Summary
Middle East and Soviet expert who was the Washington Institute report’s principal drafter, became director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and Baker’s principal policy adviser, and in Perceptions of Palestine’s account had long espoused the report’s Israel-centered ideas — in his 1985 paper Acting with Caution, “a strategy of motion while patiently awaiting real movement from the local parties”, assuming “the ball is in the Arabs’ court” and demanding no flexibility of Israel — before firsthand dealing brought him, by a September 1989 symposium, to say Palestinians were “not derivative” and that the Jordanian option might never have been more than a fiction (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2502-2505, 2540-2544, 2562-2567).
Details
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Ross was known to share the pro-Israeli community’s suspicions of the State Department’s so-called Arabists, and Baker and Ross almost totally shut out the Near East Bureau’s line officers; with Daniel Kurtzer and Aaron David Miller he formed the trio Ashrawi describes (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2534-2537).
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Ross, Kurtzer and Miller wrote Baker’s May 1989 AIPAC speech calling on Israel to lay aside the vision of a greater Israel (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2580-2583).
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Christison part 4: Ross authored the June 1993 statement of principles released under Christopher’s name that left ultimate sovereignty over the territories to permanent-status talks and made them “disputed” rather than occupied; in the Clinton administration he served throughout as special Middle East coordinator and principal architect, consistently allowing Israel to set the starting point, agenda and pace, refusing U.S. positions on final-status issues until Barak was ready in mid-2000, and at the end used the theme that Palestinians continued to “socialize hostility instead of preparing to make peace with their neighbors” (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2764-2772, 2934-2946, 2968).
Related pages
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, James Baker, Martin Indyk, Richard Haass, Hanan Ashrawi