Ambassador Dennis Ross
Special Middle East Coordinator, U.S. Department of State

"Understanding the Arab-Israeli Peace Process"

Thank you, Eli. You know, Eli, I thought that I had a tough job until I stood next to you today and we had a chance to meet a lot of people coming in. I found that everyone wanted to talk to you. They didn’t just want to talk to you, they wanted to talk to you. So I don’t know if coming out here to help with these negotiations is the kind of thing I want to do. You know, working with Arabs and Israelis may just not be enough preparation.

It is nice to be back here. I have spent a good chunk of my life here. My oldest child will be attending UCLA. There was an event last night at UCLA, and I was given an award. Now, I’m not a real demonstrative person, so the photographer was trying to get me to smile. When she brought out what was going to be a gift for me -- which turned out to be a signed basketball by John Wooden -- I melted. I didn’t just smile. It was all over.

It is an interesting time to come here to talk to you about peacemaking in the Middle East. There has just been an election in the Israel. It did produce a dramatic mandate for a new Prime Minister. It is a mandate for change. But we don’t have a government that is formed yet, and because of that, we are in a period that is really an interregnum. At a time when you’re in an interregnum, I think it always makes sense to step back and think about how you might approach peacemaking from a broader perspective. Today, in my comments, I offer you a number of points of perspective, in terms of thinking about peacemaking in the Middle East. Primarily, my focus is on Arabs, Israelis, and Palestinians, but it’s not limited to that. I say this because the core of the Arab-Israeli problem is really the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, but that’s not all of the Arab-Israeli problem. We have made it very clear that, for us, the objective is a comprehensive peace settlement. That means it is very important to get all of the tracks underway. Its very important to try to produce an outcome on all of the various issues.

Let’s start with my first point of perspective. You described, Eli, what is a very long history, that I have had in working on the Arab-Israeli issue. I can tell you that the landscape to peacemaking is dramatically different today than what it was when I began working on the Arab-Israeli peace issue. One way to highlight that is with a couple of examples from this year, that demonstrate just how much peacemaking in the region has changed, because the landscape is so different. One example is from February of this year, which was at the time of the funeral, in Amman, for King Hussein. Everybody from the world, all of the leaders in the world, turned out for this funeral, which is no big surprise. King Hussein was truly a historic figure, held in great respect and admired internationally; so, the fact that there were leaders from all over the world that came for the funeral was not particularly surprising. The fact that all the leaders from the Arab world came was also not particularly surprising. That you had a huge contingent from Israel, one might have said, isn’t surprising given the relationship the Israelis had with King Hussein. But it is surprising that all of the leaders of the Arab world would come [with Israelis present].

I’m sitting next to my former boss, [former] Secretary [of State Warren] Christopher, and we have had a few trips to Damascus. I’m sure if we had talked about the idea of a funeral for King Hussein, and discussed whether or not President Assad would go to that funeral if there were a large contingent of Israelis, I bet we would have had some questions in our minds as to whether or not he [President Assad] would have attended. But in fact he did. Now, the reason he did is because nobody in the region would have accepted that it was a reasonable explanation not to go just because Israelis were there. That, in itself is a reminder that the landscape in the Middle East for peacemaking is very different from what it used to be. That’s an example that shows you something about the landscape, but it’s not what I would call a positive example.

Let me give you a positive example. In January of this year, at the second annual meeting of the Paris Peace Center, there...and I should say something about the Paris Peace Center. The Paris Peace Center exists to create cooperative projects between Israelis and Palestinians and Israelis and Arabs. They focus on issues that are really functional in character, respond to functional needs like water, health, agriculture. You name it. Where there is a functional need, they want to create cooperative programs between Israelis and Palestinians and Israelis and Arabs... They had their second meeting, and it was held in Tel-Aviv. There were 120 Palestinians who came to participate, in Tel-Aviv, and there were dozens of Arabs throughout the world who came to participate. The first point I would make is that when we would try to create what we would call track-two diplomacy, diplomacy outside of formal channels, we were always told "you can’t do this." The idea that you would have this kind of meeting in Israel would be absolutely unthinkable until you had peace. Now we obviously don’t have peace, but we have come a long way and the landscape is very different from the way it used to be.

