THE SIN OF OSLO
By ABBY WISSE; September 5, 2004 –
THE MISSING PEACE: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE FIGHT FOR MIDDLE EAST
PEACE BY DENNIS ROSS
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX, 872 PAGES, $35
DENNIS Ross has spent the better part
of his adult life working for the U.S. government, through successive
administrations, trying to help accomplish one thing: an end to the
Arab-Israeli conflict. Now, he's produced an arm-breakingly heavy, 800-page
recounting of those efforts. If you love process you'll be riveted; if you want
answers, you're out of luck.
For all the detail (and there's a lot here), the many
character studies (find out what Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu and Abu Ala are
really like!) and summaries of proposals and counter-proposals (and counter-counter-proposals)
there's an essential piece missing from "The Missing Peace."
The point that Ross seems loath to admit has been crystal clear
from the beginning: The Oslo peace process was built on a lie. That lie, a sin
really, was the decision to choose Yasser Arafat as a peace partner.
Arafat, who founded and heads the Palestine Liberation
Organization, is many things: A Palestinian patriot, a murderer, a liar, a
Nobel laureate, a terrorist, a thug. But he never was and never will be a
peacemaker. In fact, he wasn't even much of a central figure for Palestinians
or the world community following his miscalculated support for Saddam Hussein
during the first Gulf War in 1991.
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Tragically, in 1992, the Israelis committed the original sin of the
Oslo process by resuscitating Arafat from his pit of irrelevance and impotence
in Tunis and bringing him to Washington and Gaza City to "lead" the
effort to make peace with Israel.
Men like Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin bet that
Arafat would morph from a killer into some kind of rational leader because the
Israelis chose to make him a player again. And President Clinton and his
administration spent eight years, with Ross at the head of that effort,
enabling Arafat's evasions and lies.
Ross has all sorts of explanations and theories about the
difficulties of making peace between Israel and her neighbors, offering readers
some of his hard-won insights. He tries to explain how both Israel and the
Palestinians have their own "narratives," which put the two peoples
at odds even before reaching the negotiating table. He is right to point out
that the personalities involved over a decade of talks made for some
complementary pairings and some less so. Ross certainly had his preferences; he
can't hide his distaste for Benjamin Netanyahu.
But all these complications and conflicts can't compare with the
real reason the process was doomed to failure: Arafat was the wrong choice: 11
years later, the thousands dead and many more injured are bloody proof of that.
This is so much the case that the current Israeli leader, Ariel Sharon, is
risking his political future to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip.
Arafat is playing no role in that decision.
"The Missing Peace," is an extremely long and detailed
account of all the meetings, summits, phone calls and late-night working
dinners that are part and parcel of negotiations and diplomacy. And that is
really the most important contribution Ross makes with this tome. His book is
for policy wonks and students of the Middle East peace process who want all the
minutia of the years 1993-2000, from the American perspective. For anything
else, readers will have to look elsewhere.
Abby Wisse is editor of Post Opinion Books. E-mail:
awisse@nypost.com