Dennis Ross clears up Carter's confusion

In today's NY Times, Dennis Ross "sets the record straight" about what really happened at the Clinton-initiated Middle East peace talks in 2000 because he says that President Carter has it all wrong in his controversial new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

According to Ross, President Carter muddled the terms of the deal Arafat rejected to the extent that "the reader is left to conclude that the Clinton proposals must have been so ambiguous and unfair that Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was justified in rejecting them." Ross says the reality is totally different.

Ross can claim authority on the subject since as Clinton's envoy to the Middle East, he was the principal author of the proposals. As he says, "I know what they were and so do the parties." In other words, it is Carter who doesn't know what he is talking about.

According to Ross, "the Clinton parameters would have produced an independent Palestinian state with 100 percent of Gaza, roughly 97 percent of the West Bank and an elevated train or highway to connect them. Jerusalem’s status would have been guided by the principle that what is currently Jewish will be Israeli and what is currently Arab will be Palestinian, meaning that Jewish Jerusalem — East and West — would be united, while Arab East Jerusalem would become the capital of the Palestinian state."

Moreover, "The Palestinian state would have been 'nonmilitarized,' with internal security forces but no army and an international military presence led by the United States to prevent terrorist infiltration and smuggling. Palestinian refugees would have had the right of return to their state, but not to Israel, and a fund of $30 billion would have been created to compensate those refugees who chose not to exercise their right of return to the Palestinian state."

Ross says it's important to know the truth about what really happened since "there has emerged a mythology that seeks to defend Mr. Arafat’s rejection of the Clinton ideas by suggesting they weren’t real or they were too vague or that Palestinians would have received far less than what had been advertised. Mr. Arafat himself tried to defend his rejection of the Clinton proposals by later saying he was not offered even 90 percent of the West Bank or any of East Jerusalem. But," as Ross says, "that was myth, not reality."

He continues, "Nothing has done more to perpetuate the conflict between Arabs and Israelis than the mythologies on each side. The mythologies about who is responsible for the conflict (and about its core issues) have taken on a life of their own. They shape perception. They allow each side to blame the other while avoiding the need to face up to its own mistakes. So long as myths are perpetuated, no one will have to face reality."

It would seem that Prince Bandar, then the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. and another key participant, would likely corroborate Ross's recollection, or at least that is the impression his biographer, William Simpson, gives. In his book, The Prince, Simpson says that Bandar told him he told Arafat at the time that "This is the best deal you are ever going to get and I would take it now because it will take years and years if you don't." (p. 263)

Simpson also says that Bandar believes that "any Palestinian, man, woman, or child who died in Gaza or West Bank from January 2001 [the day Arafact rejected the proposal] until today did not have to die."

When Simpson asked Bandar why he thought Arafat had rejected the offer, the Saudi prince replied that in his view, Arafat "could not make the transition from revolutionary leader to statesman."

To illustrate what he meant by that, Bandar contrasted the two Egyptian presidents, Nasser and Sadat. "Nasser was the revolutionary leader; he precipitated a misguided war - gave the enemy a chance to fight him in 1967 in the Six Days War, lost a lot of his country - Sinai - and never managed to figure out how he could regain it by being a statesman.

"[Sadat, on the other hand] looked at the whole situation and said, 'I have to be a statesman. The only way I can regain this land is being a statesman. I cannot use the lingo, the rhetoric, the behavior of Nasser, who lost the land, if I am to regain the land.'

"[So Sadat,] being a statesman, he created the environment to have a war that had an objective and that objective was to move the political landscape forward, not to win or lose the war. So he prepared for a war; he initiated a war; and then agreed immediately to a ceasefire to preserve his gains, which were, in the big scheme of things, limited. But on the other hand, they were big, because they changed the equation. And then went to the negotiating table and through that negotiation he got back all his land."

Then, indulging in some speculation, he added. "And for whatever it is worth, my prediction is that...Abu Mazen is Sadat....Although he doesn't have the same charisma and the same popularity of Arafat, he is going to deliver a Palestinian state that at the end of the day, regardless of what you say about Arafat's qualities, he couldn't deliver. And regardless of what you say about Abu Mazen's lack of charisma, he will deliver."