Published in Arabic by Al
Hayat 11 November 2000
Dennis Ross, the Senior US
Coordinator of the Arab-Israeli peace process, has announced that he plans to
retire from government service at the end of the Clinton Administration next
January 20.
All those who worked with him
on the Middle East praise his remarkable memory, his fertile mind, his skill in
note-taking, drafting and briefing, his mastery of negotiating procedures, and
his calm, unruffled, laid-back style.
Presidents have come and gone:
Reagan, Bush, Clinton; Secretaries of State have come and gone: George Shultz,
James Baker, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright. But Dennis Ross has
soldiered on at the State Department since the early 1980s, playing an increasingly
important role over the past decade as the institutional memory, the tireless
negotiator, the indispensable ‘manager’ of the peace process.
The Arabs, however, will not
miss him.
For them, he represents two
things: first, he symbolises the extent to which Israel and its friends have
captured US Middle East policy; more generally, he is a symbol of the influence
American Jews have achieved over the American Government, a prominence to match
their unique position in business and finance, in the media, in the film
industry, in academia, science, literature and many other fields of American
life.
Dennis Ross’s role in the
history of this past decade is obviously not as visible or as towering as that
of Henry Kissinger who, in the first half of the 1970s, first as National
Security Adviser and then as Secretary of State, shaped America’s relations
with the Middle East to Israel’s advantage.
After Black September of 1970,
Kissinger promoted Israel to a ‘strategic alliance’ with the United States, and
after the October War of 1973 he showered Israel with political, military and
financial assistance. US aid to Israel rose from $30m in 1970 to $2.2bn in 1974
– and it has remained in the billions ever since.
Ross has been more discreet in
championing the Israeli cause, but as effective. He is credited with having
played a crucial role in designing the rules of the Madrid Peace Conference of
1991 and of the subsequent peace process. He helped James Baker, then Secretary
of State, to frustrate the Arabs’ wish for an international conference and
force them instead to accept separate bilateral negotiations, as Israel
insisted upon. The pattern of separate negotiating ‘tracks’ has coloured the
peace process ever since, contributing to Arab disunity and weakness.
Ross’s detracters say that his obsession
from the start has been with
process rather than with substance. Under his management, the essential
issues of the dispute between the Arabs and Israel were constantly deferred. At
every stage of his long career as a ‘facilitator’, he let Israel set the pace.
He kept the parties talking, but with no ultimate vision of a final settlement,
except one which Israel would allow.
Over the last seven years, Ross has been
ably assisted by his friend and associate Martin Indyk who, like himself,
started his career with the pro-Israeli lobby, the America-Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Under Clinton, Indyk has had a meteoric career – at
the Middle East desk of the National Security Council, as Ambassador to Israel,
as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and then, at Barak’s
special request, once again as ambassador to Israel. His career has recently
suffered a blip when, on pressure from the FBI, the State Department
temporarily withdrew his security clearance. In the Arab view, Ross has been
more skilful than Indyk in playing down his partiality.
The only trouble with the
American peace team is that its Middle East peace-making since Madrid has, by
any objective standard, been an abject failure.
Consider the outcome: The
Madrid process was meant to end the conflict but today, ten years later,
Palestinians and Israelis are at war as violently as ever, perhaps more so
because expectations have been so bitterly disappointed; relations between
Syria and Israel are frozen in hostility; outraged by Israeli brutality in
dealing with the Al-Aqsa Intifada, Tunisia, Morocco, Oman and Qatar have
severed their timid links with the Jewish state; while, on the popular level,
the furious outcry against America and its Israeli ally echoes from one end of
the Arab world to the other, finding occasional expression in attacks such as
the one on the USS Cole in Aden harbour. Millions of Muslims across the globe
have been alienated.
This is not a record of which
American diplomacy can be proud.
Dennis Ross has this year been
a major player in two events, two crucial turning points in the peace process,
both massive flops. The first was the Clinton-Asad Summit in Geneva in March;
the second was the Clinton-Arafat-Barak Summit at Camp David in July.
The spectacular failure of
these two encounters has dashed expectations of peace and poisoned the
atmosphere throughout the region.
And yet it would appear that,
in both cases, Dennis Ross advised President Clinton that these Summits could
be successful, urged him to call them and expend valuable political capital on
them.
It is not easy for an outsider
to judge the role of individual officials in the making of American policy.
Dennis Ross is evidently not as powerful as Madeleine Albright, the Secretary
of State, or Sam Berger, the National Security Adviser. Bureaucratically, he
does not stand above Edward Walker, the Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern
Affairs. But in terms of real influence on Middle East policy, he ranks very
high – perhaps higher than anyone else.
He may not like it, but the
world is likely to judge that the failure of American Middle East policy in the
past decade must to a large extent be laid at his door.
Ever since Madrid and until
his death last June, the late President Hafiz al-Asad of Syria battled to
secure, in exchange for peace, an Israeli commitment to full withdrawal from
the Golan Heights to the 4 June 1967 line.
When he was prime minister,
Itzhak Rabin finally gave Asad this commitment in July 1994, and Shimon Peres,
following Rabin’s assassination in November 1995, endorsed it in his turn.
