In the second episode of the Fathom series ‘Those who tried: Conversations with the Peace Processors’, Ambassador Dennis Ross recalls his time as a negotiator at the very heart of the process which culminated in Camp David 2000 and, ultimately, in the Clinton Parameters. Ross assesses the importance of Arafat to the eventual failure of the process, and the problem more broadly whereby each party to the conflict affords ‘mutual recognition of “the other” as a fact, but not through the lens of legitimacy.’ Ross also looks forward, to consider the future of a post-Hamas Gaza.
A scholar and diplomat with more than two decades of experience in Soviet and Middle East policy, Ross played a leading role in shaping US involvement in the Middle East peace process, dealing directly with the parties as the US point man on the peace process in both the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. He served two and half years as special assistant to President Obama and as National Security Council senior director for the Central Region, spending the first six months of the administration as the special advisor on Iran to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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Below is a lightly edited transcript
The Iranian Missile Attacks
Calev Ben–Dor We are recording in April 2024, just a few days after Iran attacked Israel. There seem to be two analytical approaches. One is that the Iranian response was choreographed and planned. It was primarily symbolic, and Iran didn’t want to do a huge amount of damage. And according to that reading, they actually got exactly what they wanted. There’s a second reading which says one can’t call a country sending 300 drones, missiles and cruise missiles at an airbase with F–35s etc. symbolic, and that actually they intended do some quite large military damage. And in this they failed, and it was a disappointment or an embarrassment. As someone who spent so long thinking about Iran, I’m wondering how you see the Iranian intent and satisfaction with what happened?
Dennis Ross: I think when you acquire all sorts of military weaponry, and then you decide to use it, you want to show you’re effective when you use it. If this was just a statement, they would have sent 15 or 20. They sent 100 ballistic missiles, 185 drones, and 30 cruise missiles. By the way, these are not cheap for them. So if this was just about a statement, you use a fraction. Their aim was to try to inflict real damage on Israel and at the same time, to try to rewrite the rules. They want to be able to say to Israel: ‘you can no longer go and kill Revolutionary Guard generals and forces in Syria, because if you do, it’s going to elicit this kind of response from us’. So they wanted to change the rules. And from an Israeli standpoint, they think, ‘so Iran is telling us they can deploy all these Revolutionary Guard officers whose purpose is to create pressure and threat against Israel, but that we can’t retaliate against those who are threatening us? Forget it’. So each is trying to rewrite the rules. This is what the Iranians were trying to do with the Israelis. Will the Israelis think a little bit more about who they decide they’re going to strike and what the benefits of it are, how disruptive it will be to Iranian operations? My guess is probably yes. But I think also there will be an Israeli response as a way of saying to the Iranians, ‘you don’t get to rewrite the rules. And if you hit us directly, the price you’re going to pay is not going to be a price you want to pay’.
Demilitarization in Gaza
Jack Omer Jackaman: Let’s turn now to the issue of Gaza. In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, you wrote that Israel needs a strategy, not slogans, while also mapping out the things all the main players – Israel the PA, the US, pragmatic Arab, Sunni states – should be doing. For those who haven’t read the piece, can you summarise your suggestions in that article and how you see a constructive way forward?
DR: In any case of statecraft, you want to be sure that the objectives you establish are objectives that can be met. When I hear total victory, I don’t know what it means – it’s a slogan, not an objective. The demilitarisation of Gaza is an objective, and it’s an achievable one because Israel is, in fact, in the process of demilitarising Gaza. It has already defeated Hamas as a military, it has now reverted to what it once was – a militia. That doesn’t mean a militia is not a problem, but they had built up a huge military industrial base, a genuine organisation – 24 battalions, five brigades, clear command–control, a lot of discipline, a lot of coherence. That’s now gone – 19 of the 24 battalions no longer exist. And what that means is that command and control and the ability to plan and operate has all gone. So on the one hand, make demilitarisation your objective, reach an agreement with the US on what constitutes enough to ensure that demilitarisation is achieved. Get an agreement from the US in return for this, that the US will create a mechanism, regionally and internationally to ensure there can be no militarisation of Gaza; and create a formula where reconstruction will be pursued in return for what is a guaranteed demilitarisation – so that Gaza cannot be a platform for attacks against Israel.
