The Lost Steps
Avi Shlaim
The Nation, 30 August 2004
American policy-makers may be divided into two schools of thought on
the Arab-Israeli conflict: the evenhanded and the Israel-first. The
evenhanded school seeks to play the role of the honest broker in
pushing the two sides toward a settlement of the dispute between them.
It believes that America's most vital interests lie in the
oil-producing Arabian Gulf, and it is reluctant to jeopardize those
interests by being too close to Israel. The Israel-first school, on the
other hand, supports a special relationship with the Jewish state,
hailing it as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism.
Members of this school also seek a settlement of the dispute between
Israel and its neighbors. But their starting point is that Israel has
to assume serious risks on the road to peace and that America should
therefore give it all the support it needs in order to feel confident
enough to assume those risks. George H.W. Bush was arguably the most
evenhanded President in American history. Bill Clinton was by far the
most pro-Israel President until George W. Bush's rise to power. An
Israeli newspaper once described Clinton as the last Zionist. In long
historical perspective, however, George W. Bush may yet emerge with a
stronger claim to this title.
Dennis Ross was the chief Middle East peace negotiator in the
Republican Administration of George H.W. Bush and in the two terms of
Bill Clinton's presidency. Ross was particularly close to Secretary of
State James Baker, so the Democratic victory in the 1992 election was
expected to spell the end of his diplomatic career. But Clinton wanted
Ross to stay on as head of the American Middle East team under
Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Consequently, Ross remained a
key player in this political process for the next eight years. He thus
has the unique distinction of having served in a prominent capacity
both in the most evenhanded American administration since the war and
in one of the most ardently pro-Israel ones.
Despite Bush the elder's pedigree, Ross belongs fairly and squarely in
the pro-Israel camp. His premises, position on the Middle East and
policy preferences are identical to those of the Israel-first school.
Indeed, it is difficult to think of an American official who is more
quintessentially Israel-first in his outlook than Dennis Ross.
In his memoir Ross recounts in minute detail his personal
involvement in the Middle East peace process from 1988 to January 2001.
This was an eventful period in the history of the region, which saw the
Gulf War, the Madrid peace conference, bilateral Arab-Israeli
negotiations under American auspices in Washington, the Oslo Accord
between Israel and the PLO, the conclusion of the Jordanian-Israeli
peace treaty, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the rise and fall of
Benjamin Netanyahu, the ill-fated Camp David summit and the outbreak of
the al-Aqsa intifada. There were also persistent though ultimately
unsuccessful efforts to achieve a breakthrough on the Syrian track, the
high points being the meetings between Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister
Farouk al-Shara in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and between Bill
Clinton and President Hafez al-Assad in Geneva.
During the period covered in this book, there was thus a great deal
of peace process and Dennis Ross was the peace processor par
excellence. Unfortunately, the substantive achievements of this process
were not so impressive, for there was more process than peace. The two
major achievements--Oslo and the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty--were
negotiated directly between the parties themselves with virtually no
American involvement. Ross indirectly acknowledges the failure to
achieve comprehensive peace in the Middle East by calling his book The Missing Peace.
The main point and the real value of the book are indicated in the
subtitle--it is the inside story of the struggle for peace, of the
failures as well as the successes, of personalities and policies, of
countless crises and confrontations, of backstage maneuvers and media
spin, of betrayals and brinkmanship, of the high points and the low
points.
About Ross's dedication and commitment to the cause of peace there
can be no doubt, but his influence over the actual course of events is
more difficult to measure. Yossi Beilin, the militant Israeli moderate
and one of the main architects of the Oslo Accord, has recently
published a book titled The Path to Geneva: The Quest for a Permanent Agreement, 1996-2004.
"Until Clinton's very last day in office," writes Beilin, "Ross wanted
to believe that it was possible to reach an agreement. The failure of
the negotiations with the Syrians and with the Palestinians was the
failure of Dennis Ross." This verdict is surely too harsh. The fact
that Ross kept up his frantic efforts to broker an agreement literally
until his last day in office does not necessarily saddle him with the
responsibility for the failure. More senior players were involved, and
it was their choices that determined the final outcome.
