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

by Dennis Ross (Author)
Key Phrases: Abu Ala, Abu Mazen, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
This is the ultimate insider's account of the roller-coaster ride of the Middle East peace process from 1988 to the breakdown of talks in 2001. More than anything else, Ross, the chief U.S. negotiator for Presidents Bush 41 and Clinton, has written an epic diplomat's handbook. We see the moves and countermoves on both sides, the preparation that goes into any statement or gesture, the backroom wheeling and dealing and the dance of language and meaning. Ross lays out, in painstaking detail, the "one step forward, two steps back" approach that finally led to such breakthroughs as the handshake on the White House lawn. He offers detailed accounts of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, the rise and fall of Benjamin Netanyahu and a picture of Arafat "seeking to have it both ways... La-Nam (no and yes in Arabic)." Ross's critical eye paints a vivid picture of the very different characters and strategies of Arafat, Barak and Clinton, and what led to the failure at Camp David. While Ross lands in the blame-Arafat camp, he is not without criticism of Barak and Clinton. Tragically, for all those who follow this region, Ross's book does not present a hopeful picture; the litany of failures sounds like a broken record: "We left the region hopeful, but that hope was premature"; "Once again, however, our best-laid plans went awry." Sure to garner its share of controversy and media attention, this work of history in the making is essential reading for anyone interested in why we are where we are in the Middle East. Maps not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post
No one will be celebrating the fourth anniversary of the Palestinian uprising next month. The past four years have wreaked enormous damage on people, places and politics. Palestinians have lost 3,000 lives and thousands more livelihoods. Their social and political institutions have been demolished, their leadership bankrupted morally as well as financially, their children sacrificed for a hopeless, pitiless cause.

The Israeli death toll is around 1,000 people, many of them victims of suicide bombers who have targeted civilian buses, cafés and shops. Israel's army has stormed through Palestinian cities to root out militants, weapons and bomb factories; launched a campaign of targeted assassinations against leaders; and sealed off the Gaza Strip and West Bank with barriers that gouge their way through Palestinian land, strangling the uprising but killing many innocents as well and sowing the seeds of hatred and vengeance in a new generation. The two peoples remain locked in a fatal embrace.

It's hard to recall that just days before the uprising began, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat clasped hands with then-prime minister Ehud Barak of Israel during a warm and glowing meeting at Barak's official residence in Jerusalem. The two leaders dedicated themselves that evening to completing a final settlement of the conflict. History's rear-view mirror is cruel: Peace, which once seemed close enough to touch, now looks thousands of miles and deaths away.

For a dozen years, Dennis Ross was the American diplomat in charge of making peace happen. He served as midwife, babysitter, taskmaster and father confessor to a generation of Israeli and Palestinian leaders and negotiators. Ross -- and they -- struggled, exhaustively and sometimes nobly, and ultimately they failed. Now he has written an equally noble, exhaustive and, at times, exhausting 800-page account of the people and the process.

The Missing Peace tells an epic and tragic tale. Ross recounts how, in the aftermath of the Cold War and the first Gulf War triumph over Iraq, his first boss, then-Secretary of State James A. Baker, cajoled, teased and bludgeoned Arab and Israeli leaders into attending a Middle East peace conference in Madrid in the fall of 1991. The book goes on to record Yitzhak Shamir's political demise; the return to power of Yitzhak Rabin; the extraordinary backroom maneuverings that resulted in the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestinians; Rabin's assassination by a Jewish extremist; and the brief promise of a breakthrough under his even more dovish successor, Shimon Peres. Ross chronicles the years of halting progress and stalemate under Peres's right-wing successor, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the near-breakthrough and ultimate failure of Ehud Barak's meteoric premiership. Ross also provides a painstaking account of the failed attempts of Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu and Barak to reach agreement with Syrian strongman Hafez Asad.