In the end you need to create an alternative administration within Gaza. So it can’t be Hamas, which will try to reassert itself politically. But then here you have to make another condition. Hamas cannot be in control, if there’s going to be any reconstruction, because they divert whatever comes in for their purposes. This is an organisation that had no interest in building Gaza. It created 400 miles of tunnels, it created a huge military industrial base. Gaza itself may have been an open air prison for Palestinians who live there, but it was not an open air prison for Hamas. They got whatever they needed. I visited one of the bases where the Israelis brought back captured equipment all made by Hamas – the drones, the rockets, anti–tank missiles, rocket propelled grenades, mortars. So they had no problem getting the material they needed. That means that you’re going to have to ensure that reconstruction has a monitoring mechanism that ensures there could be no diversion of material. And then you have to have an alternative over time to Hamas, otherwise you leave a vacuum. Either you allow some others to come back or you also put other forces which can emerge in its place.
But you can’t have an alternative Hamas unless you have a reformed PA, only when you have a reformed PA will you be able to create an alternative to Hamas. So there’s a transition period, where I think you could actually have Arab forces come in and play a role they never played before. They won’t come in unless they know there’s a reformed Palestinian Authority that can return in 12–18 months. They’re not going to go in and be a bridge to nowhere – they need to be a bridge to something they see is quite realistic.
Camp David and the Clinton Parameters
CBD: There are probably very few people who spent as many hours in the negotiation room over the decades as you. I’d like to go back 30 years, more or less, to the Oslo years during the Clinton administration. That ends with the Camp David summit in July of 2000, the beginning of the intifada in the September, and the presentation of the Clinton Parameters in December, which I believe you read out to the two teams.
Over the years, and even at the time, there were two main arguments that developed as to why the peace process failed. One takes the form of a kind of tragedy of errors argument – that it could have worked had the Americans been better prepared, or had Rabin not been assassinated, or Ehud Barak shown better interpersonal skills, or the Syrian track not been prioritised, etc. There’s another argument that says mistakes were made on all sides, but that the main obstacle was then–Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. In your book, Missing Piece, and in various other pieces you’ve written, you seem to side more with the latter argument. For example, you’ve written that ‘Arafat was never ready mentally, personally or historically to conclude a deal with Israel.’ ‘A comprehensive deal was not possible with Arafat – too much redefinition was required… He could live with the process, not with the conclusion.’ ‘The essence of Arafat was someone who succeeded as a symbol but failed as a leader.’ ‘Arafat was not going to say yes under any circumstances.’
Could you can you expand on this opinion, please, and also perhaps trace how you came to that conclusion or how your view evolved over the years?
DR: A couple of points to start with. One, to validate the premise. I had a dinner about 18 months ago in Rawabi with one of the former Palestinian negotiators, who said to me ‘can you imagine what would have happened if we had said yes to the Clinton Parameters? Can you imagine where we would be today?’ I learned then, and interestingly enough, I didn’t know it before, that the entire Palestinian delegation wanted to say yes to the Clinton Parameters. And they made a decision not to brief back in Ramallah until they went back as a group, because the idea was they would have strength in numbers. And one of the people there learned a little bit about what was going on, not the details, but without knowing what they were going to say, he understood that the group were going to come in and say, ‘accept the Clinton Parameters’. And he went to Arafat and he said, ‘this is what they’re going to come and say’. And when they walked in as a group, Arafat immediately said, ‘you’re all traitors. You’re prepared to betray the Palestinian national promise’. And they melted. So the point that Arafat wasn’t capable of doing this, is one that I want to come back and explain when I came to that conclusion. It’s a little misleading for me to say when I came to that conclusion, because even before we went to Camp David, and even before the Clinton parameters, I was highly suspicious that he couldn’t foreclose an option. And because he couldn’t foreclose an option, he would never accept what we were asking him to do, which was to end the conflict.
Partial agreements he could live with, because that didn’t end the conflict. It didn’t end his identity. His identity was shaped by struggle. During the last year of the Clinton term, I would constantly raise my doubts with Abu Mazen and Abu Ala that Arafat could do this, and they would both say to me that he was the only one on our [the Palestinian] side who can. In saying that, they weren’t saying they knew that he would, but just that he was the only one who could, and were telling me not to give up – meaning the two of them wanted it to happen, but only he could make that decision.