Some of the controversy surrounding Ross is related to the fact that
he is Jewish. Not so subtle questions were sometimes raised, especially
in the Arab world, about his being Jewish and its effect on his
fairness as a negotiator. Ross himself tells us that his faith was
never an issue with the Presidents and Secretaries of State with whom
he worked most closely. This is obvious: Had his faith been a problem,
Ross's employers would not have appointed him in the first place or
kept him on following the transition from a Republican to a Democratic
administration. On the other hand, he tells us, some right-wing
American Jews have felt that Israel is in such danger that it should
never be subjected to pressure or criticism. When the Bush-Baker team
put pressure on the government of Yitzhak Shamir after the Gulf War,
Ross received hate mail branding him a self-hating Jew. The gibe could
not be further off the mark, for he is in fact a very proud Jew. One
can only sympathize with Ross for the crassness of some of his American
co-religionists. As Ross himself points out, "In the Jewish tradition
there are few higher callings than to be a seeker of peace--a Rodef
Shalom." Some of Ross's supporters in the Jewish community described
him as a Rodef Shalom, and for him there could be no greater accolade.
Arab attitudes to Ross, however, merit a more
serious consideration than he allows. His relations with Yasir Arafat
were always very strained. Arafat saw Ross as an arrogant man who was
too close to the Israelis. In his bad moments Arafat considered Ross to
be a real enemy and at one point went as far as to refuse to meet with
him. Hafez al-Assad criticized Ross rather more obliquely for not being
positive enough in his attitude toward Syria. The Arab media habitually
portrays American policy toward the region as biased in favor of Israel
as a result of the influence of the Jewish lobby and Jewish officials,
and Ross was held out as a prime example. Other factors, such as the
democratic nature of Israel and the lack of democracy in the Arab
world, are conveniently forgotten. Nevertheless, Arab leaders'
perception of Ross as partial to Israel complicated America's task as
the manager of the peace process.
Since Ross was the architect of the first Bush Administration's
policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict and the chief peace negotiator
of the Clinton Administration, his assumptions were important. Ross's
entire approach to peacemaking is premised on a strong US-Israeli
relationship. Given Israel's small size and vulnerability, he argues,
it must feel secure if it is to make concessions for peace. Israel
would not feel safe enough to give up territory if it doubted the
American commitment to its security. Similarly, the Arab world would
not accommodate itself to Israel's existence if it had reason to
question the staying power of the American commitment to Israel. While
peace must ultimately be between the two parties and must therefore be
directly negotiated by them, Israel must feel secure if it is to take
risks for peace. This, in a nutshell, is Ross's philosophy of
peacemaking.
There are three main problems with this approach to peacemaking. In the
first place, it puts all the emphasis on Israel's concern for security
and overlooks the Arab concern for justice. Given this approach, it is
hardly surprising that the Arabs felt Ross was too sympathetic to
Israel's needs and insufficiently attuned to theirs. Second, the
Israeli concept of security is so inflated and one-sided that it
amounts to a denial of the legitimate security concerns of the other
side. Third, the approach advocated by Ross is wide open to abuse by
Israel. Israel can absorb any amount of American aid without
reciprocating with concessions to the Arabs. In short, Ross's mistake
lies in assuming that a confident Israel would embark on the road to
peace. History does not support this conclusion.
No one was more confident of Israel's military power than Moshe Dayan,
who served as defense minister from 1967 to 1974. Yet he was unwilling
to assume risks for the sake of peace. Dayan frankly admitted that he
would rather have "Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than peace without
Sharm el-Sheikh" (a strategic point in the Sinai Peninsula, captured
from Egypt in the 1967 war and later returned to Egypt in the Camp
David I agreement). Opportunities for peace during that period were
missed not because Israel felt insecure but because America did not
lean hard enough on its ally to return the territories it had conquered
in 1967. Dayan used to say: "Our American friends offer us money, arms,
and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the
advice." The lesson for peacemaking is obvious: support for Israel
should be made conditional on heeding American advice.
