With Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat on what appeared to be his deathbed last week, it was difficult to contact Dennis Ross, as so many other news media institutions wanted to.
As U.S. envoy to the Middle East from 1988 to 2000, Ross had met and negotiated many times with Arafat, including at the infamous sessions in summer 2000 (at Camp David) through January 2001, at which Arafat rejected what many observers believed then and believe now was the best deal for a Palestinian state that he could ever have received from Israel.
Moreover, Ross’s recently published book, “The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), has further established him as an authority.
Indeed, as Ross said when The Chronicle finally did get to speak with him by telephone last week, the book “has been taken seriously,” receiving extensive and respectful reviews from such journals as the New York Review of Books, The New Republic and Foreign Affairs – even if the reviewers didn’t always agree with the views he expressed there.
“You wouldn’t expect people to just embrace it,” he said when asked about this. “But nobody questions my facts. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to debunk the mythology and explain what happened.”
His expertise will be available in Milwaukee in the coming months. Ross will be speaking about his book at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center’s Jewish Book and Culture Fair on Sunday, Nov. 21, 2 p.m., at the JCC, in an appearance co-sponsored by the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations.
Then he will be commuting to Milwaukee this winter as Allis-Chalmers Distinguished Professor of International Affairs in the political science department of Marquette University, according to a release from MU.
In that capacity, he will teach a class on “International Politics of the Middle East” for political science majors and “will give a couple of public lectures, I think, as well,” he said.
He currently is “counselor” at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think-tank that, as he put it, does research and analysis “trying to understand and shape what U.S. interests are in the Middle East and determine how best to pursue them.”
Ross believes the second term of the Bush administration is “likely to be more involved” in Middle East diplomacy than it was in the first term.
“In the first term, the administration was disengaged,” Ross said. “I think the notion was legitimate to test, but it proved to be wrong and not to work.”
He said three developments will make greater engagement more likely. First, there is Arafat’s death or incapacitation. Because Ross in his book described him as a prime obstacle to Middle East peace, “with him not there, there is no longer that problem,” he said.
Second is the decision by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to withdraw Israel and Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip. This could “create a new opening” for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement — if the U.S. government helps and doesn’t “sit on the sidelines,” Ross said.
The third development is the recent statement by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who said on Nov. 3 in his remarks upon Bush’s re-election that “the need to revitalize the Middle East peace process is the single most pressing political challenge in our world today.”
“There is no foreign government with whom the president has better relations” than the Blair government, Ross said. If Blair considers the Mideast to be his “number one priority,” then that “probably will incline the President to do more,” Ross said.
The big issue raised by Arafat’s departure from the scene, Ross said, will be the creation of new Palestinian leadership. To do that, “I believe elections are what we need to be focusing on,” he said, because that is the way to obtain leaders who are “annointed by the Palestinians, not outsiders. That will definitely create some new possibilities.”
Admission to Ross’s presentation at the JCC is $10 for adults, $8 for students. His book will be available for purchase at the event.
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