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'Israel's advocate' to leave White House
Dennis Ross, Obama's strongly pro-Israel Middle East aide, will leave his
post for a position in pro-Israel think tank.
Jim Lobe </indepth/opinion/profile/jim-lobe.html> Last Modified: 12 Nov
2011 15:54
Dennis Ross, President Barack Obama's top Middle East aide who has
attracted criticism for his allegedly strong pro-Israel sympathies, will
leave his post at the end of this month, the White House announced Thursday.


He will rejoin the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), an
Israel-centred think tank that was spun off in 1985 from the powerful lobby
group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Ross served as
WINEP's counsellor and a fellow during the George W Bush administration
from 2001 to 2009.

"An institution that believes sound policy lies at the intersection of
scholarship with statesmanship is especially proud that Dennis is returning
to his intellectual home," said WINEP's executive director Dr Robert
Satloff.

Despite the generally hawkish views of WINEP's fellows and their frequent
criticism of Obama's approach to the Middle East, Ross said in a statement
that his departure from the White House was due to family reasons. It
offered no hint of major policy differences between him and Obama or his
colleagues on the National Security Council.

"Obviously, there is still work to do but I promised my wife I would return
to government for only two years and we both agreed it is time to act on my
promise," added Ross.

"I am grateful to President Obama for having given me the opportunity once
again to work on a wide array of Middle Eastern issues and challenges and
to support his efforts to promote peace in the region," he said.

But coming as it does, as Republicans in the 2012 presidential primary race
and in Congress have been hammering away at what they have characterised as
Obama's "hostility" toward Israel and its prime minister, Binyamin
Netanyahu, Ross' departure could give them more ammunition.

Because of Ross's unusually close ties to leaders in the Jewish community
and the Israel lobby, his presence in the White House has acted as a shield
against those attacks.

"…(W)ith the diplomacy frozen, Ross’s departure is not a diplomatic problem
for the White House; it is instead a problem for the Obama re-election
campaign," wrote Elliott Abrams, Ross' counterpart in the George W Bush
White House, who, as a neo-conservative Republican, has been relentlessly
critical of Obama's Mideast policies.

"For Ross was the only official in whom most American Jewish leaders had
confidence. As most of them are Democrats who have long accepted Ross'
faith in the 'peace process', they viewed his role as the assurance that a
steady, experienced, pro-Israel hand was on or near the tiller," Abrams,
now with the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on his *cfr.org* blog
early Friday morning.

*Hawkish policies towards Iran*

A former Soviet specialist who served in top Middle East positions under
former presidents George HW Bush and Bill Clinton, Ross was initially
brought into the Obama administration as the State Department's special
advisor for the Gulf and Southwest Asia, a post he held from February to
June 2009.

He then moved over to the White House where he has served as special
assistant to the president and senior director for the "Central Region" at
the National Security Council, making him the civilian counterpart of the
chief of the Pentagon's Central Command (CentCom), covering a region
stretching from Egypt to Afghanistan.

While adept at keeping a low profile, Ross has focused in particular on US
policy toward Iran, about which he has long-held hawkish views, and on
Israel-Arab relations, especially the US-led Israel-Palestinian "peace
process" which appears to have reached a dead end under his supervision.

Indeed, Palestinian leaders, who have often referred to Ross as "Israel's
lawyer", have refused to meet with him formally since shortly after the
resignation of Obama's first special envoy for the Middle East, Senator
George Mitchell, last May.

Indeed, one senior US diplomat, Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer, who took part in
the Clinton-era negotiations, cited a number of anonymous officials who
were critical of Ross' mediation in the 1990s in his book co-authored with
Scott Lasensky, entitled "Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace".

"The perception was always that Dennis started from the Israeli bottom
line, that he listened to what Israel wanted and then tried to sell it to
the Arabs," one Arab negotiator told them. "... He was never looked at ...
as a trusted world figure or as an honest broker."

Similarly, Abraham Foxman, the long-time head of the strongly pro-Israel
Anti-Defamation League, once referred to Ross as "the closest thing you'll
find to a *melitz yosher*, as far as Israel is concerned". Melitz yosher is
the ancient Hebrew word for "advocate".

Mitchell - who was replaced by a career State Department official, David
Hale - reportedly left out of frustration over Obama's failure to take a
harder line toward Netanyahu's rejection of US appeals to resume a partial
moratorium on Israeli settlement activity, or to take other measures that
would bolster Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and induce
him to return to direct negotiations. Mitchell considered Ross his main
antagonist in internal policy debates, according to a number of sources.

Ross also strongly and successfully opposed suggestions by Mitchell and
others that the US put forward its own proposals on a final settlement of
the conflict.

While Ross has long been critical of Israeli settlement expansion, he
reportedly argued, as he did under Clinton, that exerting serious pressure
on Israeli leaders would prove counterproductive.

*Iran 'peace process'?*

According to various reports, he was privately critical of Obama's demand
in 2009 that Israel halt all settlement activity in the Occupied
Territories and East Jerusalem as a precondition for re-launching
negotiations with the Palestinians.

Despite those differences, Ross' early endorsement of Obama as president -
as well as his role during the 2008 campaign as a liaison to AIPAC and
other Israel lobby groups - earned him entrée into the incoming
administration's top foreign policy ranks.

His stance on Iran was also considerably more hawkish than Obama's public
position of "engagement" with the Islamic Republic, at least during the
campaign and at the outset of the administration.

In the run-up to the 2008 elections, Ross participated in two task forces
on Iran policy, including one by the Bipartisan Policy Center, which called
for military strikes against Tehran if it did not agree to abandon its
uranium enrichment programme. Other task force members included prominent
neo-conservatives who championed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Ross was also a founding member in 2008 of United Against Iran (UANI),
another hawkish group that has mounted an aggressive public campaign to
highlight the alleged threat posed by Iran to Israel and the US.

And, in a book co-written by WINEP fellow David Makovsky and published just
after the 2008 election, Ross called for using diplomatic engagement
primarily as a means to rally international support behind "tougher
policies - either militarily or meaningful containment" - an approach that
has been largely adopted by the administration.

Indeed, the fact that Ross has largely prevailed in setting the basic
policy parametres on both the "peace process" and on Iran, at least for
through next year's election, makes it unlikely that Obama will make any
major policy changes in the interim.

"The administration does not need Dennis Ross anymore," said MJ Rosenberg,
a Mideast expert at Media Matters, who used to work for AIPAC and the more
dovish Israel Policy Forum. "It's on automatic pilot, enhanced by direct
demands from AIPAC and Netanyahu that will invariably get a positive
response. Ross was a middle man and a middle man is no longer necessary."

"Dennis Ross is returning to the outpost of the Israel Lobby whence he
came, leaving a diplomatic shambles behind him," according to Ambassador
Chas Freeman (ret.), former head of the US Middle East Policy Council.

"None of the issues in his charge prospered during his tenure, which saw
the collapse of any pretence of a peace process between Israel and the
Arabs, a deepening of the Iranian conviction that a nuclear deterrent is
necessary to deter Israeli or American attack, and the collapse of American
prestige and influence among the Arabs and in the Islamic world more
generally," he wrote.

*A version of this article was first published on Inter Press Service.*
Source:
IP