Before embarking on the detailed narrative of the peace process, Ross
outlines the context and the contours of the conflict. This takes the
form of a long chapter on "Why Israelis, Arabs, and Palestinians See
the World the Way They Do." Ross's account of the Israeli narrative is
predictably better informed and more sympathetic than his account of
the Arab and Palestinian narratives. He repeats, for example, the hoary
claim that on the morrow of its spectacular military victory in June
1967, Israel offered to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan
Heights in return for peace with Egypt and Syria, only to be confronted
with the "three no's" of the Arab League summit at Khartoum: no
recognition, no negotiation and no peace with the State of Israel. In
fact, no offer was ever made, and the process of colonization quickly
got under way. Ever since then, Jewish settlements on occupied Arab
land have been the main obstacle to peace in the Middle East. The three
no's of Khartoum were the excuse, not the cause, for Israel's
relentless intransigence in the post-1967 era.
Ross is right to stress that the two sides have a fundamentally
different approach to peace negotiations. The Israeli mindset focused
on practical, highly detailed matters, and on the security dimensions.
By contrast, the Arab and Palestinian mindsets were drawn to
principles, generalities and their broad claims: Return their land, and
peace--or at least the absence of war--would result. The onus to start
the process was on Israel, not on them, because it was Israel that had
occupied their land. From these very different starting points stemmed
the different ideas about peace negotiations, their purpose and the
tactics that should be employed.
Ross's involvement in the story began with the
peace conference that James Baker convened in Madrid in the wake of the
Gulf War. It was the mother of all Middle East peace conferences and a
real landmark. Prior to Madrid the question was: Could negotiations
ever take place? Afterward, it was: Could the negotiations ever produce
peace? The conference itself was in fact more significant at the
symbolic than at the practical level. It ended the taboo on direct
negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. It also established
the ground rules: bilateral negotiations on the basis of UN Resolutions
242 and 338 and the principle of land for peace that they incorporated.
After the conference, as always, the slow coach was Israel. Yitzhak
Shamir was dragged to Madrid kicking and screaming, and as long as he
remained prime minister, the bilateral talks went nowhere slowly.
With the rise to power of Yitzhak Rabin's Labor government in June
1992, the American peace team was back in business. Within a matter of
months, Bill Clinton was firmly ensconced in the White House. Both
leaders tended to favor a "Syria-first" strategy, believing that a deal
with Syria would change the entire strategic landscape of the region in
a way that a deal with the Palestinians could not. Rabin was prepared
to contemplate a complete withdrawal from the Golan Heights in return
for complete peace and security. This conditional offer became known as
"the pocket," as it was placed in Warren Christopher's pocket.
Christopher embarked on a shuttle between Jerusalem and Damascus that
brought the two sides to the brink of peace. But the final terms that
Assad offered fell short of Rabin's expectations, so he accelerated the
secret talks with the PLO that culminated in the Oslo Accord.
The implicit bargain was statehood for security. A historic
threshold had been crossed. Having been upstaged by the Norwegians, the
American peace processors did not sulk in their tents; they immediately
rallied round to promote the PLO-Israel accord, to elevate it and to
generate momentum behind it. Clinton succeeded brilliantly in turning
the signing ceremony of the Declaration of Principles into the most
spectacular diplomatic event of the 1990s. A year later, Rabin
surprised Clinton again by presenting him with a peace agreement with
Jordan on a silver platter. But a year after that an Israeli extremist,
Yigal Amir, assassinated Rabin, dealing a body blow to the peace
process.
Benjamin Netanyahu's victory over Shimon Peres at the polls in May
1996 was most unwelcome to the Americans. Clinton had told Rabin that
if the prime minister ran risks for peace, the United States would act
to minimize those risks. Now that Rabin was dead, Clinton felt
responsible for preserving his legacy. Netanyahu posed an unmistakable
threat to this legacy. As prime minister, Netanyahu was not as bad as
people had expected--he was much, much worse. In his first meeting with
the President, at which Ross was present, "Netanyahu was nearly
insufferable, lecturing and telling us how to deal with the Arabs. He
would respect the Oslo agreement because a democratically elected
government in Israel had adopted it, but there would have to be
adjustments and new negotiations over parts of it." After Netanyahu
left the room, Clinton observed, "He thinks he is the superpower and we
are here to do whatever he requires." No one, according to Ross,
disagreed with that assessment.
Following Netanyahu's visit, Ross traveled to the region to brief
Arab leaders. "My visits with both Assad and Arafat were successful,"
he writes, "but Netanyahu--believing that his policy of talking tough
but not doing anything was working--squandered what I delivered."
