Customer Reviews

The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace

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There are two quips by former Israeli Foreign Secretary Abba Eben, that seem appropriate to reflect upon whenever one discusses the Israeli-Arab attempts at peace negotiations "The Arabs" Mr. Eben had famously said "Never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity". The Israeli government, on the other hand "only does the right thing after having exhausted every other possibility"*

"The Missing Peace" is the frustrating but illuminating memoir of Dennis Ross, the Chief American negotiator in the Israeli-Arab peace process. Ross's book is an exhaustive record of Ross's schedule: No meeting is too trivial to recount, no quarrel too tiresome to include, no thought too minor to mention.

Ross's focus is squarely on the Israeli- Arab negotiations, and specifically the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian meetings (with the Jordanians guest starring for one chapter, and the Egyptians, Saudis and Moroccans making sporadic appearances). If you are looking for a comprehensive treatment of Israeli-Arab relationships, or the Peace Process in the 1990s, look elsewhere: This is squarely about the meetings, negotiations, and tactics. Worst still, because the US had only a limited role in the Oslo accords, the very start of the historic process between Israelis and the Palestinian Liberation Organization is under reported.

In his conclusion, Ross concedes that "negotiations do not take place in a vacuum" and that the broader picture, and the Israeli and Palestinian publics have to be considered. But Ross's book fails to include them; We get astonishingly little about some of the major players in this drama: Israeli Refusniks, Palestinian Militants, and Oslo Skeptics generally. Given Ross's friendship with Natan Sheransky, then leader of Israel's Center-right Israel Ba'alyah Party, it's astounding how little insight we get into him, or anyone else not intimately involved in the negotiations. Even events that had major effects on the negotiations, such as the construction in Har Homa, are explained in the context of the negotiations only, and not in a wider context.

Within the process itself, Ross's approach is remarkably free of analysis. The main feature of the Oslo accords was its piecemeal construction - instead of coming up with a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian predicament, the architects of Oslo conceived a series of steps, spreading over years, between the initial signing and the final accords. The idea was to get the Israelis and Palestinians used to working together; In hindsight, that clearly failed. The obvious shortfall was that, if the process was to collapse in some point, a heavily armed Palestinian Authority would inevitably clash with the Israelis, leading to many casualties on both sides. Since that is exactly what happened, some meditation about the original decision is in order. Ross offers none, save for Rabin's assertion that this piecemeal progress was as far as the Israeli public was ready to go at the time.

Sometimes, Ross's narrative demonstrated how utterly incompetent the people who run the world are: Israeli premier Rabin and Syrian President Asad talked past each other regarding the meaning of "Full withdrawal" for about a year. Later, Benjamin Netanyahu's envoy to the Asad, Ron Lauder, actively deceived the following Israeli Premier Ehud Barak, and the Americans, regarding the agreements reached with Asad. Palestinian Chairman Arafat meanwhile, was childish and prune to fantasies; in one of the worst, he insisted that the Ancient Jewish temple was in Nablus, not Jerusalem (p. 718).

To summarize an 800 odd word book in a several paragraphs: the bottom line in the Israeli-Syrian negotiations was that Israelis and Syrians were out of Sync. Barak's mood about a summit meeting with Syrian Foreign Minister Shara swinged sharply. By the time he became committed to a deal, the Syrians were uninterested.

With the Palestinians, the fixing the blame is both simpler and more complicated: Ross clearly sees Arafat as "not up to ending the conflict" (p. 756). It's hard to argue against that position; in the end, Barak went further then anyone could have expected. Saudi Prince Bandar told Ross "If Arafat does not accept what is available now, it won't be a tragedy, it will be a crime" (p. 748).

Reading Ross's account, I became more convinced in my earlier conviction that the main fault in the fall of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process lies with Israeli Premier Ehud Barak. Barak went far (one of the surprises I had was that he probably went too far - most Palestinians would have settled for less, p. 719), truly striving for peace, and Clinton accommodated him in bringing all pressure on Arafat to accept or offer a reasonable counter proposal - but since Arafat could not make peace with the Israelis, all this effort was in naught. Although Ross does not necessarily accepts the thesis that Arafat was behind the outbreak of the 2000 al Aqsa Intifada, he clearly did nothing to prevent it. By all accounts, Arafat, feeling the pressure on him, released it in the only was he could: through violence.

