Photo Credit:
Dennis Ross with then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 1999.

Few people have been more intimately involved in U.S. Middle East peacemaking efforts over the past 25 years than Dennis Ross. Over the years he has served as director of policy planning in the State Department under George W.H. Bush, Middle East peace envoy for Bill Clinton, and special assistant to Barack Obama. (He left the administration in November 2011.)

Ross is currently a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a professor at Georgetown University. The Jewish Press spoke with him about his new book, “Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

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The Jewish Press: In Doomed to Succeed, you describe the enormous amount of effort the U.S. has expended on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the last several decades. Why does the U.S. care so much?

Ross: I think historically there’s been a view that this conflict is a game changer in the region – that if you resolve it, it will improve our position in the Middle East and ease our relations with the Arabs. It’s a view that’s been embodied in almost every administration since Truman’s time.

I personally, however, have never believed this to be true.

Why not?

Well, it’s pretty simple to explain today. If tomorrow you solved the Israeli-Palestinian problem, it wouldn’t stop one barrel bomb in Syria, it wouldn’t push ISIS back one centimeter, it wouldn’t change Iran’s ambitions, it wouldn’t stop the proxy war in Yemen, and it wouldn’t change the struggle in Egypt between President Sisi and the radical Islamists.

Would it be good to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian problem? Absolutely. But it’s not going to be a game changer, and it’s not the source of the conflict in the broader region.

You write in the book that U.S. peace proposals are sometime driven by European pressure. Why does Europe care about Israel-Arab relations?

Early on I think they cared because they were concerned about their access to oil. Later I think they have tended to see the Palestinians as victims and Israeli settlements as a form of colonialism, and they want to separate themselves from that because of their own history of colonialism.

Jimmy Carter is widely regarded in the pro-Israel community as the U.S. president most hostile to Israel. Do you agree?

No, I think Eisenhower was probably the toughest. Eisenhower saw Israel as an impediment to all of our strategic designs in the region. During the ‘56 Suez War, he even contemplated sending U.S. forces to expel the Israelis from the Sinai, and he had his undersecretary of state threaten the Israelis with expulsion from the UN.

I think Carter was tough toward Israel, but Carter is also the one who produced the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, which established $3 billion a year in U.S. assistance to Israel. That’s not a small thing.

How do you regard Obama? Is he Carter II?

I think you have to look at Obama as more similar to George H. W. Bush than Carter. On the one hand, Obama takes a very strong view of America’s commitment to Israel on security. On the other hand, he sees Israel as being the strong party and the Palestinians as weak, and therefore he puts the onus entirely on the Israelis to make peace.

So he has no problem distancing from Israel, and the first Bush also had no problems distancing from Israel even as he felt it was very important to be responsive to Israel’s security needs.

Whom do you regard as the most pro-Israel president?

Bill Clinton.

It’s interesting you say that because most right-wing Jews are not terribly fond of him.

Right, but Clinton has an emotional attachment to Israel and he’s the one president who emotionally believed it’s a mistake to create any distance between the United States and Israel.

George W. Bush comes to that point but that’s not where he starts in his administration. In his first call to Israel after 9/11, George W. Bush pressed Ariel Sharon to have Shimon Peres meet Yasir Arafat, the man responsible for many of the terror attacks going on in Israel.

Bush changes, but Clinton throughout his administration thinks it’s a mistake to distance from Israel because Clinton believes we’re Israel’s only true friend and therefore although we may have disagreements, they need to be managed privately because if we create a public wedge between ourselves and Israel we will encourage Israel’s enemies. Clinton is the one president who completely believes that.

In policy debates within the Obama administration, you often advocated the more pro-Israel position. Did White House officials ever intimate to you – directly or indirectly – that your Jewishness was influencing your views?

I think in earlier administrations – Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy – there was an anti-Semitic undertone. Nixon said he wanted to keep Kissinger out of his policymaking the first couple of years because of his Jewishness; he thought it would make it difficult to reestablish ties with the Arabs. He actually said this.

But I think the turning point was really Reagan. Since that time, I don’t think you find this anti-Semitic undertone.

In an interview with The Jewish Press two years ago, Bush official Elliott Abrams said he too never felt his Jewishness was an issue in the White House but said he sometimes felt the Saudis regarded him as an Israeli agent.

There was sometimes a sense in the Arab world: “Well, you know why [Ross] is so tough on us…”

But I think that was convenient for them because they wanted to find reasons to explain why we were pursuing policies they didn’t like or why they were doing something that might be hard for them. They could say, “Well, the Americans didn’t give us a choice and look where the Americans come from.”

Some people argue the U.S.-Israel relationship is a one-way street. What’s your take?

I argue quite the opposite. If you look in the military area alone, there are so many things we gain from Israel. Active armor on our armored personnel carriers and tanks has come largely from things the Israelis have developed. So much of our drone technology has come from the Israelis. So much in the doctrinal area about how you deal with asymmetrical warfare we get from the Israelis. The level of cooperation with the Israelis on intelligence is also something we gain very significantly from.

If you go outside of the military security arena, you can look at the Israeli companies that are in California now to help with the drought. You have Israeli universities producing drought-resistant agriculture that is a contribution to civilization, not just to the United States. There are so many different things we get from Israel.

In Doomed to Succeed you write that the biblical Book of Joshua was a source of inspiration to Bill Clinton the night before the Oslo Accords were signed on September 13, 1993. How did the Book of Joshua, of all things, inspire Clinton the night before this treaty was signed, considering that the book is all about the Jewish people conquering the land of Israel and annihilating most of its inhabitants?

You’d have to ask Clinton because I was quoting what he wrote. He says he couldn’t sleep the night before the ceremony, so he got up and read the Book of Joshua. He describes this. And afterward he gave me and [Secretary of State] Warren Christopher a tie with trumpets on it [recalling the trumpets that toppled the walls of Jericho].

Some right-wing Jews believe it’s a miracle that Israel has the West Bank today considering the number of peace proposals America has pushed over the years; that if not for the Palestinians being so stubborn, they would have had 90 percent of the West Bank ages ago. What’s your take?

It’s true. Look, you had the Clinton parameters, and Arafat said no. You had what Olmert offered [Mahmoud Abbas], and he said nothing. And you had what President Obama offered in March of 2014 to [Abbas], and again he gave no comment.

There’s an old saying of Abba Eban: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Since the year 2000 there have been three proposals to resolve the conflict that would have produced a Palestinian state, and the Palestinians have either said no or have given no response.

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Elliot Resnick is the former chief editor of The Jewish Press and the author and editor of several books including, most recently, “Movers & Shakers, Vol. 3.”