Netanyahu also strained relations with Jordan to the breaking point for
no apparent reason, provoking an uncharacteristically emotional and
personal attack from King Hussein. In a meeting at the White House, the
King accused Netanyahu of threatening the hopes for peace of Arabs and
Israelis alike with his refusal to respect agreements, immaturity and
poor judgment.
Ehud Barak's 1999 victory over Netanyahu raised expectations sky-high
in Israel, among the Palestinians and within the Clinton
Administration. Whereas Netanyahu only scored points, Barak promised to
solve problems. Clinton said that he waited for Barak's arrival in
Washington like a child waiting for a new toy. The American peace
processors were back in business. Clinton hoped that Barak would
fulfill all of Israel's outstanding commitments to further troop
withdrawals from the West Bank and then proceed without delay to
negotiations on a permanent-status agreement with the Palestinians. But
he yielded to Barak's insistence on aiming for a deal with Syria first.
Barak and Assad were realists. They knew that what mattered to the
Syrians was the land, and that what mattered most to the Israelis was
security and water. There was thus a basis for a deal, for "a peace of
the brave," as Assad liked to call it. Barak's initial approach to the
Syrians, however, was based on a faulty premise: that he did not have
to reaffirm Rabin's conditional commitment to withdraw to the lines of
June 4, 1967, which would place Syria on the northeastern shore of the
Sea of Galilee. Barak wanted Israeli sovereignty over the lake and a
strip of about 400 yards to the east of it.
When Ross accompanied Madeleine Albright to Damascus in December 1999,
it was clear that something had changed. Assad put forward ideas but
did not impose any conditions for resuming negotiations with Israel.
This paved the way for a meeting between Barak and Farouk al-Shara at
Shepherdstown, the following month. At Shepherdstown the Syrians were
willing to go forward, but Barak held back. Unbeknownst to the
Americans, Barak received the results of a poll that led him to believe
that full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan would arouse widespread
domestic opposition. He therefore decided to hold fast regardless of
the Syrian moves. It was then, Ross later came to believe, that the
deal was probably lost--and with it the possibility of an Israeli
withdrawal from Lebanon within the framework of an understanding with
Syria rather than under pressure from Hezbollah.
Clinton made one more effort to broker a deal by inviting Assad to a
summit meeting in Geneva on March 26, 2000. Prior to the meeting
Clinton elicited from Barak his bottom lines. At the meeting, Clinton
announced with great drama that Barak, based on "a commonly agreed
border," was prepared to withdraw to the June 4 line as part of a peace
agreement. Ross tells us that Assad was simply not interested. But his
account of the summit is inaccurate and unreliable. Instead of acting
as an honest broker, Ross cooperated with Barak in an attempt to trick
Assad. Assad's position was consistent and unswerving: He insisted all
along on full withdrawal to the June 4 line in an exchange for full
peace, nothing more and nothing less. Barak, on the other hand, played
games, using Clinton to intimate to Assad that the Israelis were going
to offer this if he came to Geneva. But when everyone assembled at
Geneva, the proposal that Barak presented still had Israeli control
over the whole of the Sea of Galilee. Barak did not offer to withdraw
to the June 4 line. He did offer territory elsewhere in exchange for
keeping control of the shoreline, but Assad considered this
unacceptable. He claimed that "the lake has always been our lake; it
was never theirs.... There were no Jews to the east of the lake." He
could not last in power for one day, he said, if he were to agree to
what Barak was asking.
The meeting in Geneva thus ended abruptly in high-visibility failure.
The most charitable explanation of this failure is that a
misunderstanding had occurred: Assad expected to have his needs met as
he defined them, and he simply shut down when he saw that the President
had not delivered what he expected from Barak. Ross, however, suggests
a different explanation. He thinks that Assad, conscious of his failing
health, was preoccupied with insuring a smooth succession for his son
Bashar. A deal with Israel was no longer on his agenda. This
explanation, however, ignores two facts: Assad had prepared his public
at home for an imminent agreement, and he brought a large team of
experts to Geneva, including military officials. As they left the
conference room, Assad went up to Ross and grasped him by the upper
arm. Ross reciprocated this silent gesture of friendship. Though Assad
did not seem weak, Ross noticed as he grasped his upper arm that there
was nothing there-- no muscle, no fat, no tissue, just bone. This
seemed to confirm the reports about the Syrian dictator's declining
health. But whatever the cause of Assad's intransigence, the Syrian
track was dead.