What changed the landscape? Very simply, what changed the landscape was Oslo. Oslo took the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict and transformed it. It transformed their relationship from mutual rejection and mutual denial into mutual recognition. When you cross the threshold to mutual recognition, you can’t turn the clock back. You can’t un-recognize, you can’t go back to denial. You’ve crossed that threshold. When Israel and the PLO recognized each other, they recognized that they each had needs, each had interests and there was going to have to be a negotiation using dialogue to reconcile those [needs]. That transformed peacemaking. That meant there was no longer a question of whether you could solve this conflict, but rather a question of when you would solve this conflict. But when is a profoundly important question. Because the longer it takes to get to "when," the more likely you are to have more victims, more violence, more pain, and more potential for conflict. "When" is important, and that’s why the Clinton administration has invested a great deal of time to accelerate the point at which we get to "when." Now, its no secret that the last few years of peacemaking have not been easy. That’s an understatement.

Let me go to my second point on perspective. Even during a period between 1993 and 1996, when we made a lot of progress, when you had two agreements between Israelis and the Palestinians that created the Palestinian Authority and then brought it to the West Bank. When you had a peace-treaty made between Israel and Jordan. When you had direct negotiations with the Syrians and Israelis and progress was made. When you had a multilateral process which brought fourteen Arab countries together with the Israelis in working groups. When you had an economic summit process that brought the private sector of the Arab world and the public sector of the Arab world together with their Israeli counterparts. When you had eight members of the Arab League establish diplomatic relations with Israel, of one form or another. Even during that period from 1993 to 1996, when there was all that progress, this was not a process that worked in a linear direction. It was a process that was marked by ups and downs. It was a process that was marked by set-backs. It was a process that was marked by real crises and real problems. So even when you have that, you have to understand that its never going to be a simple process.

The interesting thing here is that that should come as no surprise. We are dealing with a conflict that has a legacy. It has a legacy of suspicion and violence and doubt and pain and grievance. And, it also has very determined enemies, who are prepared to do anything they can to try to prevent the process from succeeding. Yigal Amir did not kill Yitzakh Rabin because he wanted to promote peace; he wanted to kill it. Hamas bombers who carried out suicide rages were not carrying out those suicide rages because they wanted to promote peace; they wanted to kill it. When you take that legacy, and you take those enemies, you’re going to have a process that is going to move in fits and starts, that is going to be characterized by ups and downs. The surprising thing is, not that the process experienced set-backs, or even that it experienced traumas, but that the process endured. And most people would not have predicted in 1993 -- September of 1993, at the time of the signing of the Declarations of Principles at the White House -- that this process could have endured all of the set-backs and the traumas that it did.

You have to ask yourself these questions. "Why has it endured? Why didn’t it collapse?" My answer is fairly simple and direct and it goes to a fundamental truth: there is no acceptable alternative to the pursuit of peace. History and geography has destined that Israelis and Palestinians are going to live as neighbors. They can live in perpetual struggle and conflict, or they can live in peace. At Oslo, they made a choice. They wanted to live in peace. The absence of an acceptable alternative is enough to create an incentive and a reason to negotiate for peace. It is not enough to make peace. The absence of an acceptable alternative is a negative; it’s not a positive. To make peace, you have to have positives. To make peace you have to build relationships. To make peace, both sides have to be able to work together and see that in working together, they can solve problems big and small. In the course of doing that, they acquire a level of mutual confidence, they acquire a perspective on each other and come to believe that they can make it. They come to believe that they have the same incentives, the same intentions and the same objectives. As a result of doing that, they acquire the understanding that no matter what the difficulty is, they will find the way.

My third point on perspective is that even when you have that kind of relationship, even when you have that kind of engagement, even when you have that kind of dialogue, it’s still going to take time. There are a variety of reasons for why it’s going to take time. The first is, this is a historic conflict. Nobody wants to make a historic mistake. The second is that leaders have to satisfy themselves -- that they are not giving up more than they have to give up. I can’t tell you how many times Yitzakh Rabin would say to the two of us, "First I have to satisfy myself." First he had to satisfy himself -- that Israel could afford to make certain decisions. Yitzakh Rabin isn’t the only one who had to satisfy himself. Yassar Arafat had to satisfy himself. Hafez Al-Assad had to satisfy himself. Leaders have to convince themselves that what they are being asked to do is what they have to do: that they can’t get by with giving up less, that this is the best that they can do, that they have to become convinced. The only way they become convinced is by spending enough time, in an exhaustive way, to satisfy themselves. But there is a corollary to satisfying themselves. Some of them also have to satisfy publics. And you don’t satisfy publics by rushing into agreement. Because the question is going to come up, "You could have done better." You need a process which shows that you did everything you could before you came to such an understanding. There is yet another reason.

