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The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace
by Dennis Ross
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2004-08-09)
ISBN: 0374199736
EAN: 9780374199739
Dewy Decimal #: 956.053
Hardcover: 872 pages
Edition: First Edition
SKU: 28475
Condition: New
Comments: THE HARDBACK BOOK! FARRAR, STRAUS, 2004. THE UNABRIDGED 1ST EDITION. WITH TERRIFIC PHOTOGRAPHS! HARDCOVER W/GILT LETTERING, DUST JACKET AND PAGES ARE BRAND NEW! Rapid shipping w/FREE tracking. GREAT PACKAGING . Air Mail.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
A gripping personal narrative of the struggle for Israeli-Palestinian peace
Dennis Ross, the chief Middle East peace negotiator in the presidential administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, is that rare figure who is respected by all parties: Democrats and Republicans, Palestinians and Israelis, presidents and people on the street in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Washington, D.C.
The Missing Peace is far and away the most candid inside account of the Middle East peace process ever published. The maneuverings of both sides, and of the United States as well, are described. For the first time, the backroom negotiations, the dramatic and often secretive nature of the process, and the reasons for its faltering are on display for all to see.
Ross recounts the peace process in detail from 1988 to the breakdown of talks in early 2001 that prompted the so-called second Intifada. It's all here: Camp David, Oslo, Geneva, Egypt, and other summits; the assassination of Yitzak Rabin; the rise and fall of Benjamin Netanyahu; the very different characters and strategies of Rabin, Yasir Arafat, and Bill Clinton; and the first steps of the Palestinian Authority.
The issues Ross explains with unmatched clarity-n-egotiations over borders, Israeli security, the Palestinian "right of return"--are the issues behind today's headlines. The Missing Peace explains, as no other book has, why Middle East peace is so difficult to achieve.
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Customer Reviews
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A view of the Middle East from a true expert
Rating  (4)
Date: 2009-01-03
Dennis Ross has worked for both Democrats and Republicans, and is considered one of the foremost authorities on the Middle East. He is so respected that he was even mentioned as a potential Secretary of State for Obama.
Ross has been directly involved in negotiations with all the major players: from Arafat to Rabin to Assad. His book gives an excellent insider's perspective on the personalities of the various players. He is the first person, for instance, whom I have seen paint Hafez al-Assad, the father of Syria's current leader, as something more than just a crazy fool. He saw a method to Assad's strategies, even if they were often repugnant to the West.
His account is a bit too exhaustive: he admits in the book that he keeps notes on absolutely everything, and he needed to find an editor who could help him cull some details for this book. It seemed like every declassified fact about negotiations was included. Nevertheless, this is a terrific book, and is invaluable to anyone who wants to understand the Middle East in a more sophisticated way.
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Surprisingly pleased
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-11-24
The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace The story captures the reader like a novel and,like a good novel, delves into the character of principal actors, with the exception of Bill Clinton and other U.S. leaders. The factual detail, which the author doesn't spare the reader, does not harm the intensity of the story.
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"The Missing Perspective": A Review of Dennis Ross' The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace
Rating (4)
Date: 2008-08-31
Dennis Ross' treatise on the triumphs, travails and tragedies of Middle East peacemaking during the 1990s is indispensable reading for anyone interested in acquiring essential knowledge about the key players, issues, individual perspectives and national strategies that shaped the Middle East peace process over the span of an entire decade. As the U.S. envoy par excellence to the Middle East peace process under both Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton, and one who logged more hours with Middle East potentates during these presidential administrations than anyone else, Ross is both authoritative and eminently qualified in regards to his subject matter. Not only is Dennis Ross' book noteworthy for its encyclopedic mastery of the many tracks and rounds of Middle East peace negotiations, it also reads as a veritable primer in the art of diplomacy itself from one of the most consummate diplomats of the modern era.
In Ross' comprehensive coverage of the Israeli/Syrian and Israeli/Palestinian negotiations, he provides a detailed analysis of the substantive and procedural aspects of peacemaking. This is overlaid with Ross' frequent references to the domestic and regional context, and interpersonal texture of relations between negotiators, factors that constituted the backdrop to negotiations and contributed significantly to the prospects of overcoming the procedural and substantial hurdles to peacemaking.
Ross' book serves as a useful corrective to those who subscribe to the `primordial hatreds' point of view, namely the perspective that Arabs and Israelis have fought since the dawn of recorded history, and are eternally condemned to a zero-sum struggle of absolute winners and absolute losers. If this were true, Syria and Israel would not have come as close as they did to reaching an accord. For as we learn from Ross, the real tragedy of the Middle East peace process is not how far apart the protagonists were, but rather how close they came to clinching a deal and ending the conflict, were it not for the unwanted intrusion of idiosyncratic factors.