Having left the Palestinians to twist in the wind, Barak now had no
choice but to resume negotiations with them. Once again he asked for
American help, and once again he expected the Americans to do
everything his way. As Yossi Beilin testifies, Barak called Clinton
often to comment, criticize and complain. Like his predecessor, Barak
treated the President of the United States like a clerk and got
impatient when his orders were not carried out immediately. Many of the
technical details with which Barak burdened the President could have
been safely left to the subministerial level. Barak is a most peculiar
individual, combining high intelligence with a complete absence of
interpersonal skills. In the army they used to call him "little
Napoleon" both because of the physical resemblance--short and stocky
with a pear-shaped head--and the authoritarian personality. His style
of negotiation is best described as the extension of war by other
means, or peace by ultimatum.
Barak refused to fulfill Netanyahu's commitment to a third
redeployment on the West Bank. This undermined Palestinian trust in
him. Brushing aside their protests, Barak insisted on a summit meeting
between the top leaders to conclude a final-status agreement, and
Clinton obliged. Arafat felt that a summit was premature and that if it
failed, it would make matters worse. He suggested lower-level talks to
close the gaps and lay the groundwork for the summit. Clinton persuaded
Arafat to attend the summit and promised him that if it failed, no one
would be blamed: There would be no finger-pointing. The summit meeting
was duly convened at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland,
and lasted fourteen days, from July 11 to 25, 2000. Ross provides an
exceptionally detailed and gripping account of what transpired at the
summit, day by day, almost blow by blow. His account demonstrates
complete mastery of the issues, considerable psychological insight and
a keen sense of drama.
Barak emerges from Ross's account as a man who played his cards very
close to his chest, driven by conflicting impulses and utterly
exhausting and exasperating to deal with. To be fair to Barak, he did
bring to Camp David a set of ideas that touched on all the most
sensitive issues at the core of the conflict: Palestinian statehood,
borders, Jerusalem and refugees. His great fear was that Arafat would
pocket whatever he offered and demand more, forcing Barak to move again
beyond his red lines. He could contemplate withdrawal from 90 percent
of the West Bank, but he was worried that the Palestinians would retain
the animating grievances of the conflict--Jerusalem and the right of
return of the 1948 refugees. In short, Barak was worried that Israel
would come under pressure to give up a great deal but get nothing in
return. His mood was darkly apocalyptic, seeing everything in
life-and-death terms. So stressed was Barak that he choked on a peanut
and required the Heimlich maneuver to resume breathing. Barak's way of
dealing with these anxieties, however, was self-defeating. He would not
accept anything that he did not hear directly from Arafat, yet he
refused to meet Arafat. In the two weeks at Camp David the two leaders
did not have one serious face-to-face discussion. This left Clinton
with the unenviable task of serving as a messenger between the two
taciturn and surly leaders.
On the seventh day of the summit, Clinton's
patience was exhausted and he flipped his lid. Barak gave Clinton a
paper that he wanted him to present to the Palestinians as his own. Not
only did the paper pose questions as if the Palestinians had a test
they must pass, but it walked back some of the key moves that Shlomo
Ben-Ami, Barak's foreign minister, had made earlier. Clinton exploded:
"You want to present these ideas directly to Arafat, to the
Palestinians, you go ahead and see if you can sell it. There is no way
I can. This is not real. This is not serious. I went to Shepherdstown
and was told nothing by you for four days. I went to Geneva and felt
like a wooden Indian doing your bidding." His voice rising and his face
red, Clinton shouted, "I will not let it happen here. I will simply not
do it." This outburst evidently had a sobering effect, for the next day
Barak finally presented his bottom lines. Clinton duly conveyed the new
ideas to Arafat, underlining their historic significance. Were they a
basis for concluding an agreement, yes or no? The answer came back: No.
Nor did Arafat make any counterproposal. This sealed the fate of the
summit. Clinton promptly laid all the blame for the failure of the
summit at Arafat's door, breaking his promise that there would be no
finger-pointing in the event of failure.
