Amb. Ross to give Israel Segal lecture at Neve Shalom

By Seth Mandel

June 6, 2008

A prime architect of the accord offered to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PLO chairman the late Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000, Dennis Ross has been intimately involved in the pursuit of peace between Israel and its neighbors. Despite the absence of that permanent peace, Ross said, Israel has flourished in the face of daunting odds during its first six decades.

"What Israel has achieved is nothing less than remarkable, notwithstanding what it's had to endure, notwithstanding the neighborhood it's been in, notwithstanding the threats, it's maintained its democratic character, its democratic values, and it's a cutting-edge society," Ross told The Jewish State ahead of his upcoming visit to Metuchen's Congregation Neve Shalom.

Ross will deliver the keynote address at the 23rd annual Israel Segal Memorial Lecture, sponsored at Neve Shalom by Shirley Segal and her family in memory of Israel Segal. The event, to be held June 22, is part of a planned celebration in honor of the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding. For more information on the lecture, contact Rabbi Gerard Zelizer at (732) 548-2238 ext. 18.

Ross will talk about the current prospects for peace in the region, which he said are relatively low due to a lack of faith in the process on both sides.

"And so long as the public is completely disbelieving, it's pretty hard to empower the leaders to take the kind of leaps that they will have to take," Ross said.

For example, he said, since Israel "disengaged" from Gaza, Palestinian terrorists have used the land to launch thousands of rockets at nearby Israeli towns. There is, therefore, little confidence that a withdrawal of troops and Jewish communities from the West Bank would bring different results.

The Palestinians, Ross said, believe their lives are still controlled by Israel, and find movement within their Palestinian Authority-governed land difficult. They don't believe anything will change on that front, he said.

To turn that cynicism into renewed confidence, Ross said "each side has to do something that they can't politically do that would have an impact on the other side's public."

Israelis, he said, are looking for some tangible proof of a commitment to root out terrorism on the part of the Palestinians; if self-policing simply isn't working, they could easily stop the incitement to terrorism that is seemingly ubiquitous in the Arab media and among its leadership.

For the Israelis' part, Ross said, checkpoints could be made more bearable without eliminating them completely. Many checkpoints have several lanes, but only one of the lanes is open. A move to open more lanes without removing checkpoints would be a welcome gesture with significantly less risk, Ross said.

It has been widely accepted that the Camp David offer Ross helped craft would be the basic framework behind a final status settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ross said that's because the terms of the proposal weren't random, but rather carefully considered from both sides' points of view.

"We didn't pull it out of the air; we didn't make it up," Ross said. "That was based on thousands of hours of debate, discussion, exploration, argument, finding out from each side what it is that is really essential to them -- not what they wanted but what they needed. And so those ideas represent an effort to meet the respective needs of both sides. And whatever they come up with will actually look a lot like that."

Ross, now a Ziegler Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is the author most recently of "State Craft: How to Restore America's Standing in the World." He will take questions and sign books after his speech.

Ross recently returned from Israel, where he attended President Shimon Peres' "Facing Tomorrow" conference, which showcased many examples of what Neve Shalom will be celebrating June 22. He said leaders from a plethora of fields -- such as science, medicine, energy, business, the arts, education, and geopolitics -- attended the conference.

"And that's a testimony that Israel is, in many respects, a magnet," Ross said. "And it's a reminder what Israel is today and what it continues to strive to become."