INQUIRER (THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN)
BRAD NORINGTON
As a former top US diplomat who through the years has been accused of being too close to the Jewish cause in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, Dennis Ross does not seem one-sided. He readily accepts Israel has an “achilles heel”.
“I do agree with that,” Ross says, referring to Israel’s expansion of settlements into areas of the occupied West Bank not contemplated previously.
It disturbs this former Middle East co-ordinator for Bill Clinton and special adviser to Barack Obama that the Israeli government has pushed housing developments well beyond the main settlement blocs on land occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War.
According to Ross, the main settlement blocs that take up about 4 per cent of occupied West Bank territory could conceivably stay in Israeli hands as part of any future peace deal.
But the reach of newer settlements has fuelled angry claims among Palestinians and their supporters that Israel’s incumbent government is not interested in land handovers or swaps, and not serious about the proposed creation of a neighbouring Palestinian state with defined borders.
During the past fortnight Ross has visited Australia as a guest of two local Jewish community groups, the Melbourne-based Anti-Defamation Commission and Gandel Philanthropy, when debate over the Middle East conflict is fiercer than it has been for years.
Ill feeling about outlying Jewish settlements, poor living conditions for Palestinians and outright rejection of a two-state solution by some members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet have combined to fuel justifications within Australia and abroad for the immediate recognition of a state of Palestine.
On this last point, Ross disagrees; he says recognition now would be a mistake. Yes, Ross says, he knows about the trauma of forced evictions for 8500 Jewish settlers when Israel handed control of Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005. Israel’s Gaza disengagement is a lesson, he says, for just how difficult it would be to evict 100,000 Jewish settlers from the West Bank, many of them resisting all the way. And so a powerful reason, too, for not adding to the conundrum by sending more Jews beyond the main settlement blocs.
Ross believes maybe a quarter of West Bank settlers would agree to leave voluntarily in any eventual land swap deal. Perhaps another quarter would go with incentives. Moving the rest — many of them Russian Jews and other immigrants who believe Tel Aviv has settled them with guarantees of certainty about their future — could be impossible. Still, Ross says the intense focus on settlements ignores how the push for a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has sunk to its lowest ebb for other reasons.
“It diverts attention away from what I think are fundamental realities,” Ross tells Inquirer. When Donald Trump recently tweeted that a lot of interesting things were happening, Ross says the US President was “seeing some things that I don’t see”. Ross sees a possible path for a two-state solution but does not see it happening anytime soon. He asks how it is reasonable to expect peace when Hamas, regarded as a terrorist organisation, has controlled Gaza since 2007 yet will not recognise Israel’s right to exist and remains committed to its destruction.
Mahmoud Abbas’s seemingly more moderate Fatah party runs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and is deeply split with Hamas in Gaza. Yet, asks the seasoned diplomat, how genuine is Abbas and his party about a resolution when they will not acknowledge any maps of what a Palestinian state may look like?
Even more telling, how is it that the West Bank leadership still funds the Martyrs Foundation? As Ross reminds, this organisation pays money to the families of terrorists who kill Israelis. Such rewards look like tacit approval — hardly the recipe for mutual acceptance.
Hamas is the biggest impediment. “You can’t wish away Hamas,” Ross says. “Israel is not going to go into Gaza and remove Hamas … Egypt is not going to get rid of Hamas. The Palestinian Authority is incapable of getting rid of Hamas. So the idea of a two-state outcome right now? Nobody can produce that.”
Neither does Ross see it feasible that a Palestinian state could be a two-step process, starting with the West Bank and Gaza joining later. The idea was put to me in the past fortnight by former Gillard foreign minister and ex-NSW Labor premier Bob Carr, once a champion of Israel but now leading the campaign inside his party for immediate recognition of Israel.
“I think it is a big mistake to try to produce it without Gaza,” Ross explains. “First, the Palestinians won’t go along because then they’re dividing themselves. They already see themselves as the weakest party. Even if you could, theoretically, you create an enormous incentive in Gaza to disrupt any deal.”
Rising support for Hamas in the West Bank could be lethal for Abbas’s Fatah party. When Hamas took control of Gaza, Abbas loyalists were thrown off high-rise buildings.