When I went to see Arafat at his request on 11 December, in Morocco, I went in and I said to him, ‘look, I’m not going to fool you. You’re not going to fool me, there are five weeks left and then President Clinton is gone’. And I said, ‘and I’m gone’. And he said, ‘well, I know that Clinton has to go, but you can’t leave’. And I said, ‘no. When he goes, I go’. He said, ‘no, no, you can’t leave’. I said, ‘I’m telling you, I’m leaving’. I had helped to create a backchannel between, Arafat and Amnon Lipkin Shahak and Shlomo Ben Ami and Shimon Peres. And so I said to Arafat, ‘you tell me, is there a deal here?’
Initially he said, yes, ‘because I’m serious and they are serious’. And I said, ‘that doesn’t tell me anything I need to know about whether you can accept what they’re capable of doing’. And so I suggested that I tell him what I think the Israelis are capable of doing on borders, security, Jerusalem and refugees. And you tell me if you can do it. And we hadn’t done the Clinton Parameters yet, but the outline – as you might guess – is not too far from what the Clinton Parameters would become. And Arafat said to me, ‘yes, I can do it’. So I called President Clinton on a secure line, and I briefed him on the conversation, and he asked me, ‘why aren’t you more excited?’ And I said, ‘because I don’t believe him’. I said, ‘it’s easy for him to sit here one on one with me and say yes. But when he actually has to make that decision and know the blowback he is going to get, I have my doubts. But we have to test it because basically he’s telling us he could do it. Okay, let’s test it. Let’s find out.’
That’s why we invited the two delegations to come that first day when they arrived at Bolling Air Force Base. I brought both sides together, and I did what our original strategy had been at Camp David (but which we had walked away from). That was for the president to separately lay out to Barak and Arafat a set of parameters that shrunk the gaps between them and then say, ‘okay, here’s the gaps. Now, you spend the next couple of days at Camp David, you give me reactions to what we’ve said. We will draft a treaty out of that, and then we’ll work through the differences’. Barak rejected it in the first meeting with President Clinton. And President Clinton decided to walk away from it because he felt that because Barak has to give up more than Arafat, I don’t want to jam him.
So here we are now on 18 December at Bolling Air Force Base. I start the meetings with both sides together, and I went through each issue and I shrunk the gaps between them. I said, ‘look, these are our thoughts. The two of you should now look over the next couple of days and reach an understanding’. And after three days, Shlomo Ben-Ami and Saeb Erekat came to me and said, ‘we can’t bridge our differences. We need you to make a bridging proposal’.
That’s where the Clinton Parameters came from.
That was a Thursday afternoon. We invited both sides to come to the White House on 22 December, on a Saturday. The Israelis actually moved from Bolling Air Force Base to the Hay Adams across the street from the White House to allow them to walk there on Shabbat. The night before, at midnight I got a call to say that Mohammed Dahlan had to come and see me urgently. I asked if it could wait, but he said it couldn’t. So he comes over to my house at one in the morning on Saturday. And he says, ‘what, are you going to make a swallow in the morning? What’s going to be too hard for us.’ And I said, ‘you know, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I will focus what’s going to be hard for you. I’m not going to tell you what’s in this, because the president’s going to do that tomorrow. But I’ll tell you what’s going to be hard for you.’ And I went through and I told him that refugees were going to be hard for them, and security was going to be hard for them. And he was quiet, and asked ‘can’t you make it any easier?’ And I said, ‘well, you can tell by what I’m not saying what’s going to be hard for the Israelis, so no, there’s not going to be any more. We’re not going to have any more movement.’
But I said, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I don’t want the last thing the president does to be a failure. And I don’t want you guys to be in a position where you’re saying no to him. So if you don’t think this is something you can live with, tell me, and I will give you until eight tomorrow morning, and if is this is something you’re not going to be able to accept, I’ll tell the president to cancel the meeting, we just won’t do it. But you got to tell me by tomorrow morning’. So literally he sat there for five minutes, didn’t say a word. I mean, if you ever were watching somebody where you literally could hear what was churning inside him… Sit with someone for five minutes without a word being said. Imagine it. One thing I learned in negotiating is when someone is thinking through something, don’t interrupt their thinking. So after five minutes, he goes, ‘go ahead, present’. Meaning, he thought they could live with it. And so if you ask me, yes I had these doubts before we presented the parameters. I felt we needed to test this. In the end, we did it. And Arafat proved that he wasn’t up to it.
