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Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-ross14jul14,1,2981681.story
Abbas Keeps His Eye on the Big Picture
(Los Angeles Times) - Dennis Ross As the American envoy to the peace process during the Clinton administration, I worked closely with Mahmud Abbas, often sitting across a table from him around the clock, seven days a week. Abbas preferred to discuss the broader concepts and principles and let others work out the details. For him, that bigger picture was peace with Israel, telling me at one point how he had started in the 1970s "swimming against the stream" to get Fatah to adopt his position of a state next to Israel, not in place of it. He was as nationalistic as any Palestinian I dealt with, but, unlike Arafat, he saw that violence had been disastrous for Palestinian interests. Dennis Ross, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is a former U.S. envoy to the Middle East.