With Clinton's support, Barak's version of events rapidly gained
ground, particularly in Israel and the United States. According to this
version, Israel made the most generous offer imaginable at Camp David,
but Arafat rejected it flatly and made a deliberate decision to return
to violence. This allegedly demonstrated that there is no Palestinian
partner for peace. In The Missing Peace
Dennis Ross supports this version, sometimes implicitly and sometimes
explicitly. During the crisis at Camp David, he muses that Arafat may
simply not be up to making a deal: "He is a revolutionary; he has made
being a victim an art form; he can't redefine himself into someone who
must end all claims and truly end the conflict."
The Barak-Ross version of the collapse of the Camp David summit is
simplistic, selective and self-serving. It is also contradicted by
Ross's own account. If he and Barak didn't think that Arafat was up to
doing a deal, why did they convene the summit and pressure Arafat to
attend it? Didn't the intimate relationship with the Israelis cast some
doubt on America's claim to be acting as an honest broker? Was there no
basis for Arafat's suspicion of an Israeli-American conspiracy to
corner him at Camp David? Arafat has many faults, but he has
demonstrated his ability to make historic choices, notably by opting
for a two-state solution in 1988 and by signing the Oslo Accord in
1993. By contrast, Barak had been unhappy about the accord with the
PLO; he abstained in the cabinet vote on the 1995 Oslo II agreement;
and he had never been a member of what Yossi Beilin calls "the peace
mafia" in Israel. The most fundamental cause of the failure of the Camp
David summit lies not in Arafat's psychological makeup but in Barak's
package. On the one hand, he offered only limited concessions on
Jerusalem and the refugees, and on the other hand he insisted on an
absolute end to the conflict. He insisted that the Palestinians sign on
the dotted line that they had no further claims against the State of
Israel. This remorseless insistence on finality was in fact part of the
problem, not the solution. Peace by ultimatum did not work.
Barak's package was a reasonable basis for an interim agreement, not
for the final end of the conflict, which he wanted so badly. Israelis
like to demonize Arafat, but no Palestinian leader, however moderate,
could accept the package on offer at Camp David. Arafat, in fact,
represents the broadest consensus within the Palestinian community.
That is the source of his legitimacy and the secret of his strength.
Arafat's real mistake was not to reject the much-vaunted "generous
offer" but to encourage, or at least to tolerate, the resort to
violence from his side following the collapse of the Oslo peace
process. The Palestinian resort to violence in the al-Aqsa intifada had
disastrous consequences. It came close to destroying the peace camp in
Israel, convinced the public that there is no partner for peace and
brought to power the most aggressively right-wing government in
Israel's history.
The Missing Peace is a comprehensive and fascinating memoir
about the trials and tribulations of an American peace processor. It
covers a period of thirteen years on all the tracks, and it ends with
some general reflections on the perils and pitfalls of peacemaking. It
is easy to pour scorn on a process that absorbed so much time and
energy from all the parties involved and yielded such meager results.
But the years since the end of the Clinton presidency have shown all
too clearly the cost of not having a peace process. A peace process
does not invariably produce a settlement, but it usually keeps the dogs
of war at bay. Talking, however protracted and inconclusive, is
preferable to fighting and mutual carnage. As Winston Churchill used to
say, "Better to jaw-jaw than to war-war." Dennis Ross and the other
members of his team therefore deserve our gratitude for all their
efforts to bring a measure of peace and stability to a region that is
notoriously prone to irrational behavior and violence. And Ross himself
deserves special commendation for producing such a revealing record of
these efforts.
Yet The Missing Peace raises serious questions about the
soundness of the Israel-first school of which Dennis Ross is a
prominent member. The American emphasis on Israel's security at the
expense of Palestinian rights was one of the reasons for the failure of
the American-sponsored peace process. The asymmetry in power between
Israel and the Palestinians is such that a voluntary agreement between
the parties is simply unattainable. A third party is needed to push
Israel into a settlement, and that third party can only be the United
States. What is more, the Americans have the capacity to bring
effective pressure to bear on Israel. America supports Israel to the
tune of $3 billion a year. Never in the annals of human history have so
few owed so much to so many. It simply does not make sense for America not
to exert this leverage in the cause of peace. Paradoxically, the most
serious charge against the Israel-first school is that it does not
serve Israel's true, long-term interests. Israel's real interest, like
that of the Palestinians, lies in an end to the occupation and a
two-state solution. In the absence of a fair and equitable solution,
the two communities will remain locked in a fatal embrace, an endless
dance of death.
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