These problems are hard and they are real. If you look at the Israelis’ and Palestinians’ positions going into permanent status, the differences between them are not artificial, they are real. It’s going to take time and it’s going to take a real intensive, exhaustive effort to work through their differences in order to understand what each side needs, what their interests are, and what their limitations are. Once they’ve worked through that in an exhaustive way, they can understand that there are certain problems and certain answers that they can’t develop before they go to the table. It takes time, it requires an exhaustive effort because when you work through everything ultimately you get to the point, especially on the really hard problems, of understanding that what you have in mind when you go to the table is not necessarily what you are going to produce after you have been at the table. I’ve often tried to illustrate this by saying -- taking the Israelis and Palestinians -- if the Israelis were here, and the Palestinians were here on a set of issues, the answer will not be along this plane at all. The answer will be out there; because they will work through a process and come to understand what each can do and can’t do. They will create different kinds of answers. What some people like to call "outside the box." That’s what will happen, eventually. Hopefully, not for too long. It has to come through an intensive process.

My fourth point on perspective is that, even when you have the right kind of engagement and even when it takes time, there is a big difference between taking time and being mired in a stalemate. When you’re engaged and you have a relationship, both sides can believe that no matter the difficulties, both sides can find the way. But when you have a stalemate, what happens with a stalemate is that both sides begin to have fundamental doubts. There’s a crisis in confidence. They find they can’t even solve small problems together. They find it difficult to even talk to each other unless someone else sets them up for a meeting. They begin to question whether negotiations are in fact a mechanism for solving problems. They not only lose trust, ultimately they lose hope. When you lose hope, you can’t sustain this process. When you have a stalemate, it can be so corrosive that even when you have an absence of an acceptable alternative, the stalemate may in fact undercut the ability to sustain that process.

We had a stalemate from the Spring of 1997 until we broke the stalemate with the Wye agreement, the Wye Memorandum. I won’t recount what we did during that eighteen-month period to break that stalemate. Suffice it to say, at Wye we succeeded largely because the President was there with the leaders, and more specifically, because the President brought the leaders together. This put them in a situation where they had to address not only their own needs but the other sides’ needs, which included each sides’ need for an explanation, a public explanation. What Wye did was to begin to recreate a relationship that had been a casualty over the previous couple of years, and it began to recreate a partnership that had been lost over the preceding couple of years. It [Wye Memorandum] actually carried through to its first phase of implementation, which presented problems that were sorted out. In the second phase of implementation, there were problems and they weren’t [sorted out]. Then the political realities took over, and we had an election in Israel, and we are where we are.

That leads to my last point on perspective -- I’m sure you’re wondering, "Just how many points of perspective does he have?" Sometimes I wonder too. If we are going to get there, the parties have to have a relationship between themselves. They have to develop a level of trust between themselves. They have to have a partnership, and having a partnership means you don’t put your partner in the corner. You don’t do those things or say those things that are going to make it more difficult for your partner. If you weaken your partner, you weaken yourself. You cannot have a zero-sum mentality and expect that these kinds of existential questions will be solved. We have an important role to play, there’s no question about that. We cannot take their place. We cannot negotiate for them. We have a role to play in terms of providing reassurance, sometimes clarification, sometimes making suggestions, sometimes bringing them together with us to see if we can sort out problems, but we cannot take on the role for them. Especially when you are dealing with these kinds of questions and these kinds of issues.

We have a stake in Middle East peace. We have an interest in a Middle East that’s at peace. Arab-Israeli peace won’t end all of the conflicts in the Middle East, but it will change the balance of forces between those who focus on reason and want to be a part of a global community, and those who are extreme and want to turn the clock back. We have an interest in the forces of moderation being dominant in the region. We have a stake in Middle East peace. We can’t stand aside as if we have no interest; we do have an interest. But at the end of the day, we can want peace but we can’t will it. We can help the parties, but we can’t make the decisions for them. We can work with them, but we can’t impose an agreement. Ultimately, this has to be their agreement. They have to invest in it. They have to own it. They have to be able to defend it. They have to stand by it. They have to believe in it. And, if that happens, we will not only see peace made, but last.

We will be there every step of the way, because we do have an interest. This is going to be their peace. Some people have referred to me as an eternal optimist -- maybe because I’ve worked on this issue for a long time. I don’t believe I am [an eternal optimist]. I believe that I’m a realist. And realism tells me that it is possible to get there.