For instance, Syria and Israel were in many respects like ships passing in the night - they both came to grips with the essential requirements of peace - Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in exchange for Syria's establishment of normal, peaceful relations with Israel - yet their timing was never in sync. When Syria was ready, Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak hesitated, out of concern that he could not convince a skeptical, security-minded Israeli public to accept Israeli withdrawal from the strategic Golan Heights. Less than a year later, Barak expressed his belated readiness to do a deal, yet by that point an ailing Syrian President Hafez al-Asad feared the stability of the regime if an agreement were concluded that he might not live long enough to personally oversee the implementation of.
Ross also provides a detailed portrait of the `credibility gap' that progressively widened between Israel and the Palestinians as both failed to live up to commitments regarded as sacred by the other side. Israel's failure to check the expansion of illegal settlements in areas where Palestinians constituted a majority of the population and hoped to establish an independent state eroded confidence in Israel's intentions in the eyes of many Palestinians. Likewise, Palestinian suicide bombings perpetrated against civilian Israeli targets, which caused scores of casualties, sowed doubts among Israelis as to whether the Palestinian Authority was genuinely committed to ensuring Israel's security.
Despite providing a seemingly balanced and nuanced account of both sides' aspirations, grievances, claims and strategies in the negotiating process, Ross ultimately and unfairly ends up championing the Israeli narrative and version of events. After providing an objective appraisal of events throughout most of the book, Ross in the last few chapters betrays his fundamental biases, placing almost the entire blame for the breakdown of negotiations and the renewal of large-scale violence since 2000 squarely on the shoulders of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. According to Ross, when push came to shove, Arafat was unable to face the moment of truth and to trade in his life as the leader of a movement of armed struggle for a life as the president of a demilitarized Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace with Israel.
However, not only do other Clinton advisers present at Camp David contradict Ross' interpretation of the facts as far as Arafat's behavior is concerned, they also show that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak played his own double game. While negotiating peace and thus conveying the intention to evacuate occupied territory on one hand, Barak and every prior Israeli administration since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 greatly accelerated the tempo of illegal settlement building on the other hand. In fact, the number of Israeli settlers jumped 150 percent during the Oslo years, growing at a faster rate between 1993 and 2000 than in the twenty-six preceding years of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
While by no means does Ross ignore the obstacles to peace posed by ongoing Israeli settlement building, his analysis severely underrates how corrosive such unilateral Israeli actions were (and still are) to peace in both a symbolic and practical sense. More than any other category of actions, unhindered settlement building demonstrated to many Palestinians the futility of pursuing peace with Israel by raising their suspicions that the Oslo Accords were nothing more than an ingenuous Israeli-created device to consolidate its occupation under the guise of an internationally legitimated `peace process.'
Moreover, the practical effects of settlement building combined with prolonged closures of the Palestinian territories, which led to the severe constriction of trade and access to gainful employment, was to make the average Palestinian far worse off economically during the Oslo years. Contrary to Ross' point of view, it was these economic hardships and the daily indignities to which the Palestinian people were subject (e.g., curfews, checkpoints, arbitrary arrests and detentions) under continuing occupation that caused the start of the second intifada in 2000, not the supposed machinations of Arafat. Given the steady deterioration in living conditions for the Palestinians (and this despite an influx of foreign investment), Arafat's encouragement was hardly needed to bring Palestinian dissatisfaction to the point of raising the banner of revolt.
Furthermore, if Ross is indeed correct that Arafat was the single biggest obstacle to peace, why has Israel proven unable to do a deal with the Palestinians after Arafat died and the more moderate Mahmoud Abbas (a.ka. Abu Mazen) rose to take his place? From the outset, Abbas has stated his adamant opposition to violent means of struggle against the occupation. However, Israel, in a reprise of Barak's disingenuous approach, has kept Abbas tied down in so-called peace negotiations, while continuing to expropriate Palestinian land by means of settlements and the Separation Wall, confining Palestinians to ever-shrinking territories and placing the prospects of a two-state solution further and further beyond reach. For all of his mastery of the issues and his grasp of the obstacles to Middle East peace, Ross' obsession with Yasser Arafat's misdeeds leaves him unable or unwilling to come to terms with the far greater shortcomings of the other side in this century-old conflict.
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The Missing Peace
Rating  (1)
Date: 2008-04-27
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
I waited 3 weeks for this item to be delivered before I could file a claim in which time I lost valuable reading time for a book club review and meeting with the author. The book was never delivered. I was very angry and will not use your web site again.
Marilyn Steinmetz
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Good - but Ross awards his own kudos
Rating  (3)
Date: 2008-01-10
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Good book overall as far as one being able to pick out info if they put their mind to it. But I thought poorly written with tons of verbiage with the most annoying part the amount of self-congratulating done by Ross.
It could really be re-done in 1/4th size with as much info and without the "I love Ross" hype. We surely don't need to know he ate pitas with honey in Egypt.
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