RUTHFULLY YOURS

Looting is a great way to advance the increasingly violent, racist Black Lives Matter movement, an agitator is teaching students after being rewarded by the Left with a teaching gig at prestigious Yale University.

The words of Twitter star Deray Mckesson expose for the umpteenth time the lie that Black Lives Matter, whose members idolize unrepentant cop killers Mumia abu Jamal and Assata Shakur, is a law-abiding, peaceful movement and that those who loot and riot in its name are a fringe or unrelated element. Lawless violence and bloody insurrection are how Mckesson and his followers pursue their vision of so-called social justice.

Mckesson led a class that was discussing, “In Defense of Looting,” an essay by Willie Osterweil whose bio at the New Inquiry website describes him as “a writer, editor, and member of the punk band Vulture Shit.”

It would be hard to find someone whose background better suited him to write about the U.S.-Israel relationship than Dennis Ross. A long-time diplomat and policymaker, he has been involved in Arab-Israeli negotiations in every administration from Carter to Obama, with a single time-out under the first Bush. His new book does not disappoint: Doomed to Succeed devotes a pithy chapter to each administration, explaining its policies and the reasoning behind them.

Ross describes a recurring pattern wherein a president with warm feelings toward Israel tends to be replaced by a chillier executive, only to be replaced in turn by a friend. Thus Truman (friendly) is replaced by Eisenhower (not so much) then by Kennedy (who initiated arms sales), Johnson (also friendly), but then Nixon-Kissinger (a Machiavellian combination in outmaneuvering Israel), and so on.U.S.-Israel relations have hit a nadir with the current president. Ross quotes National Security Adviser Susan Rice playing the race card as she tells ADL chief Abe Foxman that Benjamin Netanyahu “did everything but use ‘the N-word’ in describing the president.” Yet the changes at the top matter less than they might seem to. Ross’s chief contribution is to show how certain unchanging and misguided assumptions have driven U.S. policy since Israel’s birth and remain idées fixes in the minds of U.S. policymakers to this day. He writes, “I was struck by the similarity of the arguments. I found them recycled, often (to my amazement) couched in the exact same terms.”

Dennis Ross and “Middle East Peace Process” are nearly synonymous, and Mr. Ross wrote an 800-page book on the subject, “The Missing Peace,” after serving as a Mideast envoy to President Bill Clinton. So why another volume now? In “Doomed to Succeed,” the Washington hand brings his account up to date by covering the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations and looking at U.S.-Israel relations from Truman on.

The chapters that cover administrations in which Mr. Ross served—especially at a high level, as he did under Messrs. Bush, Clinton and Obama—are predictably the most lively. There is always the danger that familiarity breeds forgiveness, and the author is indeed less critical of mistakes under Messrs. Clinton or Bush than others might be. But that grant of clemency is withdrawn toward Mr. Obama, as Mr. Ross’s familiarity breeds page after page of criticism.

Mr. Ross’s portrait reinforces the recent account by Israel’s former ambassador, Michael Oren, in his book “Ally.” Six years of Mr. Obama get more pages here than eight years of Messrs. Clinton or Bush, and the author writes that “the president’s distancing from Israel was deliberate.” Though he credits Mr. Obama with deep sympathy for the Jewish state, the incidents he recounts contradict him.