Ambassador Dennis Ross is counselor and Ziegler distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a foundation dedicated to informed debate on U.S. interests in the Middle East. Ross served as the point person on the peace process in both the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. He facilitated the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, was instrumental in assisting Israelis and Palestinians in reaching the 1995 Interim Agreement, and brokered the Hebron Accord in 1997. He was awarded the Presidential Medal for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service by President Clinton, and Secretaries Baker and Albright presented him with the State Department’s highest award. He is a frequent contributor to the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. His book, The Missing Peace, a comprehensive look at the Middle East peace process, was published in 2004.
The following address was presented via video to a meeting of Presbyterian Action supporters during the 2008 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
I want to thank you for asking me to speak with you today on Middle East peacemaking.
When I look at Middle East peacemaking, one of the things that guides me is the recognition that both sides have needs. Both sides’ needs have to be addressed. And we have to look at the situation as it is, not as we think it should be.
I think one of the things that has plagued the Bush administration generally in foreign policy has been what I’ll call ideologically-driven assessments rather than reality-based assessments. When we look at the Middle East and especially the situation between Israelis and Palestinians, we really have to see it as it is, not as we think it ought to be or we think it should be or we think it might be, but actually as it is.
One of the problems that plagues peacemaking today is that both sides are completely disbelieving, and unless you can reestablish a context in which both sides believe in the peace process, it’s pretty hard to empower leaders to take the leaps that are going to be necessary to make big decisions.
Why do we have such public disbelief today? On the Israeli side, because the Israeli public looks at a reality. They withdrew from Lebanon unilaterally, and in the aftermath of withdrawing from Lebanon unilaterally, Hezbollah became much stronger. It went from having maybe 2,000 short-range rockets to having 40,000 rockets. In the summer of 2006, Israel was hit by 4,000 rockets. Of those 40,000 today, at least a quarter are capable of hitting almost all of Israel, and withdrawal didn’t lead to Israel becoming stronger. Withdrawal wasn’t seen as an Israeli gesture that was taken by others in their world as a good move. It was seen as a sign of weakness, and it was exploited by the very forces who rejected the idea of coexistence.
Same thing in the Israeli mind happened after they withdrew from Gaza. They withdrew from Gaza 100 percent. The Palestinian narrative has been if there’s no occupation, there’s no violence. Yet when Israel withdrew from Gaza, not for one day after Israel withdrew did rocket fire or mortar fire stop. Yes, they were still occupying the West Bank, but they weren’t occupying Gaza. And the expectation for Israelis was that after withdrawing from Gaza, good things would happen, but the opposite happened.
Israelis look today and they see the town of Sderot along the border with Gaza has been subjected to daily rocket fire. Now Ashkelon is being hit on an intermittent basis. The difference is that Gaza lies along the Israeli periphery. The West Bank does not. It sits astride the heartland of Israel. And if Israel withdrew from the West Bank and the same thing happened in the West Bank that happened in Gaza, every Israeli community would be subject to daily rocket fire, and people would have to live basically in shelters. So no Israeli is going to subject himself to that, and they have in their minds no reason to believe the Palestinians will do anything to prevent it, because in fact up until now they have not. That was true even before Hamas took over Gaza. The reality was Israel was being hit on a daily basis, even when Fatah controlled Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority was not preventing it.
So Israelis basically say, “When we take big gestures unilaterally, when we withdraw and pay a steep price on our side for the withdrawal, the effect is the extremists on the other side benefit, not those who might be moderate.”
On the Palestinian side, they look and they say, “We can’t move around the West Bank easily. We have checkpoints that block our way. The economy has dropped nearly 40 percent since 2001, and the Israelis are not surrendering control, so why should we think that anything would change with a peace agreement?”
So both sides have basic disquiet and disbelief about the other. If your church is going to adopt a position that is one-sided in favor of the Palestinians, it takes no account of what the Israelis have done. It takes no account of the fact that they have withdrawn unilaterally, and the consequences of unilateral withdrawal have been frankly quite bad. It doesn’t exactly create a context where peacemaking becomes more likely. It certainly will harden Israeli attitudes about whether there are those on the outside who take account of Israeli moves or whether they only will look at the Palestinians and consider the Palestinians as
victims and ignore how Israelis have also been victims.
The one thing I know from all my efforts trying to negotiate peace, you have to be able to build the confidence of both sides if you’re going to get anywhere. You have to prove to both sides that there’s a readiness to take into account their needs and to find ways to try to address them. I find the resolution on divestment from companies doing business with Israel and the others that criticize Israel to be divorced from reality. They don’t take into account the price the Israelis have paid or the concessions they made or the many times the Israelis in negotiations have been prepared to go very far and not found responsiveness on the other side. So if you want to make a contribution to peacemaking, I think the one thing you should do is not adopt resolutions that seem to ignore what in fact has taken place and seem to ignore the current reality. Are Palestinians victims? Are they suffering? They are. But is this detached from what has happened? It is not.
So the challenge now is to find a way to transform the landscape as we know it, find a way to focus on how you can build peace from the ground up, because that’s what’s going to have to happen. One of the things I learned as a negotiator, you can’t make peace solely from the top down. You can’t make it without also focusing on the ground up. You have to be able to create a political process, because the two have to be integrated.
I think one thing your assembly ought to consider is what are the ways to try to build mutual confidence. What are the ways to try to build confidence on both sides? What are the ways to engage in peace-building efforts? What are the ways to promote dialogue? A divestment approach or one-sided condemnation of Israel doesn’t improve the prospect of dialogue. Frankly, they undercut it.
I think you can be in the business of looking to those Palestinians who are trying to build from the ground up. You can be in the business of trying to encourage those Israelis who want to build connections society to society, who are focused on how to change the climate, how to restore some semblance of belief. I think that’s the better way to go. It reflects I think a more appropriate mindset for how to try to promote the prospects of peace.
If I’ve learned anything from all my time as a negotiator, the one thing I’ve learned is this is not a morality play where one side is all right and the other side is all wrong. Both sides have suffered. Both sides have grievances. Both sides have been victimized. And the one thing we have to do is find a way to get beyond being victims on each side; find a way to build some bridges.
I don’t think an approach of divestment or putting pressure only on the Israelis is the way to do that. And I think, if anything, it might harden attitudes on the Palestinian side, and weaken those whose answer is coexistence and a two-state solution. When the hardliners see that their efforts to demonize Israel resonate well in the West, it is likely to mislead them into thinking their agenda could work.
There’s no such thing as an alternative to a two-state solution. These are two national movements competing for the same space. The only way to deal with two national movements, two separate national identities is to build two states with two peoples, and that’s frankly the way to go. And I hope that everything you do will be designed to promote that outcome and not to undercut the prospects for it.
Thank you very much.
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