‘Fresh Air’ gives platform to Israel’s lawyer, Dennis Ross, to blame Arafat for failure of peace process

This is the era in which diversity is finally being promoted at the top of American institutions, including the Biden White House, but– Israel remains a glaring exception. The mainstream Democratic/media perspective on the conflict is limited to an Israeli one.

Yesterday, “Fresh Air”, the NPR talk show that did yeoman work undermining the Trump presidency as authoritarian, devoted most of an hour to a new Israeli documentary on the breakdown of the peace process; and the two guests were the Israeli documentarian, Dror Moreh, and the former peace processor Dennis Ross.

Ross is not impartial. He has been widely labeled “Israel’s lawyer”– in Al Jazeera, and by his colleague Aaron David Miller (who said he shared in the blame) — and has even embraced that role. He told a private Jewish audience in 2016, “Plenty of others have been advocates for the Palestinians. We don’t need to be advocates for Palestinians. We need to be advocates for Israel.”

So for 42 minutes on Fresh Air, Ross put out a very stale argument, that Yasser Arafat was in the end responsible for the breakdown of the peace process.

Interviewer Dave Davies: [A]fter the Camp David negotiations ended in failure, the Clinton team gets some principles and gives them to both sides, which the Israelis privately agree to adopt. And you have Arafat come in. There’s some hope that it might happen. It doesn’t. He wants to ask more questions. He wants to renegotiate. It can’t be done. Dennis Ross, do you think Yasser Arafat would ever have been able to close the deal? I mean, there’s this narrative that kind of grew out of this, that he would never be a partner… for peace. What is your take?

Dennis Ross: My take is he wasn’t able to do a final deal. it required too much personal redefinition for him… Arafat was capable of doing limited deals with Israel because Arafat was the kind of guy who could never foreclose an option. What made it hard for him to accept what we were asking were three words – end the conflict. Well, for him, end the conflict meant end the grievance, end the struggle, end the claims. That, he wasn’t prepared to do.

Later Ross said Arafat rejected the Clinton parameters, because he’s just a defiant Palestinian.

In the end, Arafat wasn’t prepared to move on anything. We made a proposal that, in a sense, we drew out of [Ehud] Barak, what was the kind of things that he could actually do. And Arafat doesn’t make a counterproposal, but he simply rejects it. He does – I will say he does go back to Gaza, and he goes back with the image that he defied Israel and the United States. The notion of defiance is very much a part of the historic Palestinian narrative.

It’s astonishing that even as “Fresh Air” trotted out this mythology, there’s a new book out from a leading historian of the conflict saying that Israel bears the greatest responsibility for the failure of the peace process in the Clinton era. “Israel simply was unwilling to end its occupation of the West Bank and allow the Palestinians to have a viable state of their own,” Jerome Slater concludes after examining closely the negotiations that Dennis Ross led, in his book “Mythologies Without End.”

As for Arafat asking so many questions rather than accepting the deal outright, Slater disputes Ross’s reading:

“Dennis Ross later characterized Arafat’s letter as ‘stiffing’ Clinton with reservations that were essentially ‘deal-killers.’ However, it seems persuasive — or even undeniable– that most of Arafat’s objections or requests for changes, clarification, or more specific and detailed proposals were reasonable and legitimate. In light of the history of past Israeli violations of apparent agreements — for example Oslo — he was right to be concerned that every Clinton ‘idea’ could be interpreted by Israel in a manner that effectively undercut his proposed compromises.”

And when it came to Arafat’s rejection of Clinton parameters, Slater puts the onus on Barak. “Barak ended the Taba talks, and in his last few months in office he resumed his previous rigidity on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with devastating consequences that continue today.” Barak did so because he was ambivalent about “the need for compromise” and unwilling to “appear too ‘leftist’… on the ev of the national elections.”

Of course, Israel has rarely felt a “need for compromise;” it has continually expanded the domain of the “Jewish state,” and today it’s been declared an apartheid regime by a leading human rights group. Though of course that news wasn’t on “Fresh Air” yesterday either.

No, what we got was a gushing report on Dennis Ross’s statecraft (Davies: “God, I have to say, I marvel at your ability to visualize moves on the diplomatic chessboard still.”).

Though Davies did ask Dennis Ross whether it wasn’t a problem that there were so many Jews on the U.S. negotiating team. Davies:

“One of the issues that’s raised in the documentary is that most of the members of the American negotiating team over this – the course of these conversations are Jewish, varying degrees of observance among them. And there’s a question of whether, you know, a Jewish – Dennis, you’re Jewish. I mean, the question of whether, you know, you just have an affinity for one side or an understanding that colors the way you do things?

Ross of course deflected this, with a lot of b.s. “I think that all of us who happen to be Jewish on the team, we all had a real passionate commitment to try to resolve the conflict. So if there was something that our Jewishness contributed to, it was a sense of mission about trying to resolve the conflict and do everything we could in that regard.” And that means: “[W]e had to really understand what the Palestinians needed. We had to really listen to them, which we did.”

It can hardly be the case that Ross just happened to be Jewish. The Israel lobby is well aware of who gets such positions. And again, Ross has said outright that American Jews must be advocates for Israel not Palestine. And he’s chair of a pro-Israel organization that is battling the challenge of Jews marrying non-Jews.

The amazement of the “Fresh Air” interview is they treat Dennis Ross as an impartial observer and completely omit the Palestinian perspective. No one was “really listening” to Palestinians on NPR yesterday, just parodying the “Palestinian narrative.”

So a leading liberal publication addresses a central question in history/policy — and it’s completely one-sided. The indigenous people are given no opportunity to say why they object to Jewish nationalist colonial settlement in their land. That omission ought to be impossible in 2021. But it’s not.

Thanks to Kate Casa.