But there were those on the Arab Side, principally current President Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Qurei, who genuinely strived for peace. Arafat could not have lived for ever - why not wait for the next generation of Palestinian leaders and make the deal with them? Ross argues that the Israelis and the Americans had to find out whether Arafat had it in him to deliver (pp 767-769). Fine, but they needed a contingency plan in case he did not. Alas, Barak and the Americans had none. Instead of probing whether Arafat was capable of making a final deal, they pressured him as hard as they could, forcing him to chose between Peace and War. Arafat, who never liked to be forced to make choices such as these, was forced to make it. Six years and thousands of casualties later, we are still paying the price for Barak's hubris.

*(Feb 2. 2009 correction: One of the comentators below pointed out that Eban's quote was not about Israel, but about "men and nations" generally)

Dennis Ross is certainly an authority on the story of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. His book offers a historic background of this conflict, the version of each party and the diplomacy buildup that sometimes led to breakthroughs in peacemaking and in other times reached the brink of peace but later stalled.
The book is unnecessarily long (872 pages), but is entertaining as it includes anecdotal details and some other less important details about how Ross boarded planes and took showers prior to his meetings.
The book also sheds light on how, on several occasions, arrogance, pride, prejudice, electoral considerations and pulling diplomatic stunts to muster further support of followers have always affected peace negotiations.
It also shows that terrorists and other anti-peace factions succeeded in so many instances in delaying peaceful efforts and in other instances completely sabotaged them.
Ross has been a witness of the diplomatic effort between Israelis and Arabs, which was interrupted in 2000. His book is certainly a reference document for all those interested in taking a deeper look into the Middle East conflict and international attempts at resolving it.

I have only read a few books on the Middle East and one other on the peace process being "Waging Peace" by Itamar Rabinovich. Dennis Ross is committed to the Midele East peace process. It is very clear that he has been at the "coal face", the one who has guided the key players in their neogotations. The book is a fantastic insight into what went on behind the scenes that were played out in the international media. Apart from a blow-by-blow description that would appeal to any history student focused on the Palesinian-Israeli peace process, there are a number of reasons why anybody vaguely interested in this subject would enjoy this book: (1) It is a thriller! The expression "truth stranger than fiction" tales on true meaning as this book is like a "cannot put down" suspense novel. (2) The story of the peace process is recorded in great detail (3) Ross gives us hope that somewhere in the distant future the Palestinian-Israel issue can be resolved. Anybody reading this book will learn a great deal about what the truth is in the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy. I loved this book and read most of it, certainly 550 out of 800 pages, over the Easter weekend. This is a great book and is written in elegant style. Read the Publishers' Week and Washington Post reviews but buy this book even if it is from Amazon Marketplace, It is a "must have" and a gripping, cannot put down book to read

This book is comprehensive, to be sure, and that's the problem. Ross' presentation is so detailed and so specific that I had trouble seeing the forest for the trees. Too frequently, he offers the most superficial and irrelevant details. For example one footnote explains that a friend brought him snacks in preparation for the sessions at the Wye River Plantation. Thanks, Mr. Ross: I really understand Middle East negotiations now: it's all about the snacks and who brings them. Unfortunately, he generally fails to tie it all together in a coherent summary, except for a very short analysis at the end of the entire tome of 800+ pages.

The book focuses heavily on negotiating tactics and personalities, but offers precious little of the big picture. I would strongly recommend that Mr. Ross engage the services of a top-quality editor, to eliminate the trivial, and to illuminate the long-term patterns, and large-scale issues emerging from the period in question.

