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2002-01-18 Dennis Ross-Heritage interview |
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| Heritage editor Donald H. Harrison had the chance to interview former
U.S. Middle East Envoy Dennis Ross prior to the United Jewish Federationąs
Menąs Event on Jan. 9. Here are excerpts from their interview: Harrison—Let's start with the predictable question: Seizure of the Karine A, and the reluctance of the United States to acknowledge that it may in fact have been arranged by the Palestinian Authority. What's going on? ROSS—Well, it looks like the State Department has come out today (Jan. 9)—actually yesterday — somewhat more affirmatively that they take what the Palestinian captain of the ship said at face value, and that the onus is now on Arafat to do something, to demonstrate something other than that. You know, I — this is one where it is hard to suggest exactly what was going through their thinking, because from my standpoint it was unmistakable. The captain of the ship, the guy who was driving the ship, is a Palestinian naval police officer and he answers to the Number Two in the Palestinian Naval Police. It is inconceivable to me, knowing the way Arafat works, he signs all the money orders. So $15 million, which is what was involved here, there is no way that thing was done without his knowledge. Hes a real micro-manager? When it comes to money— not when it comes to other things, but when it comes to money, he is. So it is extremely unlikely to me that this could have been done unknown to him. The problem with Arafat is always that Arafat never closes the door on any option. My guess is— if you read the account of what the Palestinian captain said — he said when the cease fire was declared they were en route and he assumed that he would get orders to stop, but he did not. That is why I view this as an indication of, again, Arafat has taken some steps, he is continuing to take more, but he has not made a choice yet, and absent that it is going to be very very hard to change things. There seems to be a lot of uneasiness about Iran aligning itself more closely with the Palestinian Authority. Previously, it has helped Hezbollah, helped Hamas, but there seemed to be a willingness to embarrass the Palestinian Authority. The problem with Iran is that Iran is not a unitary actor. You have (President Mohammed) Khatani; you have the parliament which is now embroiled in a major struggle with the judiciary, and you have the Ministry of Intelligence and you still have the Revolutionary Guard. It is very clear that there is a segment of Iran which unfortunately dominates the instrumentalities of power that is quite determined to cause as much trouble as they can. Did they work with Hezbollah and others before? Absolutely. Was that their purpose? Yes. What seems to be the case here, there seems to be a Palestinian-Hezbollah connection, not Hezbollah-Hamas, but Palestinian-Hezbollah connection, at least in terms of some of the individuals involved, and it suggests to me, again, a desire on that part of Iran to fish in these troubled waters as much as they can, and as I said, in the case of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, Arafat always keeps his options open. Normally, what I used to say about Arafat, people around him are not permanently up, not permanently down, but they were never permanently out. With all this going on, are we further away from any kind of understanding between the Israelis and the Palestinians? I don't see much hope right now. I do see hope in a longer term, because I think there is an understanding on both sides that there is no acceptable alternative to peaceful coexistence. The challenge is to reestablish the legitimacy of peaceful coexistence which has been lost in the last year. It is not a case of a loss of confidence, or a loss of trust; it is much more fundamental than that. It is a loss of faith and belief. To think in such an environment that you can simply go back and take on the existential questions like Jerusalem, borders or refugees is a complete illusion. First things first. You create stability, then you focus on creating an environment where both sides can begin to believe again that this can work. And for me that means you have to focus on the premise of peacemaking, which is security for the Israelis and the end of Israeli control of Palestinian lives for the Palestinians. Everything you do has to confirm that in reality, not in rhetoric (but) in day-to-day behavior, so both sides can believe that what this is supposed to be about can in fact happen again. That will take time. It is not going to turn about right away. Where we were a year ago, at the end of the Clinton administration and the Clinton ideas, we are not at that point now, and it will take a long time to re-create it. That was a point when we thought we could settle the conflict, and when indeed we offered ideas that (former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud) Barak was prepared to accept and Arafat was not. And those ideas went a very long ways toward satisfying the Palestinian aspirations from a historic standpoint. Why do you think Arafat walked away from what ostensibly was the best deal any Israeli could possibly have given? Because I think he is one of those revolutionaries who is capable of being a revolutionary but is not capable of being a statesman. I donąt think he could redefine himself. That's not to say he can't keep