The Missing Peace.<\/em>\u00a0Yet if Ross\u2019 engaging prose does not quite match Kissinger\u2019s wit and repartee, his excurses about everything from top restaurants around the world to stories about his kids enliven what finally becomes a classical tale of a bellum interruptum, one that cannot be settled other than by absolute separation or the radical democratic reform of the Palestinians.<\/p>\nThe world is obsessed with the so-called occupied territories in Palestine, but not from any abstract principle of postbellum equity or worry over civilian deaths. Otherwise un\u00a0resolutions, European subsidies, and American envoys would have been focused on occupied Tibet or Lebanon, or the killing of tens of thousands of innocents in Rwanda and Darfur. So Palestine is not so much a moral issue as a political lightning rod that involves Arab oil, Arab global terrorism, Arab fundamentalist violence in and beyond the Middle East, and Arab anti-Semitism that finds resonance in Europe. While Ross understands that the Middle East is critical to world peace, he never quite explains why this small strip of land should be \u2014 and thus never fully elucidates why diplomats like Jim Baker and Colin Powell essentially renounced the frenetic efforts of their predecessors as vain and counterproductive.<\/p>\n
There is a depressing monotony to Ross\u2019s pilgrimages to the Middle East. With his hard work, undeniable diplomatic talents, and canny reading of the role of pride, envy, and honor in the region, he sets up a series of what seem to be reasonable plans of mutual concessions. Thus, in 1993, 1998, and 2000-01 we hear of the accustomed roadmaps, quartets, back, front, and side channels, secret Swiss meetings, working points, the Mitchell Plan, the Saudi Plan, the Zinni missions, un\u00a0mandates and resolutions, and all the other multifaceted ways of avoiding the terrible truth that Arafat was an unrepentant liar and terrorist. \u201cYou should,\u201d \u201cyou could,\u201d \u201cyou must,\u201d appear in each chapter as Ross\u2019s patient and standard admonitions to Arafat in hopes that he might grasp the \u201clast\u201d or \u201cbest\u201d Israeli concession. In the end, of course, he never missed \u201can opportunity to miss an opportunity,\u201d and so refused to chop off the tentacles of the maternal terror octopus that had engendered, empowered, and enriched him.<\/p>\n
Still, as relish to the main narrative, Ross offers some fascinating details along the way. How did the late Sheik Yassin, the blind and crippled spiritual leader of Hamas, ever get back into Gaza from his ostracism in Jordan? After Israeli agents botched a hit on Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, Bibi Netanyahu was forced both to hand over the antidote for the slow-working poison and to offer reentry for Yassin in order to placate an incensed King Hussein. When a crisis with Iraq loomed over President Clinton\u2019s insistence on the return of the weapons inspectors, the Palestinian Minister of Health asked that the Israelis offer those on the West Bank gas masks for fear that their patron Saddam\u2019s WMD-laden missiles might take too many Palestinians along with the targeted Israelis. It is one thing to dance on your rooftops in hopes of seeing Jews gassed, quite another if the wind carries the nerve agent back your way. Clinton seemed to have disliked Bibi Netanyahu, and in one sharp exchange, when the Israeli leader suggested that Arafat could keep his commitments by making sure Gaza police chief Ghazi Jabali \u201cdisappeared,\u201d our president was heard screaming, \u201cThis is just chickenshit. I am not going to put up with this bullshit\u201d before he stormed out \u2014 but, in Clintonian fashion, only for the staged moment.<\/p>\n
W<\/span>hile the Israelis\u00a0on occasion were stubborn and irritating, finally they were willing to give up most of the West Bank for any sort of real guarantee of a secure peace. Nowhere is this desperation for resolution clearer than in the case of Ehud Barak \u2014 the tragic figure of Ross\u2019s narrative \u2014 who at Camp David was resigned to granting almost all of what the Palestinians had demanded for a quarter century before being humiliated and destroyed politically. And in almost every near miss, at the eleventh hour of discussion, minutes before the final signing, during the penultimate ceremony or the final staged photo-op, the Syrians or the Palestinians would back out, often gratuitously insulting or embarrassing Bill Clinton, who in turn, almost on spec, would \u201clet it rip\u201d or \u201cstalk out\u201d on singularly unimpressed Palestinians.<\/p>\nSo his memoir by needs is replete with unintended humor \u2014 full of miffs and scowls like \u201cEnough was enough, Asad had to learn that the process would stop.\u201d \u201cThis was bullshit.\u201d \u201cI was furious and wanted everyone to know it.\u201d \u201cI refused to take the call.\u201d \u201cI was angry.\u201d \u201cI was ready to have us walk away.\u201d \u201cI was stunned.\u201d \u201cViolent demonstrations were one thing, but these kind of clashes another.\u201d All this angst is punctuated at last on page 756\u00a0with \u201cAlas, Arafat was not up to peacemaking.\u201d Should we laugh or cry? Little wonder question marks characterize so many of the book\u2019s subsections \u2014 \u201cBreakthroughs in Gaza?\u201d or \u201cShouldn\u2019t we have known about Arafat?\u201d \u2014 the reader always knowing in advance the answer to these dead questions \u2014 except for the only one that really mattered but was never asked: \u201cIf Arafat did not exist, would he have to be invented?\u201d<\/p>\n