Dennis Ross is one of those guys who's never in the forground of the photograph, except when it's not on the front page of the paper. He's the guy in the background somewhere, looking a little unsure of himself in the flash of the cameras and so forth, unused to the attention and not running for office. He's also one of the guys who get things done, when things get done. He spent a decaded and a half in government (1986-2001) and spent most of that time trying to negotiate peace between the various Arab factions and nations on the one hand and Israel on the other. Jordan recognized Israel during that time, and signed a peace treaty, but other than that Ross has little to show for about 12 years of hard work. Frankly, having read this book, it's hard not to conclude that all his work and dedication deserved a better fate than the one the received.

Ross spent two years on Vice President George H.W. Bush's National Security team, then planned to return to academe. The Bush people had other ideas, though, and hired this life-long Democrat (he volunteered for George McGovern!) to work in James Baker's State Department. Three years later, when Bush was running for reelection, Ross followed his boss Baker into Bush's White House and helped with the campaign. When Bush was defeated by Bill Clinton, Ross again packed his bags for a return to the private sector, but Clinton surprised everyone by insisting on hiring him as a special envoy to the Middle East, and he held that post for the eight years Clinton was in office. He left his post at the end of the Clinton administration.

During his tenure, he negotiated with five Israeli Prime ministers (Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, and Barak) and everyone else in the region from Hafez al-Asad to Yassir Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan. He repeats a joke towards the end of the book: after negotiating with the newly crowned King of Morocco, who's younger than he is, he tells his staff that his David Letterman Top 10 list of reasons he should retire would include "When you've gone from being younger than all the people you negotiate with to older than everyone else." There are as a result thumbnail sketches of most of the leaders of the Middle East, especially Yassir Arafat and the various Israeli Prime Ministers. The negotiations that the elder Bush and then Clinton arranged and tried to guide towards peace are dissected, sometimes in agonizing detail.

The book seems to slow down as it goes along. Though the text covers 12 years, the first four are covered in about a hundred pages. Netanyahu gets to the Prime Ministership about page 250, and that was in 1996. His era covers another 250 pages or so, with Barak getting the last 300 pages for his tenure. The Camp David talks in 2000 receive about a hundred pages, including preliminaries and the aftermath. Ross is pretty merciless in his judgements: even Clinton occasionally is chided for not emphasizing things the way Ross would have liked, and the author himself comes in for self-criticism on more than one occasion for some mistake he made. He doesn't have anything bad to say about his three bosses at the State Department (though Madeline Albright comes off as less involved in the negotiations than Warren Christopher). However, he has a lot to say about Arafat (who he ultimately concludes was incapable of signing peace with Israel) and the Israeli Prime Ministers. Both Netanyahu and Barak come in for considerable criticism for their negotiating style. Almost everyone Ross negotiated with gets some negative attention.

This is an enormous, intelligent, involved, detailed, exhaustive memoir of what happened. Several of the other reviews on Amazon make the mistake of reviewing Ross rather than his book. This is a memoir: the author is supposed to tell you what he thought, felt, believed, and acted upon, and how that came out. His views may not mesh with the reader's, but the point of this whole exercise isn't whether you agree with him, it's whether you think he adequately explained what happened and what he wants to tell you about it. I think that in the latter Ross has done an admirable job. The book recounts in considerable detail the nuts-and-bolts nature of negotiating, what you have to do to try and forge agreements, and so forth. It also, yes, involves some personal accounts of things at times, as the author recounts for you the strain involved in what he was doing. This *is* pertinent, in that eventually someone working this way would collapse, and it's also interesting in terms of just trying to imagine living for 2 weeks with only an hour or two of sleep every night. Imagine trying to have a clear head after that!

I enjoyed this book a great deal, and think I learned a lot from it. Its size probably puts it beyond much of the reading public, and I know it's incomplete in terms of points of view and events, but it's going to be indispensable in discerning what went wrong in the region during the latter part of the Clinton years.

Athough 800 plus pages, it is a gripping book, which unveils the complexity and personnal influence of it's main figures. How chances are missed, and the consequenses that the everyday person in the involved countries has to live with.