any deal; he kept five deals — two of those I negotiated almost entirely. He can do limited deals because he doesnąt have to forsake his cause, he doesn't have to give up claims, he doesn't have to give up grievance. He doesn't have to give up the image of struggle which defined him so often. What we were talking about was ending the conflict, giving him what he was getting. And I don't think he was capable of doing that, and the truth of it is, it was all there — not all there, there were some concessions he had to make, but that was the point: peacemaking requires concessions on both sides, not just on one side. His negotiators were prepared to make concessions, that wasn't the problem. The problem was he wasn't prepared to make a decision. Does that lead us to the conclusion that as long as Arafat is in, there is no chance of peace? I think you have to look at things from a perspective. The choice can't be either all peace or all war. Diplomacy is measured by what is attainable, not what is impossible. So first things first. Let's reestablish the idea of peaceful coexistence and create a process where you can try to re-create the conditions where the permanent settlement is possible. If you ask me can Arafat do a permanent settlement, my answer is no, he cannot, unless he's learned some dramatic lessons which, at this point, there is nothing in his behavior which suggests he has. We were never going to be positioned better than we were at the end of the Clinton Administration, given the kind of Israeli government you had, given the president that you had here. The stars were aligned if they have ever been aligned, at least from that standpoint. Maybe where they weren't aligned, where there is a lesson to be learned, was that there was very little done to prepare publics. One lesson learned from the past is that is going to have to change. You are referring to such things as textbooks (which teach hate against the Jews)? Yes, and the incitement. And also, on the Israeli side during Barak's time, there was an effort to prepare publics at least in an indirect way. Because everything that was being discussed was basically leaked to the Israeli press, so the Israeli public constantly knew what was being discussed. It was a paradox, because typically what was being discussed in private was less forthcoming than what was being leaked to the publi— the strangest negotiation that I have ever been a part of. Usually, it is just the opposite. So at least the Israeli public became conditioned to what they thought the outcome would look like. And the Palestinian public was not, because they were never told they would have to compromise. They were never told that there were hard choices to make. They were never told that there were some legitimate needs that the Israelis had, and that they would have to give up some of their mythologies. They were not told that; whereas the Israeli public was, at least during Barak's time. Now I wouldn't say they are being told that today, but it is not appropriate to tell them that today. The Israeli public doesn't believe they have a partner. So until you can reestablish the legitimacy of having a partner, you can't focus on the bigger picture, and the point of conditioning comes only when you get into a political process that is serious. It is really first things first. Poor Anthony Zinni, the first time he goes there, there are suicide bombings. The second, most recent time, he had this episode with the Karine A. From your perspective, as someone who has been in his position, how is he doing? I think that you have to look at the situation that he has been thrust into, in the sense of how the hand has been dealt. He is dealing with a very difficult situation and I think he is doing as well as anyone could expect him to do. In terms of the ship, that I think was a coincidence. This was something that was in the works for a long time; this was not something that was cooked up to take place while he was there. The suicide bombs, the six attacks during the time he was there, that was quite conscious and deliberate. Now, interesting enough, that was an overt challenge to Arafat. If you think about it, Arafat has been desperate to get the Bush administration to intervene in a way that at least begins to approximate what we used to do, and for the first time he gets a speech by the secretary of State (Colin Powell) where the secretary of State uses formulas that even we never used. Do you mean referring to 'Palestine'? Not just that. We didn't use "ending occupation," because for us, for me, I knew that in the Palestinian ear, "ending occupation" would be translated into June 4, 1967, borders. Where is the occupation? We talked about the equivalent of that, but we never used those words. Secretary Powell did use those words; he talked about that, he talked about the "State of Palestine"; he talked about a freeze on settlement activity, and he was sending an envoy. These were all the things that Arafat wanted. The last thing that Arafat wanted was to have suicide bombs as Zinni arrived, so it was a challenge to Arafat. But one of the reasons that there was a challenge to Arafat was that Arafat has not led in the last 15 months. And the way for him to deal with the current situation is not to look for half measures; it is to lead, to make a choice. Ironically, it is not that Hamas has become so popular on the West Bank and Gaza. The support for Hamas in Gaza is about 25 percent. Unfortunately for