Along the way, Ross offers revealing and, occasionally, surprising portraits of various Israeli and Palestinian leaders. He depicts Netanyahu, a relative novice in the treacherous world of Israeli politics, as weak, hesitant and mistrustful, always looking over his shoulder to see what his right-wing critics back home were thinking and plotting. Yet at times Netanyahu showed a surprising willingness to go the extra mile, make a small but meaningful concession and pull an all-nighter to try to make progress. Barak, by contrast, comes across as childish, petulant and arrogant, a leader in love with his own immaculate conceptions and unwilling to listen to others. His penchant for grandiose, dramatic gestures, coupled with an almost crippling hesitation at critical moments, in Ross's view, probably cost Israel a chance to get a peace deal with Syria's Asad, who concluded that Barak wasn't serious or reliable.

Then there is Yasser Arafat, the wily, stubborn, recalcitrant, supremely self-serving leader of the Palestinians, who eagerly pocketed every Israeli concession while consistently failing to offer any of his own. As with many tribal chieftains, Arafat's main concerns were maintaining unity among the various Palestinian factions and preserving his own power. Still, Ross points out, no other Palestinian wielded the moral authority to compromise on issues such as the fate of Jerusalem and of Palestinian refugees. Arafat may have been crude and dishonest, Ross concludes, but he was the only game in town.

Ross himself comes across as dedicated, tenacious and single-minded. He's constantly breaking off early from family holidays to take a phone call, hold some anxious official's hand or throw a calculated temper tantrum. It's a polished performance, and The Missing Peace sometimes reads like a working manual for diplomats. "Every negotiation is about manipulation," he explains. He might have added: Be prepared to seize even the most dreadful of opportunities. When Ross heard of Rabin's assassination, he first broke down and cried. But minutes later he was calculating how best to exploit this terrible moment to further the peace process by making sure the maximum number of Arab leaders would attend Rabin's funeral in Jerusalem.

Ross's narrative climaxes with the diplomatic showdown at Camp David, where both sides' willingness to reach a solution ran up against the imperatives of their bloodstained history and the limits of their imagination. Each side now sees Camp David as the final exam that the other side failed. In the Israeli version, Arafat brazenly turned his back on a deal that would have given Palestinians sovereignty over all of the Gaza Strip and 95 percent of the West Bank, as well as control over Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem. In the Palestinian view, Israel's final proposals were suspiciously vague and presented in a belligerent take-it-or-leave-it manner that made them impossible to swallow.

While Ross is withering in recounting the miscalculations and tantrums on both sides, he holds Arafat most responsible for the failure: "Only one leader was unable or unwilling to confront history and mythology: Yasser Arafat."

Still, when Ross steps back and reviews the trail of tears that the peace process became, he argues that both sides failed to live up to their commitments. Palestinian leaders failed to stop, and even gave support to, the suicide bombers, while Israelis never really eased the grip of their military occupation or stopped building and expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

Ross saves some of his toughest criticism for the second Bush administration's failure to engage in the peace process. From the beginning, Ross argues, President Bush and his advisers mistakenly believed that because nothing could be done to improve the situation, it was better to do nothing. But Ross says Bush denied to Israelis and Palestinians America's most important gifts: its energy and its sense of optimism. When things are going badly, American involvement becomes even more crucial, he argues, because it can help prevent a bad situation from becoming worse. And he coolly picks apart the fallacies and lackluster execution of Bush's subsequent diplomatic initiative, the so-called Roadmap for Peace, that have made this effort a source of derision in Washington, Jerusalem and capitals throughout Europe and the Middle East.

Still, The Missing Peace leavens its despair with a dash of hope. For all the failures, Israelis met, talked and came achingly close to agreement for the first time with their Palestinian and Syrian counterparts. Everything was put on the table, and the outlines of the final deal became clear to all. "I am afraid it may take another 50 years to settle this now," Palestinian negotiator (and now prime minister) Ahmed Qurei told Ross after the Camp David collapse. Peace is either 50 years away, or it is just on the other side of a locked door to which both sides hold the key.

Reviewed by Glenn Frankel
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 880 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374529809
• ISBN-13: 978-0374529802
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #311,450 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars How the Peace Was Lost, July 30, 2006

By	Omer Belsky (Haifa, Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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 the 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 amazingly 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, but 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 amazingly 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)

39 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dealing with diplomatic pride and prejudice, October 18, 2004

By	Hussain Abdul-Hussain (Washington,DC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful book, April 9, 2007

By	John K "subculture" (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

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