Mutual Recognition and Legitimacy
JOJ: In terms of another aspect of the process that is often missed in debates, when they’re reduced principally to questions of real estate. In The Missing Peace, you discussed the importance of each side recognising the legitimacy of the other. ‘As for the Israelis, genuine acceptance of their moral legitimacy could alter their continuing need for control. There are few in Israel who question the legitimacy of the Palestinian national movement. There are, however, many who question whether the Palestinian or Arabs more generally are truly willing to make peace with them.’ In a subsequent book, Doomed to Succeed, you write that Mahmoud Abbas ‘would not accept anything that suggested Palestinian recognition of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.’ You then add ‘Was this a tactic because Netanyahu had made it a public issue, and he wanted to get something for it, or was it strategic, and he was not willing to acknowledge Israel this way?’ The answer in 2011, you write, ‘was not clear, and it would be no clearer after John Kerry’s efforts in 2014’. Over 20 years on from the Clinton administration, and a decade from Kerry’s efforts, what do you think the answer may be, and why do you think this aspect is so important?
DR: I have become more and more convinced that there’s kind of a mutual recognition of the other as a fact, but not through the lens of legitimacy. In so many ways after 7 October, it feels like we’re back to 1948, and we’re no longer at a point where there’s even a kind of readiness to accept the other as a fact. I think one of the changes that has to take place is a mutual recognition of the legitimacy on both sides. When I wrote in The Missing Peace that I felt most Israelis accepted the legitimacy of the Palestinian national movement, I wonder whether that was completely right – I think there was a kind of recognition of the fact of it.
I think both sides today are more at a point where they’re questioning whether they can coexist with the other or are they really prepared to accept the other. I think before 7 October, Israelis felt they never had a genuine Palestinian partner. But I think the view of the Israelis now is they think any Palestinian state will be led by Hamas. And I understand that then it becomes an issue of survival. But I wonder if we did a poll of Israelis today and we said, ‘do you recognise the Palestinians as a people, do you recognise the Palestinians should have a right to self-determination, provided they’re prepared to recognise the legitimacy of Israel and to assume a set of responsibilities?’ I wonder what the Israeli answer would be to that. I’m not sure I know what the answer would be. Maybe it’s an unfair to pose the question because they’re still feeling the trauma from 7 October. Maybe if we had this conversation a year from now, the answer would be, ‘yes, we recognise they are a people, we recognise we have to find a way to live with them. We do need to see finally from them that they recognise that the Jews have a historic connection to the land, and that Zionism was and is a legitimate movement’. We’re not at that point today. And to get back to peacemaking, I think that’s one of the things that we have to establish.
Leadership
CBD: Your next book, Be Strong and of Good Courage, which you write with David Makovsky, focuses on decisive decisions by four Israeli leaders – Ben-Gurion, Begin, Rabin, and Sharon. And you seem to be bemoaning the absence of leadership today in the circles of Israeli officials. So you write that ‘Israel has faced critical moments calling for courageous decisions in war and peace. Until now, it’s had leaders who are able and willing to rise to the moment. Those leaders did not retreat in the face of daunting challenges. They didn’t shy away from, or try to avoid the decisions they believed had to be made. High stakes did not paralyze them, even though they knew well that Israel’s margin of error was small.’ And you also warn of the drift towards a binational reality unless decisive actions are taken. Could you speak a little bit about Netanyahu as a leader and a prime minister, and the steps you think Israel needed to have made over the last few years?
DR: There is unmistakably a drift towards one state and a binational reality. That’s just a fact. Prime Minister Netanyahu has not done anything to arrest the drift. And now he has a government where he has messianic nationalists in it. So were there times when he could have made some choices and didn’t? I think there were. He is Israel’s longest serving prime minister and was not one of the characters we put in the book. What combined these four leaders was that they were very different ideologically, but they were not different when it came to the way they defined leadership. They did not avoid decisions that they felt needed to be made. They did not look for ways to defer, to be in a position where you played for time. I think Prime Minister Netanyahu on the Palestinian issue has sought to avoid hard choices. Now to be fair to him, there was very little readiness on the Palestinian side to be prepared to make hard choices. Although one thing one might have argued for is for Israel to put itself in a position where it was prepared to take a big leap, but it had to be contingent on Palestinians matching that. If they weren’t capable or willing – which I think was probably likely – then at least the onus wouldn’t have been on Israel. By not being prepared to make some of those decisions, you certainly made it easier for the world to look at Israel, the stronger power and the occupier, and to put the onus on Israel.
