Dennis Ross's Mythology (6)

Six years of diplomatic neglect has given the Bush administration what it should have expected: instead of peace or at least some sign of progress, we have the pro-peace Palestinian leader of the Fatah group desperate to hold on to power against the challenge of the rejectionist, fundamentalist Hamas group, which won the parliamentary elections in 2006 and now has taken over Gaza by force of arms. The Bush team is stunned, reacting to events because it failed to use American influence to shape them.

An example of what is wrong with U.S. thinking on the Middle East is the latest Op-Ed, in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, of Dennis Ross, the U.S.'s Middle East envoy between 1989-2000. In his favor, Ross has consistently criticized the Bush administration's policy of neglect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ross's problem is that he is obsessed with controlling the process of making peace, at the expense of using American leadership to promote and achieve a vision of actual peace.

In his Op-Ed, Ross reveals that all things considered, rather than pushing for a comprehensive peace between Israelis and Palestinians, he would have been wiser to have limited his aims to working “intensively to create the conditions for peacemaking” for the post-Yasser Arafat era. The reason, he says, is that Arafat, then the Palestinian leader, proved incapable of making “concessions on the existential issues of Jerusalem, refugees and borders.”

Now, Ross says, Condi Rice should likewise abandon her efforts to pursue a comprehensive peace. Ross's reason this time is that the rise of Hamas has produced a Palestinian identity crisis, discouraging Israel from making compromises with a people whose future leadership and orientation is in question. Instead of the U.S. articulating a vision for what a final peace deal should look like, Ross would have the State Department get involved in Palestinian factional politics on the side of Fatah—bolstering Fatah against Hamas by freeing up international aid for Fatah-controlled institutions and getting Israel to loosen up its security clampdown on Fatah-controlled areas.

The United States, the justly proud free republic that produced the likes of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Lincoln, should get into the detestable business of backing one corrupt Palestinian faction against another? Without doubt, there are no easy answers. But interfering in Palestinian politics is not America's business and is very unlikely to produce the desired results. Curious is Ross's sudden interest in bolstering Fatah--can he be unaware that it was the failure of his own mediation, the failure to help Palestinians achieve their self-determination, which helped discredit Fatah and fuel the rise of Hamas in the first place? Ross may self-servingly blame Arafat for everything that went sour, but no Palestinian would have accepted the deal he was offered—and unlike Israel and the U.S., Arafat was willing to continue negotiations until a solution could be found. Instead of more negotiations, and perhaps peace, we got Hamas.

All the donar money in the world will not help Fatah if it can't deliver true independence for the long-suffering Palestinians. Ross's thinking—and the State Department's—should focus on the big picture: Hamas, which scarcely existed when Ross began his Middle East shuttle missions back in the 1980s, will become irrelevant if the Fatah leadership succeeds in negotiating an end to Israel's occupation. Fatah will become irrelevant if it doesn't.

Ross's Op-Ed has some ideas on how Fatah, Egypt and Jordan should cooperate with Israel to combat Hamas terrorism. But after more than four decades of Palestinian violence in the name of national self-determination, it seems that political action rather than police action is what is urgently required. I would love rather to hear Ross's ideas on what the U.S. and Israel should do to promote Fatah's goals of Palestinian self-determination or, in Ross's words, to make "the West Bank... a model of success to show Palestinians and others in the region that moderates deliver and Islamists do not." That is the kind of bolstering Fatah could really use.

It has been said that with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, America has become a Middle East country. Well, let's not become another petty Middle East faction, angling with this group against that one, for some short-term advantage. That would, among other things, dishonor the lives of the 3,500 plus American soldiers who have died in Iraq in the belief they were on a mission to bring freedom and justice to this part of the world.

--By Scott MacLeod