51st: Dennis Ross’s string of failures and its reward–he’s still in charge. UPDATE..
July 9: News of the new U.S. ambassador to Israel: “[Dan] Shapiro said Obama instructed him to make Israel’s security his top priority. “This we are doing by raising the remarkable cooperation and coordination between our militaries and our intelligence services to their highest levels ever,” he said. In addition, he said his job entails safeguarding Israel’s future as a Jewish, democratic state and working to expand the depth and breadth of the bonds between the Israeli and American people, including their “burgeoning economic relationship.” Ha’aretz
July 6: George Mitchell’s departure as President Obama’s representative to the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations has left Dennis Ross in charge of the non-negotiations (you remember Dennis Ross who has been nursing the non-negotiations for two decades).
Akiva Eldar, Israeli journalist and chief political correspondent for Ha’aretz [and to the Demonizers, not an anti-Semite], raises questions about whom Ross is actually working for: “It would be tough to find a bigger expert than Ross on the myths and illusions related to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. For years he has been nurturing the myth that if the United States would only meet his exact specifications, the Israeli right would offer the Arabs extensive concessions.
“During the years he headed the American peace team, Israeli settlement construction ramped up. Now Ross, the former chairman of the Jewish People Policy Institute, is trying to convince the Palestinians to give up on bringing Palestinian independence for a vote in the United Nations in September and recognize the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people — in other words, as his country, though he was born in San Francisco, more than that of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who was born in Safed.”
Stephen Walt’s comments on Eldar’s essay, and a homey observation:”In what other line of work could someone fail consistently for two decades and still have a job?
“If you were a baseball manager and your team didn’t make the playoffs for two decades running, you’d have been canned long ago. If you were a CEO and you lost money for twenty straight years, the Board of Directors or the shareholders would have hired a replacement long ago. If you were a dean or a university president and faculty quality, student achievement and the size of the endowment kept declining on your watch, it’s a safe bet you’d be told that your services were no longer required.
“But when it comes to U.S. Middle East policy, there is hardly any accountability. And the tragic irony is that advisers like Ross — who make no secret of their deep attachment to Israel — have in fact done an excellent job of scuttling prospects for a two-state solution that is Israel’s best hope of long-term security and international acceptances.”
“According to the Oslo Accords, the final-status agreement was supposed to have been decided upon 13 years ago – meaning that we would be celebrating its bar mitzvah this year. On September 13, the accords themselves will be turning 18, the number signifying life in the Jewish mystical tradition. The time has come to put the Oslo Accords out of their misery.”
Very sad that the Oslo Accords have never been fully implemented. If Mitchell, a seasoned negotiator (N. Ireland/IRA peace process) couldn’t budge Netanyahu, who has my vote for the Most Skillfully Manipulative Politician in the World, then Ross, even if he were so inclined, doesn’t stand a chance. I sincerely hope that the selection of Ross by the Obama Administration doesn’t mean that a conscious decision was made to significantly downgrade the Israeli-Palestinain dispute until after the November 2012 presidential election. I don’t see Obama, or any of the declared presidential candidates for that matter, being willing to bump heads with AIPAC for at least the next 16 months.
Why do you necessarily think he failed?
U: “Why do you necessarily think he failed?”
Do you mean Mitchell?
No, Ross. In my experience, someone who is consistently rewarded for failure may in fact be succeeding in something that we can’t quite see.
U: There are no doubt many possible scenarios for Ross failing successfully. I was struck by an Israeli, Akiva Elder, focusing on Ross’s Zionist commitment extending to Israel ultimately occupying and annexing the whole of the West Bank. That may be inaccurate and unfair. After all, many American Jews are Zionists in the sense that they support the founding of Israel and its flourishing, and so do many non-Jewish Americans, though not all support the annexation of the West Bank.
The role of the settlements in undermining the Oslo Accords stands out as almost determinative, and there is certainly a growing, if not majoritarian, trend in Israel to argue that the two-state solution is dead, and that ultimately Israel should occupy the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. But what to do with all of those Palestinians?
The most benign view of Ross is that over the years he’s stuck to his mission, which he believes is to bring peace. If he is not a long-term thinker and strategist, he simply picks up where matters stand at any given time. He has simply outlasted not just Mitchell, but many other negotiators. He seems to be acceptable not only to our own government (and AIPAC), but to the Israeli government. That raises the difficult and ugly question of whose interests he really represents. Of course, again on the benign front, he may think that U.S. and Israeli interests are one and the same. If that was once true, it seems increasingly dangerous for both nations.
In a 2001 interview with NY Times reporter Clyde Haberman, Ross gives a detailed account of the failed negotiations with Clinton, Ehud Barak (then Israeli Prime Minister), and Yasar Arafat (then head of the PLO). Ross’s sense of how close they were to an agreement has not been confirmed by anything I’ve read since, but maybe Ross is an optimistic man. Among the observations in the interview:
Haberman: “In the final reckoning, there is no escaping the fact that the big ones got away: an Israeli treaty with Syria and a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some would call that failure, no?”
Ross: ”I don’t feel I failed, and I’ll tell you why,” …. ”Because the United States is never going to impose an agreement. What we can do is make it easier for them to make really hard decisions. In the end, the failure can never be our failure. It may be their inability to get to where they want to go. But it’s much more their doing than ours.”
And Ross on his attachment to Israel: ”My Jewishness has added to my sense of mission,” he says. And he is an ardent supporter of Israel, where he has vacationed with his family. ”I don’t believe you’ll ever produce peace in the Middle East,” he says, ”if Israel isn’t strong and if there isn’t a strong relationship between the United States and Israel.”
The article, “Dennis Ross’s Exit Interview,” was published just after the GW Bush Administration took over and tamped down peace talks. It was published in the New York Times Magazine, March 25, 2001: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/magazine/dennis-ross-s-exit-interview.html?scp=1&sq=Clyde%20Haberman%20on%20Dennis%20Ross&st=cse
Another hypothesis on failing upward: If Ross were ever to leave for good, it would be proof that the “peace process” is truly over and dead. Maybe one of his functions is to keep false hopes alive.
Margaret writes (11:53 am):
If I’ve got my numbers right, there are as many Palestinians as there are Israelis (seven million or so), so, obviously no sane person would say they should simply be absorbed into Israel. That would be a cultural disaster for everyone. It seems to me reasonable that they should be gradually absorbed into nations with cultures very similar to their own. Kind of obvious, I’d think, but of course I’d be overlooking the political reason for keeping them stateless. Seven million human pawns. Far worse than sad.
David Smith: Of course, many Palestinians are not stateless. Many have lived in Gaza and the West Bank for generations; they were citizens of the Ottoman empire and after that the British ruled them. The Israeli occupation after the 1967 war has not made them “homeless.”
Some Palestinians are citizens of Israel. Some are citizens of Jordan, the U.S., various European countries, etc. Who are the seven million that you cite? They are all stateless? Who is keeping them stateless?
Apologies, Margaret (6:27 pm) – I read the table on the right too quickly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_people
Perhaps four million is a better number (see below). That’s still an awful lot of human pawns.
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http://www.fmreview.org/FMRpdfs/FMR26/FMR2603.pdf
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statelessness#Palestinians