Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2008, pages 60-61

Waging Peace

Dennis Ross Dismisses International Law as Basis for Resolving Israel-Palestine Conflict

	Dennis Ross was in Des Moines to promote his recently published book, Statecraft (Photo M. Gillespie.)

IN A WIDE-RANGING presentation at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa on April 30, former Clinton administration “peace process” point man Dennis Ross characterized as “ass-backwards” former President Jimmy Carter’s call for Israel to comply with international law and accept its legal borders.

“There is no indication whatsoever that, for example, Hamas is prepared to accept those borders,” Ross maintained.

“On the contrary, notwithstanding what Jimmy Carter said, the Hamas figures contradicted what he said as soon as he said it. They even said it would be a transitional state, meaning they don’t accept that Israel has legitimate borders. So, even if Israel would accept those borders, it has to be certain that its neighbors would also accept those borders,” said Ross.

“The issue, ultimately, is not one of international law,” the former ambassador argued. “You don’t settle historic conflicts by having an approach that is based only on international law.”

This reporter had sought to put to Ross a question that cited the International Court of Justice’s 2004 advisory opinion on “the legal consequences of the construction of a wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem,” and the many annual votes in the United Nations General Assembly that overwhelmingly support the realization of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, primarily the right to self-determination. Professor David Skidmore, director of Drake University’s Center for Global Citizenship, quickly interrupted the attempt to place Ross’s Israeli-centric analysis of the conflict in the context of international law.

Not only did Ross dismiss international law as the basis for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict, he also called for harsh economic sanctions on Iran in order to force that country to give up its nuclear power development program. In prepared remarks about Iran, Ross declared: “One thing I can tell you: By the end of this year, Iran will be a nuclear power state. It doesn’t mean they will be a nuclear weapons state yet, but they will be a nuclear power state.

“Right now, we’re headed in the direction where Iran is going to have nuclear weapons. And if it has nuclear weapons, it’ll change the Middle East as we know it,” continued Ross.

“Iran with nuclear weapons capabilities is a country that has a nuclear shield behind which it can engage in coercion and subversion with impunity, and certainly that’s the way most of the Arab states see it. They don’t want Iran to go nuclear,” said Ross, who made no mention of Israel’s nuclear arsenal

Instead Ross, who currently is counselor and Ziegler distinguished fellow at the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a spin-off of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), raised the specter of a nuclear Iran as an existential threat to Israel. 

“[Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad said recently ‘the countdown to the destruction of the Zionist regime is imminent,’” said Ross, laying the foundation for a policy of harsh economic sanctions on Iran designed to “squeeze them economically.”

Ross’s plan, which he described as involving intensive simultaneous negotiations with the Europeans, the Saudis, the Russians, and the Chinese, “all designed to squeeze the Iranians in a way they haven’t been squeezed yet,” is reminiscent of the 13-year-long Iraq sanctions regime widely reported to have caused the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five years. That punishing sanctions regime, which discredited the Clinton administration in the eyes of many governments and enraged public opinion in predominantly Arab and Muslim nations, was cited by Osama bin Laden as one of three reasons for the terror attacks of 9/11/2001.

—Michael Gillespie