Ross was always attuned to Assad\u2019s and Arafat\u2019s perceptions of slights \u2014 their passive-aggressive backing off the moment their offers were accepted in fear that Israeli acquiescence meant they could have gotten more; their hissy fits and feigned tantrums; their constant desire to be pursued and courted by a U.S. president; their snubbing or photo-opping him by turns, depending on the particular pulse of the Arab Street. A bomb goes off in Tel Aviv and, presto, Arafat is on his way out of the country, incommunicado as the inevitable American censure looms. An American secretary of state wants badly to produce a breakthrough \u2014 and is left to cool his heels on the Damascus tarmac: Thus the old cutthroat Assad makes Warren Christopher sweat for an audience. Throughout Ross\u2019s patient description, we are unable to ignore the Orwellian nature of it all: anti-Western zealots checking in for medical treatment at American or European hospitals, Mrs. Arafat fighting the intifada from Paris fashion shows, or a diplomat busy on shopping sprees in big city malls before assuming the mantle of the pan-Arabist fatwahist for consumption back home on state-controlled television.<\/p>\n
The author of\u00a0The Missing Peace<\/em>\u00a0seems to be waking up to relearn the ways of the world each morning, as if for all his intellect and erudition Ross cannot quite accept the asymmetry of it all. On one side is a liberal democratic society, under audit by an independent judiciary and free press. On the other a kleptocracy atop a tribal society that is illegitimate in every sense of the word, nursed on victimization born out of failure and humiliation. The lesson of Sadat lingered with almost every Syrian and Palestinian interlocutor \u2014 how, like Egypt, to get back all the land lost after repeated failed attempts to destroy Israel but without making the concessions for normalization that ultimately left Sadat riddled with bullets.<\/p>\nThus, it is no accident that Ross deals with a Shamir, Netanyahu, Rabin, Barak, but always only an Arafat on the other side, winner of one rigged election one time. And just as Netanyahu or Barak realize that there is a life after electoral defeat, Arafat knows that in a lawless society there are no laws in which to take refuge. For the Palestinians, compromise abroad might well lead to insurrection and a mob\u2019s noose at home. The \u201cArafat answer\u201d (La-Na\u2019am, \u201cno and yes\u201d in Arabic) is pitted against Rabin\u2019s determination \u201cto fight terror as if there were not a peace process and to pursue peace as if there were no terror.\u201d Ross\u2019s narrative reminds us of the Europeans\u2019 vain attempts through much of the late 1930s to mollify Hitler\u2019s incessant demand for the return of \u201cstolen\u201d territory \u2014 liberal elected politicians in vain parleying with a dictator who saw every concession as appeasement and thus an invitation for still more abuse.<\/p>\n
F<\/span>inally, even Ross, the perennial optimist, sensed that irony: Though he criticizes a disengaged Bush administration for entering office with a determination to keep Arafat out of the Lincoln bedroom, he used such toughness on the horizon as a warning to Arafat to cut a deal while he still had a lame-duck but compliant Clinton. Ross concludes with all sorts of fair and judicious outlines for a comprehensive settlement based on the premise of land for peace, something akin to the 95\u00a0percent or so of the West Bank offered up at Camp David. But the data supplied by his comprehensive narrative often refute his own conclusions and hopes \u2014 and de facto argue for an alternative roadmap more attuned to the lessons of history than the social science of conflict resolution theory.<\/p>\nPeace comes, whether in Germany, Japan, Vietnam, or the Falklands, when victory and defeat adjudicate the issues at hand. Thus, there will be no settlement in the Middle East until the Palestinians accept that the effort to destroy Israel leads not to political advantage but to their own destruction, a realization that might just discredit the corrupt tribal apparatus of the Palestinian Authority. The present cold war of sorts, akin to our own struggle with the Soviet Union, will eventually lead to a day of reckoning for the Palestinians after Israel has finished its fence, withdrawn from Gaza, and consolidated remaining settlements in line with its own strategic advantage.<\/p>\n
So time is not on the Palestinians\u2019 side. The world elsewhere tires with the creepy global image of the masked jihadist as it continues to move toward open markets and free societies. Meanwhile, Palestine is closing itself off from its only window to the West, its tribal government free instead to trade and exchange ideas with the likes of Mubarak\u2019s Egypt or the Assad dictatorship in Syria.<\/p>\n
While George W. Bush gets few high marks from Dennis Ross for his relative distance from the minutiae that comprise this 800-page book, his larger post-9\/11\u00a0vision of democratizing the Middle East may do what thousands of shuttle missions by the dutiful and honest Ross could not \u2014 if the virus of democracy let loose in Afghanistan and Iraq finally infects the West Bank. After all, the real problem in the Middle East has never been just a few thousand acres of disputed land. Instead, as was true during the Cold War, strife arises from the complete absence on one side of a legitimate government \u2014 as well as the subsidized mythologies of Palestinians that they could win from the Jews through suicide murder the honor, prosperity, and victory that they could never otherwise obtain through outright war or endemic tribal dictatorship.<\/p>\n
