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To Achieve Mideast Peace, Suspend Disbelief
(New York Times) Dennis B. Ross - The rise of political Islam, Syria's civil war and looming implosion, and the Iranian nuclear imbroglio not only dominate the Mideast environment, but they also render it forbidding for peacemaking between Palestinians and Israelis. Yet the most fundamental problem between Israelis and Palestinians is the problem of disbelief. Most Israelis and Palestinians today simply don't believe that peace is possible. Israelis feel that their withdrawal from territory (like southern Lebanon and Gaza) has not brought peace or security; instead, it has produced only violence. Why, then, should they repeat the same mistake and subject themselves to far greater, even existential, risk in the West Bank? Meanwhile, Palestinians believe that negotiations from 1993 onward failed to produce independence. Given this context of mutual disbelief, the idea that the two sides now will seize an initiative to end the conflict is an illusion. I propose a 14-point agenda for discussions. The goal would be to chip away at the sources of each side's disbelief about the other's commitment to a genuine two-state solution. The writer was the U.S. chief negotiator for the Arab-Israeli conflict from 1993 to 2001 and a special assistant to the president for the Middle East and South Asia from 2009 to 2011.