Dennis Ross' treatise on the triumphs, travails and tragedies of Middle East peacemaking during the 1990s is indispensable reading for anyone interested in acquiring essential knowledge about the key players, issues, individual perspectives and national strategies that shaped the Middle East peace process over the span of an entire decade. As the U.S. envoy par excellence to the Middle East peace process under both Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton, and one who logged more hours with Middle East potentates during these presidential administrations than anyone else, Ross is both authoritative and eminently qualified in regards to his subject matter. Not only is Dennis Ross' book noteworthy for its encyclopedic mastery of the many tracks and rounds of Middle East peace negotiations, it also reads as a veritable primer in the art of diplomacy itself from one of the most consummate diplomats of the modern era.

In Ross' comprehensive coverage of the Israeli/Syrian and Israeli/Palestinian negotiations, he provides a detailed analysis of the substantive and procedural aspects of peacemaking. This is overlaid with Ross' frequent references to the domestic and regional context, and interpersonal texture of relations between negotiators, factors that constituted the backdrop to negotiations and contributed significantly to the prospects of overcoming the procedural and substantial hurdles to peacemaking.

Ross' book serves as a useful corrective to those who subscribe to the `primordial hatreds' point of view, namely the perspective that Arabs and Israelis have fought since the dawn of recorded history, and are eternally condemned to a zero-sum struggle of absolute winners and absolute losers. If this were true, Syria and Israel would not have come as close as they did to reaching an accord. For as we learn from Ross, the real tragedy of the Middle East peace process is not how far apart the protagonists were, but rather how close they came to clinching a deal and ending the conflict, were it not for the unwanted intrusion of idiosyncratic factors.

For instance, Syria and Israel were in many respects like ships passing in the night - they both came to grips with the essential requirements of peace - Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in exchange for Syria's establishment of normal, peaceful relations with Israel - yet their timing was never in sync. When Syria was ready, Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak hesitated, out of concern that he could not convince a skeptical, security-minded Israeli public to accept Israeli withdrawal from the strategic Golan Heights. Less than a year later, Barak expressed his belated readiness to do a deal, yet by that point an ailing Syrian President Hafez al-Asad feared the stability of the regime if an agreement were concluded that he might not live long enough to personally oversee the implementation of.

Ross also provides a detailed portrait of the `credibility gap' that progressively widened between Israel and the Palestinians as both failed to live up to commitments regarded as sacred by the other side. Israel's failure to check the expansion of illegal settlements in areas where Palestinians constituted a majority of the population and hoped to establish an independent state eroded confidence in Israel's intentions in the eyes of many Palestinians. Likewise, Palestinian suicide bombings perpetrated against civilian Israeli targets, which caused scores of casualties, sowed doubts among Israelis as to whether the Palestinian Authority was genuinely committed to ensuring Israel's security.

Despite providing a seemingly balanced and nuanced account of both sides' aspirations, grievances, claims and strategies in the negotiating process, Ross ultimately and unfairly ends up championing the Israeli narrative and version of events. After providing an objective appraisal of events throughout most of the book, Ross in the last few chapters betrays his fundamental biases, placing almost the entire blame for the breakdown of negotiations and the renewal of large-scale violence since 2000 squarely on the shoulders of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. According to Ross, when push came to shove, Arafat was unable to face the moment of truth and to trade in his life as the leader of a movement of armed struggle for a life as the president of a demilitarized Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace with Israel.

However, not only do other Clinton advisers present at Camp David contradict Ross' interpretation of the facts as far as Arafat's behavior is concerned, they also show that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak played his own double game. While negotiating peace and thus conveying the intention to evacuate occupied territory on one hand, Barak and every prior Israeli administration since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 greatly accelerated the tempo of illegal settlement building on the other hand. In fact, the number of Israeli settlers jumped 150 percent during the Oslo years, growing at a faster rate between 1993 and 2000 than in the twenty-six preceding years of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

While by no means does Ross ignore the obstacles to peace posed by ongoing Israeli settlement building, his analysis severely underrates how corrosive such unilateral Israeli actions were (and still are) to peace in both a symbolic and practical sense. More than any other category of actions, unhindered settlement building demonstrated to many Palestinians the futility of pursuing peace with Israel by raising their suspicions that the Oslo Accords were nothing more than an ingenuous Israeli-created device to consolidate its occupation under the guise of an internationally legitimated `peace process.'

