palestinians will have to abandon the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees, which is enshrined in U.N. Resolution 194 of 1948. His diplomatic strategy is designed not to achieve a mutual understanding on the difficult issue, but how to squeeze the Palestinians into conceding the issue outright.

Ross's idea: "Arab states" should "embrace" such a compromise, to give Abbas the "political cover" with which to abandon the refugees' rights, and give Olmert "a political argument" for talking to the Arabs. Typically of Ross's approach, he avoids making a suggestion on what compromises Israel should embrace to give the Arabs a reason for talking to Israel--like a freeze on illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, for instance.

The travesty of this cautious, unbalanced American approach is that it helps perpetuate the myths that the Arabs are impossible to reason with, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is too intractable for even the wisest American negotiator to solve. American, Israeli and Arab officials all have quite a good idea of what a reasonable settlement would look like: it's called the Geneva Accord. Although it has no official standing, it is a model peace agreement negotiated between 2001-2003 by notable Israelis and Palestinians aligned with Abbas's Fatah party and Israel's Labor party. Former President Carter, who negotiated the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt, gave the keynote speech when the initiative was launched; he said that it was "unlikely that we will ever see a more promising foundation for peace."

Ross, though, like the Bush administration, has been largely silent about the Geneva Accord, other than to approvingly note that it stirred debate on taboos among Israelis and Palestinians. If Ross took a close look at the details, he'd discover that there is even a reasonable solution to the Palestinian refugee problem that both Israelis and Palestinians can accept and does not entail, as Ross would have it, forcing the Palestinians to forget about the "right of return" before negotiations even begin.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo