Dennis Ross Speech on Middle East Peace
Los Angeles World Affairs Council
November 6, 2000
Thanks, Eli [Broad]. I don't know what's tougher-making Middle East
peace or getting a pro football team to L.A. Until recently I probably
would have said getting a pro football team to L.A. I may change that
now.
Over the years I've given a lot of speeches on peacemaking in the
Middle East, and there have been times when I've come and had to give
speeches that were extraordinarily difficult. When I gave speeches
after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated I can tell you I've never had to
face a more difficult time to give a speech. When I had to give
speeches after four bombs and nine days in 1996 I also found it very
difficult to give those speeches. Well, I come to you again at a time
when it is difficult to give a speech about peacemaking in the Middle
East. What makes it especially difficult is not just the circumstances
on the ground. They would make it hard in any case. What makes it
especially difficult is that in the last several months, and
especially prior to the time this particular crisis on the ground
erupted, we were for the first time in the history of the conflict
between Israelis and Palestinians dealing with the most existential
questions between them, issues like Jerusalem and borders and
settlements and refugees and security arrangements. We were dealing
with them in a very serious fashion. So I faced what is almost a kind
of paradox that, on the one hand, we are now looking at events on the
ground that are extremely troubling to see--and I would even say
disheartening for people like me who have worked in this for so
long--and yet I also know where we were in terms of trying to
reconcile the differences between the two sides.
It is, in fact, a paradox that the three days of September 26, 27 and
28, I was meeting with the negotiators on each side, going back and
forward between them to see if there was a bridge that could be built
to overcome the differences that existed. And at the end of three days
of negotiations at that time--and again this is five weeks ago--all
three of us felt that, in fact, we could see the way to an agreement,
as difficult as it was, as hard as it was still going to be, as
uncertain as it still might be--there was a sense among all three of
us that this was something that could be done. That was five weeks ago
and for me it feels like it's a different world in five weeks. So when
I speak to you tonight I want to say a few things: I want to talk
about how the Israelis and the Palestinians perceive and explain what
has happened the last five weeks. I want to talk about the effect it
has on peacemaking, and I want to talk about what, if any, choice
there is in terms of pursuing peace.
Let me start with how the two sides explain and see what has happened
in the last five weeks. Needless to say, what I'm going to describe
represents views that are 180 degrees apart. When the Israelis look at
what has happened in the last five weeks they see it as something that
has been contrived. They see violence having been used as a device to
try to affect the negotiations. They see violence being used as a
device to try to change the balance of public opinion internationally.
They see violence being used as a device to create either a more
favorable outcome from the standpoint of the Palestinians or an
international intervention that will produce that. The Israelis
believe that this is all taking place in a context where they have an
Israeli government that has been more forthcoming, in Israeli eyes,
than any Israeli government ever before. They wonder why this takes
place, and they draw the conclusion that the Palestinians at this
point either are not interested in peace or they have grave doubts
about whether the Palestinians are prepared to live in peace. They
look at these five weeks and they see commitments that have been made
but not fulfilled, they see Israelis demonstrating, from time to time,
restraint as in the case of the withdrawal from Joseph's Tomb in
Nablus and they see a response that betrays the value of any restraint
when they exhibit it. So the conclusion they draw is that they are now
dealing in a circumstance where they have many more doubts about
whether or not peace is possible with their Palestinian partners.
Well, I can assure you the Palestinians see it very differently. From
the Palestinian perspective, the world looks 180 degrees different, as
I've said. The Palestinians look at the Israelis and they say, the
Israelis deal with us in an insensitive way and in an indifferent way.
They see the Sharon visit as somehow being allowed by the Israeli
government, they see it as something that was designed to transform a
political conflict into a religious conflict, they say that this was a
visit whose purpose was to ignite great passions--and it did--and they
see the Israeli response in the aftermath of that and the riots that
took place, they see the Israeli response as one that is characterized
by a use of excessive force. Palestinians look at Israelis and say
"you use excessive force because you look at us somehow as subhuman."
The level of Palestinian frustration and anger is deep; you don't turn
on and off the kind of feelings that we have seen. That is a function
of looking at a process that Eli was talking about that has lasted
seven years, and the promise of that process, in their eyes, hasn't
been met. They still see Israeli control, they still see Israeli check
points, they still see Israeli settlement building. The conclusion
they see at this point, the explanation they make for their public, is
that the Israelis are pursuing a process that is designed to maintain
control but not give the Palestinians their independence.
Now, when you look at it the way I just described it, I'm not
describing it in terms of our views, or your views. I'm simply saying
"What do I hear? What do we hear from the Israelis? What do we hear
from the Palestinians?" And what we hear suggests that peacemaking is
going to be very difficult now. What we hear indicates that the last
five weeks have created a deep resentment, a sense of betrayal,
mistrust and there are very deep physic wounds that are going to take
some time to repair and to recover from. Notwithstanding that I can
tell you that last week we had the acting foreign minister of Israel,
Shlomo Ben-Ami, come to Washington and after he came we had Saab
Erekat, the chief negotiator on the Palestinian side, come to
Washington. They met with the Secretary of State and the National
Security Advisor, and I spent a lot of time with each of them. I can
tell you each of them said there's no choice but to pursue peace.
What we see now cannot be the future. What we see now is the tip of
the iceberg of what things could become and it's not acceptable.
Moderates, they say, have to be more determined to press ahead, not
less so. So there may be frustration, there may be anger, there may be
mistrust, there may be great doubt, and yet they say, "Continue to
work at it. Continue to proceed." And even though there's this
frustration and there's this anger and there's this mistrust, the
contacts between the two sides continue. Last week Simon Peres and
Chairman Arafat got together and they forged a set of understandings
designed to restore some level of tranquility and recreate a basis for
reconciliation so that peace could again be pursued. There's obviously
a lot of work to be done to reestablish that environment of
tranquility. There's a lot of work that needs to be done to create a
bridge from a psychology of confrontation and rage to a psychology of
peacemaking. And yet as I've said they see the need to continue to do
it.
Now why do they cling to that? Why is it so essential for them not to
give up the effort and give up the hope? This is a rhetorical
question, because I have the answer. There is a fundamental reality
that has not been changed by the last five weeks. That fundamental
reality is that Israelis and Palestinians live next to each other.
They are neighbors. It is an immutable reality. It cannot be changed.
You cannot wish one side or the other to go away, because they won't.
History and geography have destined them to be neighbors and they're
going to remain as neighbors. So they have a choice. The choice is to
live in perpetual struggle with perpetual pain, with perpetual
victims, with shattered lives and shattered families and shattered
dreams--or to live in peaceful coexistence. At Oslo, and Eli gave a
little bit of the history, at least when it was launched in September
13, at Oslo a choice was made for peaceful coexistence.
Now one thing is very clear. Translating that choice into reality has
proven very difficult and it has taken much longer than they thought.
They envisioned a five-year timetable, and we're in the seventh year.
They have created through the Oslo process a series of different
agreements based on a bargain. The fundamental bargain of Oslo was
recognition for Israel and security and the fundamental bargain for
the Palestinians was recognition and a pathway to achieve their
aspirations of independence.
They have negotiated five partial peace agreements on the way to what
their objective is. The first agreement was in May 1994, although it
was supposed to have been achieved by December of 1993. That created
the Gaza-Jericho authority. The Palestinians established the
Palestinian Authority in Gaza and Jericho at that time. The second
agreement was the interim agreement at the end of September 1995. That
extended the Palestinian authority to the key cities in the West Bank
with the exception of Hebron. It also created, as you said, a process
that was supposed to produce an evolution of Israeli authority to
Palestinian authority, a gradual handover through three phases of
further redeployment of territory that was to be worked out over time.
The Rabin assassination came, the four bombs in nine days came,
Benjamin Netanyahu was elected as Prime Minister, and there was
another agreement that didn't come until January of 1997, the Hebron
agreement which brought the Palestinians authority over 80 percent of
Hebron and which did work out a timetable, or a timeline, on further
redeployments. The Hebron part of that agreement was implemented. The
balance of further redeployments was something that didn't get
resolved until the Wye agreement in 1998. That was supposed to
produce, again, a balance of further redeployment for security. That
wasn't fully implemented until the Sharm [al-Shaikh] agreement, which
came with Ehud Barak and Chairman Arafat. But that agreement not only
produced the first two phases of further redeployment, it also
produced a commitment to achieve a framework agreement on all the
permanent status issues by February and a complete agreement on all of
the permanent status issues by September of this year. You may note
we're in November of this year.
It has been very difficult to negotiate these agreements and this year
we got in for the first time, to dealing with the existential
question, which go to the heart of identity and security for the two
sides. In the course of this year, the ability to negotiate on that
was clearly limited. We watched the negotiations, took part in the
negotiations, prodded the negotiators, did everything we could through
the spring and into the summer. One of the things that we discovered
is that on the issues, the core issues that were being negotiated,
like Jerusalem, like settlements, like borders, like refugees, on
those core issues it was very hard below the level of the leaders to
negotiate at a level other than slogans. Now, slogans are fine.
Slogans defend positions. They encapsulate beliefs. But you don't make
peace on the basis of slogans. You don't make peace through a
reconciliation of slogans. You make peace by negotiating differences.
You make peace by reconciling different interests.
During the course of this year we faced two realities. One reality was
we had to find a way to overcome their approach to the permanent
status issues so that they didn't negotiate on the basis of slogans.
We also realized that there was a level of frustration on both sides
about a process that was in its seventh year. For the Israelis, the
sense that you would have another partial agreement was completely
unacceptable. Why? Because they felt that the partial agreements
constituted the equivalent of slicing up a salami. They would give
more land, but what would they get in return? Would they get an end of
grievance, would they get an end of claims, would they get an end of
conflict? Not if it was a partial agreement. But the Palestinians were
just as much against the ideal of a partial agreement, because they
were in the seventh year of the process, and each partial agreement
never seemed to be fully implemented. The promise of the process never
seemed to be realized, the nature of Israeli control didn't seem to
change, and from a Palestinian perspective, they wanted an agreement
that would in fact produce what this process was supposed to produce
in terms of responding to their aspirations.
Both from the standpoint of being able to negotiate beyond the level
of generalities and slogans and from the standpoint of realizing that
another partial agreement was not going to be accepted by either side,
we realized that we would have to do something. That's basically what
led to Camp David. At Camp David we did change the dynamic, we did
break the stalemate and we did break the taboo on dealing with the
hardest of the hard issues. For the first time in this process both
sides dissected these issues, examined these issues. They laid out to
each other what was possible and wasn't possible. They laid out to
each other what they saw as being essential. They gave their
explanations in a way they had never done before and progress was made
on every single issue, but no deal was reached. In the aftermath of
Camp David we continued to make the effort that led up to what I
described before, the work at the end of September. Now we still had
gaps. We had not overcome the gaps, but there was a sense of
possibility. More than that, there was an understanding that the core
needs of each side were clearer to each other, and certainly to us,
than they had ever been before and ultimately the key is, can you
reconcile the core needs, not what's desired, but what's fundamental.
Now if you ask me the question "Can you do that in the abstract?" My
answer is "Yes." If you ask me the question "Can you do it in the
aftermath of five weeks, the past five weeks, of violence and a cycle
of violence and a cycle of grievance that has gotten worse?" my answer
is "I don't know." But I can tell you this: There are certain basic
truths that have to guide this process if it is going to succeed. The
first truth is that this is going to have to be a peace not only of
negotiators and leaders. It's going to have to be a peace of peoples
and publics. One of the things we've seen in the last five weeks is
what happens when the only people who are engaged in the process are
the elite and when you don't engage the publics. One of the problems
with Oslo, even though it was recognized, was that there has not been
a people-to-people dimension that has been significant. Somehow,
someway that has to change. This, by the way, is not a new theme. In
fact, I think when I spoke [to the Council] in June of 1999 I talked
about the importance of people-to-people.
We have not been able to translate that into a new reality. If what
we're seeing now doesn't impress upon us the need to do it, nothing
will. There has to be something that is done differently in terms of
breaking down the barriers between people, there has to be something
that is done differently that changes the stereotypes that exist
within the publics on each side, and in the near term there's going to
have to be something else. I described a sense of grievances that each
side feels, that each side perceives, that each side describes to us,
but they shouldn't be describing those grievances to us. They should
be describing those grievances to each other. There should be
discussion groups now that deal with all walks of life between
Israelis and Palestinians so that they can talk with each other and
not just at each other. So they can explain why they feel the anger
they feel, why they feel the sense of betrayal they feel. It is not
enough to tell others. They're going to have to tell each other, and
that's one of the first truths. There's going to have to be a peace of
peoples and not just of leaders.
A second truth about this process: There is no solution that can be
imposed from without or from within. We cannot impose a solution. It
will not endure. Nobody has a stake in a solution that is imposed from
the outside. The first opportunity to break it, it will be broken. So
there is no such thing as the imposition of a solution. But it's also
true for the parties: it can't be imposed from within. The Israelis
cannot impose a settlement on the Palestinians. There is no military
solution to this problem. There's only a political solution. But the
Palestinians cannot impose a solution on the Israelis. The intifada
will not achieve Palestinian aspirations. It will delay the
achievement of those aspirations.
There's a third truth, which is related to the second one. There's no
unilateral way to resolve this conflict. A unilateral declaration of
statehood is not going to resolve this conflict. Where would the
borders of such a state be? Where would the powers of sovereignty be?
You'll have constant tests and you'll have constant confrontation. It
is equally true that there is no unilateral separation that can
produce an agreement because again you'll have points of friction that
would become constant tests between the two sides. There has to be a
mutuality. Unilateralism will not resolve this conflict, but a mutual
approach that in the end responds to the needs of both sides can and
ultimately will because there is not an alternative and because they
know there is not an alternative.
I can tell you that the basic outline of what was being developed by
us at Camp David in the aftermath does respond to the needs of both
sides. What I can't tell you is whether we can have an agreement on
that basis in one month or two months, in one year or two years, or in
five years. What I can tell you is that the basic outcome will be the
same. The only difference will be that we'll have a lot more victims.
For someone like me it's unconscionable not to continue to make the
effort when you know that that's one of the truths that we deal with.
We will continue to make the effort because it's the right thing to
do. We will continue to make the effort but we'll make the effort not
with an air of unreality and not with an illusion. In the end, if one
side or the other isn't ready, it doesn't matter what we do. It
matters what they do. It matters what they decide. So we will keep up
the effort, we'll see what is possible, but in the end this is a peace
that Israelis and Palestinians must make. If they're ready it will
happen. If they're not ready, it won't. I'll stop here and take your
questions.
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