Ross suggests thinking about the creation of a Palestinian state from the Israeli public’s perspective. In 2000, Israel’s government was prepared to go further than ever in efforts to secure a peace deal.
“The Palestinian response was not only rejection but violence,” says Ross. “They (Israel) withdrew from Lebanon in May 2000. And what they got for it was a lot of Hezbollah rockets. They withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and what they got for it was three conflicts with thousands of rockets.
“They look at Syria and they see a humanitarian catastrophe. They see what’s gone on in Iraq. They see conflicts that look unlimited. They see if you’re weak you’re basically dead.”
Meanwhile, Iran is proposing a factory to make missiles in next-door Lebanon, where Hezbollah already has up to 150,000 rockets. “So that’s a pretty daunting landscape,” Ross says. “And then they say, ‘You want to add an uncertain state next to us? What if it becomes a failed state? What if it becomes a base for Hamas and ISIS (Islamic State)?’ I mean, looking at it from an Israeli standpoint … the idea that you would be surrendering security responsibility would seem irresponsible.”
The only countervailing point, as Ross sees it, is that if nothing changes then Israel is likely to become a binational Jewish and Arab state. Israelis do not want this outcome either. If Israel is the state of the Jewish people now, not counting Gaza, then Ross says the split is a Jewish majority of 61-39 per cent. But based on population growth trends, it will be 54-46 per cent in a decade.
Ross says: “It then looks less a state of the Jewish people and more like a binational state. The next generation of Palestinians are saying, ‘Let’s just leave Israel where it is. Let’s just have one person, one vote.’ That is also a threat to Israel. And so the debate in Israel is between those who say ‘We have to survive, and that means we stay where we are’ versus those who say ‘Yes, we have to survive, but it means we can’t lose our character in the process.’ ”
Israel’s future, says Ross, is about balancing its fundamental need for security, which no credible leader can ignore. During his Australian visit, Ross has seen up close a campaign within the ALP to pass a resolution later this month at its NSW conference urging the next federal Labor government to recognise Palestine — without qualifications or conditions. If passed as expected with support from the ALP left and a majority of the NSW right, the vote would break with 40 years of full-throated support of Israel. It would build momentum for change at a national level next year. Bob Hawke, Kevin Rudd and Gareth Evans have spoken out in favour. But Ross argues recognition now is deeply flawed.
“The Palestinian national movement has always been a movement focused on symbols far more than substance,” he says. “They haven’t built institutions of statehood. You don’t see a rule of law. Getting a flag at the UN is more important than building an infrastructure of a state.
“One of the basic problems is if you mislead the Palestinians into thinking ‘The international community will solve the problem for us’, then ‘we don’t have to do a thing — we don’t have to deal with Israel, we don’t have to negotiate. If we just wait long enough the international community will come and resolve this.’ ” Ross commends former Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayyad for his idea of taking responsibility and “building a state from the ground up so no one could deny it”. Fayyad was forced out in 2013.
Ross grew up in a non-religious Californian household, the son of a Catholic father and Jewish mother. At 19, inspired by the Six-Day War, he became religiously Jewish. After the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, Ross co-founded a synagogue at Rockville, Maryland, called Kol Shalom — “voice of peace”.
During an impressive career, Ross has worked for three Democrat and two Republican presidents. He has been instrumental in diplomatic breakthroughs from Syria’s Golan Heights withdrawal to Camp David accords. He helped facilitate the historic White House handshake between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israel’s Yitzak Rabin.
Seven years later, in 2000, Ross saw the second intifada that left 4000 Palestinians and 1100 Israelis dead. A lasting peace cannot happen if it creates a platform for attacks on Israel, he says. Despite the present low point, he believes a two-state solution is possible but depends on the will of both the Israeli and Palestinian populations, which is sadly lacking.
Ross says the US can be an effective broker because of its unique relationship with Israel — but with the Palestinians as well. He explains: “Ultimately it is the ability to influence Israel that is going to move things — but at the same time being able to influence the Palestinians, because they need a relationship with the United States.”