Moreover, the practical effects of settlement building combined with prolonged closures of the Palestinian territories, which led to the severe constriction of trade and access to gainful employment, was to make the average Palestinian far worse off economically during the Oslo years. Contrary to Ross' point of view, it was these economic hardships and the daily indignities to which the Palestinian people were subject (e.g., curfews, checkpoints, arbitrary arrests and detentions) under continuing occupation that caused the start of the second intifada in 2000, not the supposed machinations of Arafat. Given the steady deterioration in living conditions for the Palestinians (and this despite an influx of foreign investment), Arafat's encouragement was hardly needed to bring Palestinian dissatisfaction to the point of raising the banner of revolt.

Furthermore, if Ross is indeed correct that Arafat was the single biggest obstacle to peace, why has Israel proven unable to do a deal with the Palestinians after Arafat died and the more moderate Mahmoud Abbas (a.ka. Abu Mazen) rose to take his place? From the outset, Abbas has stated his adamant opposition to violent means of struggle against the occupation. However, Israel, in a reprise of Barak's disingenuous approach, has kept Abbas tied down in so-called peace negotiations, while continuing to expropriate Palestinian land by means of settlements and the Separation Wall, confining Palestinians to ever-shrinking territories and placing the prospects of a two-state solution further and further beyond reach. For all of his mastery of the issues and his grasp of the obstacles to Middle East peace, Ross' obsession with Yasser Arafat's misdeeds leaves him unable or unwilling to come to terms with the far greater shortcomings of the other side in this century-old conflict.

Dennis Ross has written a fine book on the history of the Middle East and his view of the evolution of the conflict between Muslim Arabs and Jews. The detail is excellent. His tremendous stumbling point, and the reason for the failure of the negotiations, is in his false assumption that the terrorists wanted peace. Throughout Ross' narrative is the assumption that negotiations were going on in going faith. 'If only the Israelis would give more', etc. It was only towards he end that he realized that negotiations were never going on in good faith and no offer would have been accepted. Had the Americans called Arafat on that early, perhaps there would have been a different outcome.

In this exhaustive 800-page tome, U.S. Envoy to the Middle East (1988-2000) Dennis Ross gives a painstakingly detailed play-by-play account of the Middle East peace process. From the Madrid Conference of 1991 to the collapse and aftermath of Camp David in 2000, Ross's account well acquaints the reader with all of the major players and the complex maneuvering this process has entailed.

THE MISSING PEACE covers both the negotiations aimed at resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and those between Israel and Syria. Ross shows how close Israel and Syria came to reaching a deal, particularly in 1993, when Yitzhak Rabin offered to withdraw from the Golan Heights--an offer that came to be known as the "Rabin pocket"--but this never came to fruition, largely because of disagreement over security measures such as early warning stations in the Golan, control over the Sea of Galilee, and the timetable for withdrawal.

Many readers will pick up this book with the hope of gaining insight into the failure of Camp David. Ross's even-handed approach prompts him to express criticism of leaders on both sides, but he ultimately blames Arafat for the summit's breakdown. With his sights set on a 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon and a greater sense of respect for Hafez al-Asad than of Yasir Arafat, Ehud Barak viewed Syria as a priority over peace with the Palestinians, which made him reluctant to come to the table. However, according to Ross, once he did so, Barak was willing to offer far more than any Israeli leader before him, including all of the Gaza Strip and 91% of the West Bank with an additional 1% land swap (Israel later accepted the "Clinton Ideas," which would have Israel cede 94-95%, with a 1-3% swap). Though conventional wisdom holds that it was the refugee issue that produced the greatest impasse, Ross indicates that the real source of deadlock was the fate of Jerusalem. Here, too, Barak offered unprecedented concessions: Palestinian autonomy in the Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City, Palestinian sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and custodianship over the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. In the end, however, Arafat could not accept any form of Israeli sovereignty over the city. Ross speculates that, in addition to Arafat's (understandable) fear of assassination, he was wedded to the struggle, unable to let go of his revolutionary identity.