When, after the arid years of
Netanyahu’s premiership, Ehud Barak became prime minister in June 1999 and declared
his fidelity to Rabin’s legacy, Asad fully expected him to accept and implement
the same commitment.
But Barak hesitated. He wanted
better terms. He was prepared to give back the whole of the Golan except for
the north-eastern shoreline of Lake Tiberias which the Syrians had held before
the 1967 war.
However, Barak professed to
want peace and praised Asad as the founder of modern Syria. As the months past,
he seemed about to take the plunge and pay the price of peace – which was full
withdrawal down to the edge of the Lake.
So, when Clinton summoned Asad
to Geneva in March 1999 with a promise of ‘good news’, the Syrian leader
believed that a historic breakthrough was at hand. He was to be bitterly
disappointed.
Not only did Barak want to
retain total control over Lake Tiberias and its shores. He also wanted control
of the waters flowing into the Lake and of the road running around the Lake. In
other words, far from accepting the 4 June 1967 line, he wanted to push back
the international frontier of 1923 by several hundred metres to the east. This
was Clinton’s grim message to Asad who immediately rejected it.
Who advised Clinton that Asad
would accept less than full withdrawal? The answer would seem to be Ross.
What were his reasons? As far
as we know, he argued that Asad was seriously ill; that he wanted to hand over
power to his son; that Syria’s economy was in trouble. In his Memoirs,
Kissinger had described Asad as a leader who would negotiate to the very edge
of the abyss, and even over the edge, but would then yield when he felt he had
wrung the most out of his opponent. Why not then give Asad an extra push?
Ross – and Barak – evidently
believed Asad could be pressured into abandoning the principled position he had
fought for since Madrid. They were wrong. In the event, Clinton, Barak -- and
Ross -- had squandered a unique chance for peace between Syria and Israel.
Much the same scenario
happened at the Clinton-Barak-Arafat summit in July, of which the only full
account we have is that given by Akram Haniyyeh, editor of the Ramallah
newspaper Al-Ayyam, who was present at Camp David as a member of the
Palestinian negotiating team.
Once again it would appear
that it was Dennis Ross, prompted by Barak, who persuaded Clinton that the
Summit could be a ‘success’, in the sense that Arafat could be pressured into
concessions over Jerusalem, such as conceding Israeli sovereignty over the
Haram al-Sharif.
Barak and Ross pressed for the
Summit in spite of Arafat’s repeated warnings to the Americans that the meeting
was ill-prepared and premature, and that failure could spark an explosion -- as
indeed it has with tragic consequences.
Haniyyeh describes Ross as the
‘unconditional champion of Israeli demands.’ The American peace team, he says,
was wholly aligned on the Israeli positions. He accuses Clinton’s advisers of concealing from the
President the reality of the situation.
He says, for example, that it
was only at the Summit that Clinton learned of the centrality of the refugee problem
because his advisers had reduced it to a question of compensation, of
settlement of refugees in host Arab countries, and of visas for those who
wanted to emigrate to the West.
Haniyyeh’s judgement is
severe. He writes: ‘Those American envoys, who shuttle endlessly to the region
and manage the file of the negotiations, have lost all credibility with the
Palestinians and the Arabs.’ ‘When,’ he asks, ‘will the United States, if only
for greater effectiveness, stop entrusting matters to these same officials?’
He reveals that at Camp David
the Americans set aside UN Resolutions 242 and 338 which were the foundations
of the peace process; they never took an initiative or made a proposal without
first clearing it with the Israelis (a Kissinger legacy); and from the start
they only put pressure on the Palestinian side, never on the Israelis.
The Israelis had in fact
virtually delegated to the United States the task of negotiating on their
behalf, in the conviction that American pressure would be sufficient to impose
‘their peace’. But, like Asad at Geneva, Arafat held firm, and the Summit was a
fiasco.
Some Arabs go so far as to
believe that Ross actually wanted the two Summits to fail in order to pin
responsibility for failure on Syria and the Palestinians and make Israel look
good. They suspect him of a brilliant but ultimately futile manipulation of
President Clinton.
Dennis Ross has had a long
career. Throughout, he has ensured that the United States has continued to
adopt Kissinger’s ‘step-by-step’ strategy. A settlement could be reached not by
squeezing Israel but by helping it to take one small step at a time. The
overall principle was also Kissinger’s: the greater America’s support for
Israel, the more Israel would be ready to take risks for peace.
In the event, the principle
proved false. The greater the American support, the more Israel was encouraged
to believe that it could stay on the Golan, stay in Lebanon, and get away with
its creeping annexation of Palestinian territory.
Ross has consistently advised
on how the UN’s role could be usurped and UN Resolutions supplanted. In due
course, the West Bank and Gaza were no longer considered ‘occupied territories’
but merely ‘disputed territories’. The Israeli settlements were no longer
‘illegal’ or ‘obstacles to peace’ but merely ‘complications’. At every stage,
primacy had to be given to Israeli security and never to Arab security.
Hizballah’s success in Lebanon
and the Al-Aqsa Itifada have now provided a rude awakening. Not only has
American policy of unconditional support for Israel not achieved peace, but
America itself is paying a heavy price for the excesses of its ally.
Dennis Ross is leaving office.
In his person he sums up the ultimate contradiction that the United States
cannot be both Israel’s uncritical ally and a credible and effective peace
broker.