Arafat, his support dropped to about that level too, but it dropped because he offered nothing. He gave a speech on the cease-fire and he went up 15 points. It is not that the Palestinian public isn't angry; they are very angry. They are. They have lost 800 dead, they have lost 17,000 wounded. They are angry, and they don't blame themselves for what the Israelis are doing to them. They don't blame Hamas, they blame the Israelis. But they don't see Hamas as the solution or the salvation and they also don't see that Arafat is offering any pathways. So when he finally begins to look like he is a leader again, there is a response. His big mistake has been to sit back and not to lead, to be satisfied with being a symbol, but not satisfied to be a leader. Is he now paralyzed at the idea of doing something? I just think in his whole career he was a decision avoider, not a decision maker. When he has made choices, he made choices because he had no choice, and that is what you have to re-create now; you have to re-create a circumstance where he has no choice. That is why two weeks ago I wrote an article in which I called for an ultimatum, where we spell out precisely what it is he has to do. And we also make it clear that there is a timeline in which he has to do it, and if he doesnąt do it within that timeline, then we suspend our relations with the Palestinian Authority, because that matters to him. This is what he has achieved, his standing on the international stage, and if we put that into question, then he is much more likely to act. Look at his behavior in the last couple of weeks. Since his speech, there has been a lull, although there were four Israeli soldiers killed today in a firefight in Gaza. But there has been a lull, and even this is different than a suicide bombing. The fact is that what he has done was to begin to look like he would crack down, has begun to make arrests, he closed Hamas offices, but these are not definitive steps by him, and he has to make definitive steps. The idea is that you do a deal with Hamas. Every deal that has been done with Hamas since 1993 has been temporary, and this will be too. What are the terms of the proposed ultimatum? What I wanted us to do was to insist on the following: Number One, that Arafat would arrest all those on the list that he had been given by Zinni. To this point, he has arrested a little less than half. There were 33 people, and at the beginning of the week he arrested 10, and I think he has arrested another six. Secondly, I wanted him to shut down the infrastructure, but specifically the Dawa, not just the. military wing of Hamas. You have to go after their infrastructure. That will take some time; it is not so simple. If it were so simple and so clear, the Israelis would have done it a long time ago. They don't know where they are. I wanted them to go after that infrastructure, but also the Dawa, which is the social structure of Hamas. Hamas, unlike Islamic Jihad, is a social movement. That is why it runs clinics, schools; that is why it has after-school programs, that is why itdistributes food. Those are all useful things, which the Palestinian Authority ought to do, but for Hamas, because they are a social movement, they have an agenda, they have a political aim. The non-military wing of Hamas will become much more forceful in terms of stopping Hamas military activities if they think that their infrastructure, which gives them appeal, is going to be shut down. So the second thing was to shut down the Dawa. The third thing was to go after all the bomb-making factories and the mortar-producing factories. And the fourth was to make a speech to his public, in Arabic, in which he makes it clear that violence and terror have not served Palestinian interests, it has set them back, that they will never achieve their objectives or their aims except at the negotiating table. This is what I wrote about two weeks ago. What kind of a time limit? I was going to give him 96 hours, but the time frame, as long as it is very clear, is less important than the reality of the demands. In fact, in all four of the areas that I have mentioned, he has been pressured not only by us but by the Europeans, and he has made arrests, but not completely. He did shut down some of the offices, but again partially. They did shut down a couple of mortar-producing factories, but again, it is not complete. And he did make a speech in Arabic to the public. But while he had some good things in there about the cease-fire and that there is only one authority — which was the first time I have heard him say that, and that's important because the notion that up to now you could have other authorities operating was something that he never challenged — but he justified what he was doing on the grounds that we don't want to give Sharon an excuse to continue to do this to us, as opposed to saying this isn't in our interests. Compare him to what (President Pervez) Musharaf is saying in Pakistan. He says this is a perversion of Islam, this intolerance is a threat to us. He doesnąt talk about what the Indians are doing as a reason why he has to do this, he talks about why it is in their interests, Pakistani interests, to transform themselves, and that what these people (terrorists) do is simply wrong. You didn't hear Arafat say anything like that. And I want Arafat to do that, because it is critical that he discredit this kind of behavior and make it clear that it is beyond the pale and won't be tolerated. |
