Summary
Bush administration NSC director of Middle East affairs and a principal drafter of the Washington Institute report, whose own writings, in Perceptions of Palestine’s account, placed the entire burden of concessions on the Arab side, eschewed any U.S. effort to press Israel, gave no evidence of recognizing the Palestinian issue’s centrality or that the conflict’s roots lay in the Palestinians’ dispersal in 1948, and listed Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial as one of four recommended books on the conflict (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2502-2505, 2550-2561).
Details
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Haass repeated, Christison writes, the shibboleth that “visible efforts by the United States for a comprehensive peace in the Middle East help perpetuate the illusion in the Arab world that the secret to peace in the region lies not in their own willingness to compromise but in an American willingness to pressure Israel” (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2552-2553).
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Christison part 4: Haass persisted even beyond 1990 in failing to recognise the PLO’s importance, insisting “the whole idea is to play on the split, not to help preserve [Palestinian] unity”; after Madrid the peace process was left to the Ross-Haass team, whose frame had not changed substantially (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2596, 2702).
Related pages
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Dennis Ross, Joan Peters, George Bush