Ross identifies a number of other reasons for the absence of a successful peace settlement. On the Israeli-Syrian track, the two sides were simply out of sync. While Asad could not match Rabin's boldness in 1993 (or, later, that of Peres), the situation reversed when Barak's enthusiasm cooled in December-January 1999-2000. With respect to Israeli-Palestinian peace, extremist violence--such as the spate of suicide bombings in 1996--often derailed negotiations.

Although Ross only delves into this toward the end, another key problem was that the negotiations were often affronted by the situation on the ground. Instead of good-faith measures that would have cooled tensions and lent legitimacy to the talks, Israeli settlement expansion and Palestinian incitement continued unabated. Further, both sides fell short of the necessary societal transformation. Asad and Arafat both failed to condition their publics regarding the necessity (and inevitability) of compromise, and Israeli leaders (notably Netanyahu) often felt the need to take a step back for every step forward in order to appease the right wing. Neither side created opportunities for human contact between Arabs and Jews. Ross also places some of the blame on the American negotiators for not confronting both sides about obstructive actions, for fear of disrupting the process.

For serious students of the Middle East peace process, this book offers a monumental narrative showing precisely what occurred, what ultimately went wrong, and how we can learn from this history as events continue to unfold.

Described as the "inside story" of the intricacies surrounding the Middle East peace process, the writer provides details pertaining to the many summits and negotiations between both sides including those at Madrid, Oslo, Geneva and Camp David.

The reader is taken behind the scenes to witness the diplomatic disputes/stalemates and personalities seeking to negotiate over the pivotal issues pertaining to this ongoing conflict.

The book's cover carries many accolades for the author, including glowing comments from such as former US President Clinton together with those from former US Secretaries of State Kissinger, Christopher, Shultz and Albright.

The writer also being lauded as having spent more time negotiating with Yasser Arafat than anyone else.

Whether or not the reader will agree with all of these sentiments or the opinions included within this study, the individual cannot fail to be impressed with how eminently readable this rather lengthy investigation is.

Despite the realms of text and detail available, having studied these issues myself for some time, I cannot shake the feeling that many officials still have not grasped an agenda which seeks nothing less than the "eradication of the Jewish state" as detailed in the "Palestinian National Charter". Whilst the book refers to the process discussed in relation to the latter's "revocation", the Charter still remains in effect and valid.

Given such an understanding, then the reader can perhaps better understand the context of the negotations and read between the lines as to what actually constituted the refusal by Arafat and his entourage, to accept what are cited as the most far reaching concessions and offers for peace ever made by an Israeli government.

Whilst the book attaches significance to so many individual issues, I feel frustrated that the aforementioned point is apparently not understood. Others may disagree.

The full text of the offer of a peaceful settlement is included in the book's appendix. An offer cited as having been agreed to and accepted by the former Israeli PM Barak but refused by the late Palestinian Chairman Arafat.

Essentially this settlement offer is described as having revolved around an offer to provide the Palestinian side with a state of their own which included some 99% of what Arafat actually demanded.

The book describes this as being namely a deal upon settlements, refugees and Jerusalem's Temple Mount/Holy places together with the inclusion of East Jerusalem as a capital of a Palestinian state.

This "solution" is also cited to have included between 94% and 96% of "West Bank" territory inclusive of a "land-swap" of between 1% and 3%.

A number of other issues being left for negotiation, such as the degree of militarization of any future Palestinian state etc..

Perhaps the most crucial declaration and admission of all cited herein was that the agreement would result in an "end of conflict" with it's implementation putting an "end to all claims".

The book describes how Arafat refused to accept this offer and instead is cited as returning to violence and the outbreak of another "intifada" having failed to obtain 100% of what the Palestinian/Arab side had demanded.

I would consider this book to be valuable for anyone interested in studying the Middle East peace process itself where it would be a highly useful reference.

However I would also be interested in accessing the opinions of other officials involved in relation to such a highly complex and contentious subject.

For this purpose I recommend the following books;-

"The Mideast Peace Process: An Autopsy" by Neal Kozodoy

"The High Cost of Peace" by Yossef Bodansky.

Thank you.