You look at what happened on 7 October and where there’s been terrible death and destruction in Gaza. And my own criticisms of the Israelis were not addressing the humanitarian needs in Gaza, which I felt was an imperative for Israel’s strategic interests to buy the time and space they needed to succeed militarily and to truly dismantle Hamas. By not addressing the humanitarian needs, everything shifted and focused on Israel. The idea that Hamas bears no responsibility – and leave aside the fact they took hostages they never should have taken, as young as nine months old, who does that? – Leave aside the fact that they could end the suffering Gaza tomorrow, if Sinwar and the others who were still alive were to leave. But they don’t do that, and the world is not asking them to do that. The onus has been put on Israel, and I think a lot of the onus remains on Israel because Israel is seen as the stronger power.
And if I look at the four leaders that we wrote about, I don’t think any of them would have put Israel in this position. They would have recognised they needed to make some hard choices. And I think they would have done that. I have not seen Prime Minister Netanyahu do that on this issue.
The Israeli-American relationship
JOJ: Final question on a very topical subject. In your book, Doomed to Succeed: The U.S. Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama, you identify what you describe as mistaken assumptions that many administrations have had, including the centrality of the Palestinian issue to America’s regional posture, and whether the US should distance itself from Israel in order to gain credibility with Arab states. You talk about two lenses: the ‘cooperative’ and the ‘competitive’, and you say, ‘the difference in views typically reflected a longstanding split between those who saw working closely with the Israelis as the key to affecting Israeli behavior favorably and those who did not’. How do you evaluate the current relationship between the Biden administration and the Israeli government? Do you think it has changed as the war against Hamas has gone on?
I think that President Biden has operated on the assumption that you put your arm around the Israelis, you demonstrate your commitment to Israel, and that gives you the ability to influence them. Obviously there are those who say that Prime Minister Netanyahu has not been very responsive on Gaza, and that has created greater pressures on President Biden. It is interesting that when he made it clear that we might change our position in Gaza, over five months into it after the mistaken killing of the seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, that did have an effect on Prime Minister Netanyahu in terms of Israel very quickly beginning to do things on the humanitarian front it had not before.
I still basically believe in this notion that you’re much more likely to affect Israel if you put your arm around Israel, and if you demonstrate, most importantly, that you get Israel’s predicament. And many tend to focus on more on the idea we need to put pressure on Israel, and they tend to ignore the predicament that Israel faces in the region – that there are those in the region who actually don’t want Israel to exist and are carrying out actions to inflict that. Hamas didn’t build up Gaza, they built up the capability to fight Israel. Iran talks about Israel not being there in 25 years, and it’s pursuing a policy with its proxies of making it unlivable. If you don’t get that sense of the predicament that Israel faces, and that there are those who view this through an existential lens, your ability to influence the Israelis goes down, not up. That doesn’t mean that you always have to agree, and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t points where you can’t exercise your leverage, especially in circumstances where you look at President Biden; one of the things President Biden has done is pay a domestic political price. And he wasn’t seeing Prime Minister Netanyahu willing to pay a political price at the same time that he was paying a political price. So I think that increased his frustration. But look at what our position was on Iran, how in advance of the attack what we were doing.
The Israeli ethos has always been we defend ourselves by ourselves. And that’s baked into the Israeli psychology. But it is interesting when they’re facing seven fronts, as the Israeli military says they are, and all these proxies, they actually needed what the US did and what the US brought others to do. It wasn’t just as us, but under the Central Command with the British and the French, and local Arab actors. One third of the cruise missiles and the drones that were launched against Israel by Iran were intercepted not by Israelis. So at a time when they’re facing multiple fronts, multiple proxies, Israel finds it difficult to do everything on their own. And who was there? Notwithstanding some of the frustration the president felt, we were there. We played a role. We worked in the days in advance of this with the Israelis to sort out exactly what would be done and how it would be done, and it proved itself to be extraordinarily effective. So I would still say with the accent on cooperation, not on distancing.