\n
\u00a92004 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Victor Davis Hanson Policy Review Dennis Ross.\u00a0The Missing Peace. The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace\u00a0by Dennis Ross. (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004) 840 pages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[795],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1b2","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2966,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/been-there-done-that-policy-in-the-middle-east\/","url_meta":{"origin":4528,"position":0},"title":"Been There, Done That: Policy in the Middle East","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services With much fanfare, President Barack Obama announced a new effort to end the endless Israeli-Palestinian struggle \u2014 by naming a brand-new Middle East envoy, former Sen. George Mitchell. The announcement was underwhelming, to say the least. For 40 years, we've seen such serial\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2009"","block_context":{"text":"February 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/february-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9674,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/has-trump-nominated-too-many-military-leaders-or-not-enough\/","url_meta":{"origin":4528,"position":1},"title":"Has Trump Nominated Too Many Military Leaders\u2014Or Not Enough?","author":"Megan Ring","date":"December 15, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review Choosing military men for top cabinet spots is not unprecedented, nor is it foolish given how Washington insiders have performed. President-elect Donald Trump is being faulted for supposedly appointing too many retired generals to cabinet-level jobs and \u201cmilitarizing\u201d the government. Former lieutenant general Michael\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Jim Mattis"","block_context":{"text":"Jim Mattis","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/jim-mattis\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1265,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/october-suprises\/","url_meta":{"origin":4528,"position":2},"title":"October Suprises","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 13, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The Democrats will probably suffer historic losses in both the House and Senate in less than 60 days. The 11th-hour campaigning of the now-unpopular Barack Obama on behalf of endangered congressional candidates will not change much. In fact, most embattled Democratic candidates don't\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "September 2010"","block_context":{"text":"September 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/september-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5875,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/count-me-out-on-syria\/","url_meta":{"origin":4528,"position":3},"title":"Count Me Out on Syria","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media There are good reasons to go into Syria, but far better ones\u00a0to stay out\u00a0[1]. Let us review a few of them. Syria is a humanitarian crisis with over one million refugees and 70,000 dead. But there are similar outrages in Mali, Somalia, and the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4541,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-real-humanists-revolution-from-afghanistan-to-iraq\/","url_meta":{"origin":4528,"position":4},"title":"The Real Humanists: Revolution from Afghanistan to Iraq","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 19, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online In September and early October 2001 we were warned that an invasion of Afghanistan was impossible \u2014 peaks too high, winter and Ramadan on the way, weak and perfidious allies as bad as the Islamists \u2014 and thus that the invasion would result\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2004"","block_context":{"text":"November 2004","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2004\/november-2004\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4486,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/unsung-victories\/","url_meta":{"origin":4528,"position":5},"title":"Unsung Victories","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 18, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"The effects of American policy throughout the Middle East are gradually being felt by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Last week, Mr. Abbas ordered the ruins of Yasir Arafat's Gaza headquarters cleared away. The Israelis had destroyed the building in 2002, and Mr. Arafat had kept the ruins as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2005"","block_context":{"text":"February 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/february-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4528"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4528"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4529,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4528\/revisions\/4529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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