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Arab Leaders Need to Play a More Prominent Role in Peace-Making than They Ever Have Before
(Washington Institute for Near East Policy) Dennis Ross - With no real contact with official Palestinians, the U.S. needs Arab leaders to play a more prominent role in peace-making than they ever have before. I do not mean to suggest that Arab leaders can take the place of Palestinians. They cannot. But they can declare whether a proposal or plan is credible and meets the national aspirations of the Palestinian people in a dignified way. Historically, the position of the Arab leaders, who accept a peaceful outcome and the principle of two states for two peoples, has been to say that they can accept whatever the Palestinians can accept. The problem has been that the Palestinian national movement has been led by those who find it difficult to accept specific proposals for resolving the conflict. As someone who helped to draft the Clinton Parameters in 2000, I know that at the time Arab leaders quietly urged Arafat to accept them. I was hosted at a dinner a few months ago by a number of Palestinians, including some I had negotiated with, and they lamented how different everything today would be if Arafat had said yes. He did not. No one in the Arab world said that while the decision was a Palestinian one, these parameters were credible and met Palestinian national rights. History might have been rewritten if someone had done so. It seems clear that whatever the Trump peace plan turns out to be, the Palestinian instinct will be to say no to it. But rejection has not served the Palestinian cause. Arab support for that cause today might best be expressed by being honest with the Palestinians in private and in public. The writer, a former special assistant to President Obama, is the counselor at The Washington Institute.