Elliott Abrams Best of Frenemies :Though the Washington hand credits Obama with deep sympathy for the Jewish state, the incidents he recounts contradict that assertion.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/best-of-frenemies-1444600776
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 But that grant of clemency is withdrawn toward Mr.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.
For example, in 2009 the administration pressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undertake a 10-month moratorium on settlement construction in the hope of getting negotiations started, at considerable political cost to the Israeli leader. The moratorium brought the Israelis nothing from the Palestinians, so they refused to extend it. As Mr. Ross writes, “though [Palestinian leader] Abu Mazen had shown little flexibility and squandered the moratorium, President Obama . . . put the onus on Israel.”
ENLARGE Doomed to Succeed
By Dennis Ross
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 474 pages, $30
Mr. Obama kept calling on Israel to take risks for peace. “But,” Mr. Ross adds, “he said nothing about what Abu Mazen had to do; the responsibility for acting was exclusively Netanyahu’s.” Even when Mr. Netanyahu accepted difficult American terms for a new negotiation in 2014 and then Abu Mazen rejected them, the administration “gave him a pass,” instead blaming the continuing construction of Israeli settlements. Mr. Obama believed that as the stronger party Israel could and should do more for peace. “But what if the Palestinians were not prepared to move? . . . He never seemed to ask that question,” Mr. Ross writes.
In Mr. Ross’s view, Mr. Obama fell for the oldest preconceptions about the Middle East, views that the State Department had been putting forward since 1948. There were principally three: “the need to distance from Israel to gain Arab responsiveness, concern about the high costs of cooperating with the Israelis, and the belief that resolving the Palestinian problem is the key to improving the U.S. position in the region.”
In chapter after chapter, Mr. Ross documents how these arguments affected policy over decades and failed to predict Arab behavior—yet were very rarely challenged. The reason they failed is simple, he says: “the hard truth is that [the Palestinians] are not a priority for Arab leaders. . . . The priorities of Arab leaders revolve around survival and security”—not Israeli-Palestinian relations or U.S. policy toward Israel.
What’s striking in this account, and in the history of U.S. Mideast policy, is why these three canards keep reappearing and gaining such wide support. When we move away from Israel, Mr. Ross observes, “our influence does not increase; our ties to the conservative Arab monarchies do not materially improve.”
When Truman recognized Israel immediately in 1948 over the deep opposition of George Marshall and the State Department, relations with all the Arabs remained intact. Eisenhower’s opposition to Israel, England and France over the Suez crisis of 1956, when those three nations invaded Sinai to seize the east bank of the Suez Canal and Ike forced them out, led to no gains with the Arab states—because “what damaged the United States was the perception that it would not stand by its friends.” When LBJ became the first president to provide tanks and Phantom jets to Israel, Averell Harriman at State predicted “an explosion.” It never came. The pattern is repeated every time because, as Mr. Ross rightly argues, the Arab states care about their own interests: “they were not going to make what mattered to them dependent on what we did with Israel.”
Mr. Ross’s treatment of each administration is necessarily brief but useful for that very reason: It’s hard to think of a college course on this subject that would not assign this book as a text. The scope of Mr. Ross’s book also allows him to highlight pointed historical ironies. He notes, for example, that Mr. Clinton intervened directly in Israeli politics to try to defeat Mr. Netanyahu in his 1996 and 1999 elections. Yet the current administration grew outraged about Mr. Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in March 2015.
Mr. Ross draws a harsh portrait of Mr. Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who opposes Israel at every turn and refuses to engage in serious conversations with Israeli officials that would improve relations. When the administration considered its first U.N. Security Council veto, of a resolution condemning some construction in Israeli settlements, Ms. Rice was “adamant” in opposing the veto, arguing it would do “grave damage” to our relations with the Arabs. The veto was cast; she was proved wrong. She never admitted her mistake. Neither did George Marshall; neither did the State Department after Suez or after Johnson provided large quantities of arms to Israel for the first time.
Mr. Ross concludes that “those in the early years of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations who saw in the emergence of Israel only doom and gloom for the United States were wrong.” True enough. So readers may have one gripe: Why is this reassuring work entitled “Doomed to Succeed” rather than “A Blessing in Disguise?”
Mr. Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, handled Middle East affairs at the National Security Council from 2001 to 2009.
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