By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
Ambassador Dennis Ross is one of the best-known faces in Middle East diplomacy. He has spent hour after hour face-to-face with that region’s leaders in critical talks at Oslo, Camp David, Sharm el-Sheikh and Paris. He has traveled to the “other Washington” to raise money for Hadassah Medical Centers’ Rehabilitation Unit in Israel, the facility that treats victims of the terrorist attacks he works to prevent.
In early May, this intrepid and persevering negotiator came to Seattle to speak at a fundraising gala for the Seattle Chapter Hadassah held at the Fairmount Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle. While in town, he sat down with the JTNews to discuss his work since leaving the Clinton administration, reflect on the peace process, talk about his new book and share some personal thoughts.
Ross was the director of the Policy Planning Staff of the Department of State in the first Bush administration. In that capacity, he helped to develop U.S. policy with the former Soviet Union, worked with Germany during their unification and inclusion in NATO, participated in arms control negotiations and organized the Gulf War coalition.
Currently, Ross is the director and Ziegler Distinguished Fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington, D.C.
He is also the volunteer chairman of the board for the Institute for Jewish People and Policy Planning based in Jerusalem, a think tank that focuses on ways to design different alternative futures for the global Jewish community.
Although he still travels to Israel about five times a year, Ross confessed that his work in the region required a great personal investment from both himself and his family.
“Doing it as long as I did was an incredible burden,” admitted Ross, soberly assessing the constant emotional strain of his diplomatic mission. “What kept me going was that very frequently, when I was in Israel, I would have Israeli mothers come up to me, very teary, asking me to succeed. And every time we would suffer what would be very difficult setbacks, I would have that in mind.”
Ross said he finally brought his wife and family with him so that they knew where he was going all of the time.
“A couple of times I brought my family out there,” added Ross, who brought them with him when staying in Gaza and Jericho. “They needed to know where I was all the time since I wasn’t home.”
Ross recounts how both Israelis and Palestinians would often come up to them and thank them, expressing their deep gratitude for what he was doing.
“That helped to sustain me,” said Ross, “and that’s why I’m still not prepared to give up.”
In addition to his work at the institute, Ross is a foreign affairs analyst for the Fox News Channel and often writes for the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The New York Times.
In his new book, The Missing Peace (Farrah, Strauss, and Giroux, August 2004), Ross documents the events in the last decade of the peace process and tries to set the record straight amidst the myths and the rumors that continue to swirl around the final offer ultimately rejected by Yasser Arafat in 2000.
“I tell the whole story of Camp David,” said Ross, “with one chapter devoted only to Camp David. It’s a long chapter. Day by day, I’ve tried to explain exactly what happened and why it happened. I demonstrate that a lot of what has been portrayed as to why it failed has taken on a life of its own, a kind of mythology.”
In the book, Ross said he also tried to draw out lessons and explain the historical factors that shaped the outlooks of all the participants in the hopes of shaping a different future for the region.
“The Palestinians have tried to say that they were offered only Bantustans, only cantons,” said Ross. “Well, it’s simply not true. I’ve appeared in places where I’ve said, what, in fact, we offered. It wasn’t Barak that offered it. We offered it. And I’ve explained exactly what it was. I’ve confronted people who’ve said, ‘Well I’ve read it and it was different’. And I’ve said ‘Well, I wrote it! I know what we presented.’ So the only way to answer that in the end was to actually explain what happened and expose it. For some people it will be painful to see what went on. It wasn’t easy for me to write all of it.”
Ross ultimately concludes that these myths, maintained by both sides, will have to be exposed in order for both societies to make the necessary concessions for peace.
“One of the reasons for my writing it was because I wanted to debunk the mythologies,” Ross said. “If there’s one region in the world where people are much more comfortable with their myths than having to accommodate to reality, it’s the Middle East. You’ll never have peace until you adjust to reality.
“It’s an effort to try to explain this conflict, where it comes from, how the diplomacy toward it has evolved, how the Israelis, Arabs and Palestinians view the world, the prism through which they see it, why they see it the way they do, and then marry that to what has actually been the real history.”
Although he no longer has a formal mediating role, Ross remains a resource for the Bush administration. He commented on the recent meeting between Ariel Sharon and President Bush in response to Sharon’s plan to withdraw from Gaza and part of the West Bank.
“This is a response to a Sharon initiative which at least creates the potential to unfreeze the situation,” said Ross. “Now my complaint about what Bush did was not the content of what he did with the Israelis – it was
the absence of any parallelism. I wanted a parallel process, to be talking to Palestinians, where you say, ‘Look, the Israelis are taking a step. What are you going to do? If they’re out, how will you assume responsibilities? Do you need help to assume your responsibilities? We in the international community might be prepared to help you, but only if you demonstrate you’re prepared to assume responsibilities. Now, you want a state? Prove that you’re up to a state.”
Today, in his role at the Institute for Near East Policy, Ross says the purpose of the think tank, which focuses on the White House, State Department, Pentagon and CIA, is not only to shape policy but also to anticipate emerging problems.
“It’s a Washington-oriented think tank whose purpose is to try and influence what we do and how we do it in the Middle East. We think that a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship is in the interest of American national security in the Middle East. It doesn’t mean that we can’t have a relationship with Arabs or with Palestinians, but the notion that there shouldn’t be a wedge driven between the United States and Israel really informs the point of departure.”