Why do they hate Palestine? A journey into the mind of an American peace architect

This article is a journey into the mind of "Dennis Ross", the former special assistant to President Barack Obama in the US National Security Council, who also served as a special advisor to former Secretary of State "Hillary Clinton", but most of all he managed what was called the peace process in the Middle East For about 12 years during the two terms of President George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

During that dangerous period in the life of the Palestinian cause, which witnessed major transformations, Ross was the engineer who drew American policy in the region, and the direct negotiator with the various parties in the Arab-Israeli conflict file, and he was appreciated by Democrats and Republicans alike in the United States.

In 2005, Dennis Ross published one of his most important books, "The Lost Peace... Secrets of the Conflict Over Middle East Peace." In this book, in which Ross bore the Palestinians the greatest burden of missing the opportunity for lasting peace and resolving the issue at that time, he presented in pages A lengthy and detailed history of the scenes of the peace process in the Middle East from 1988 to 2001 as the main American representative in it, as Ross played a central role in the Oslo II Agreement in 1995, the Hebron Agreement in 1997, and the peace treaty between Jordan and Israel in 1994. But what is important is not the details. Negotiations offered by Ross during that period were the main reason for the book's popularity, nor was Ross' negative opinion of Yasser Arafat, who, according to Ross, missed the opportunity for comprehensive peace with Israel, a country where "the love of peace is part of its spirit and personality."As he claims, what matters to us is the philosophy, the historical narrative, and the concepts formulated by Ross as an introduction to seeing the reality in Palestine.

How do you create a novel in which the oppressor and the oppressed are equal?

In this book, the Russians blamed the Palestinians for missing the opportunity for lasting peace and resolving the issue at that time.

(Social Media)

Concepts of peace and other related concepts such as defensive war, just war, and legitimate resistance have always been controversial concepts in political science.

For example, when a person hears that Israel stormed a camp and killed Palestinians while searching for what it describes as terrorists, his position will depend on the way he reads the Arab-Israeli conflict itself philosophically and historically, especially since the concept of peace is not suspended at the present moment in isolation from what we know about the past of the conflict. and his background.

Some may see that Israel is waging a legitimate defensive war to deter potential "terrorism" against its defenseless citizens, and others may see that the people Israel is looking for are not "terrorists", but rather resistance fighters and heroes defending their stolen homeland.

In the end, it depends on the accuracy of the historical narrative through which we look at the event, a narrative that can be steeped in biases and selection of information over others.

Therefore, in this article, we will focus on the ideological framework created by Dennis Ross to explain the Palestinian cause and the concept of peace and present it to his Western reader, and we will analyze the nature of the perception that shaped his actions in American foreign policy, especially since Ross is widely considered in Western circles as one of the most fair politicians with regard to human rights. The Palestinians, among the American politicians who took over the file.

But if we discover the nature of his contradictory, biased visions against the Arabs, we can understand to what extent were - and still are - the visions of those who are more extremist than him, and we can also understand the reason for the American stances in favor of Israel over the past long decades.

Reflection these days raises a re-reading of the novel on which Dennis Ross based his project for peace in the Middle East decades ago, especially as we live the diaries of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as Ross is one of the Western thinkers of political stature who have taken upon themselves since the outbreak of the Ukrainian war the task of denouncing With the Russian attack and motivating the West to defend Ukraine in the face of Putin, he believes that there is a legitimate right for peoples to defend themselves against attempts to diminish their land and sovereignty.

However, when Ross worked on the Palestinian issue file years ago and wrote about it, the matter seemed different to him, as the man addressed the American reader complaining about Yasser Arafat, who refused to make great concessions on his historical land in exchange for peace, and he complained about the Arabs who treat the land with honor. and honor, and they do not accept giving up an inch of it in exchange for peace.

However, Ross had to establish a philosophical and historical background with which to justify and legitimize the Israeli occupation from the beginning.

Ross resorted to the emotional arguments that American politicians and thinkers have long relied on when talking about Israel, as Ross wrote that the establishment of Israel in the first place came as a natural response to the sorrows and tragedies that the Jewish people went through throughout history, dating back to the year 70 BC, according to him, which is the same argument. Which Roosevelt presented to King Saud in 1945 when he told him that the suffering experienced by the Jews should make the Arabs more open towards Jewish interests in Palestine, to which the Saudi king replied that the Christian Germans and not the Muslim Arabs committed the crime, and then they are the ones who have to pay The price, not the Palestinians.

Ross presents this argument to his readers in the hope that no one will likely ask him a question stemming from the same logic: What if a group of Muslim immigrants decided to establish a state with a religious identity on Western soil or within the United States itself, as a natural response to their grief and nervous trauma that they experienced in their history?

Will Ross then accept the state of new immigrants?

And the answer actually came years later in Ross' life. When the Russian war broke out on Ukraine, Ross did not say that this was a natural response to Putin's tragedies or to the shock of the collapse of the Soviet Union, or that the Ukrainians had a strict character in sticking to every inch of their land. On the contrary, Ross took An active position in denouncing the Russian attack.

Linguistic and psychological games.. The Jews are let down and the Arabs were not Arabs

Dennis Ross (Getty Images)

Ross tried to explain to his reader that the beginning of violence historically came from the Arabs in Palestine, who started violence against Zionist immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s and committed massacres against them, seeking to convince us that revolting against a group trying to establish a state within your country is a violent act (Ross described the Palestinian revolution It's an atrocity).

At the same time, Ross entrenched the idea that Israel is a state worthy of existence, while the Palestinian resistance includes what he called Islamic fundamentalists from the start, who have turned the issue into a sectarian conflict.

Apart from the many details that Ross went through, in any case he witnessed, as the whole world witnessed, that the Ukrainian resistance included Nazi battalions, and yet the man was not terrified or discouraged by this from calling for support for the Ukrainian resistance under the pretext that it contained fundamentalists or Nazis, and even some These Nazi battalions have been trained by the CIA since 2015.

Moreover, Ross says, the psychological reason that hinders Israelis from inclining towards peace is simply their sense of being surrounded by hate around them since the Arab revolutions of the 1920s.

The problem, according to Ross, is not that the Israelis began as a group of immigrants, who were welcomed by the Arabs during their suffering from racism in Europe, until they decided to take advantage of the opportunity and build a state within Arab land by force that erases the original identity of its inhabitants, as stated by the head of the World Zionist Organization, "Haim." Weizmann" when he said explicitly: "We have to make Palestine Jewish just as France is French."

Ross tried to reduce Arabism to Sharif Hussein and his revolution as the first realistic political formation of Arabism, as if Sharif Hussein was the representative of Arabism and with him it began.

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Ross tries to appear fair at times, as he understands the feelings of the Arabs, but he tries to show this in the midst of drawing a history different from what the facts tell, because the Arabs, from his point of view, were let down because they were new to the national and Arab feelings that arose in them in the face of the Ottomans.

Also, those who shaped their sense of their Arabism were mainly the Christian elite in the Levant. As for Sharif Hussein, who led the Great Arab Revolt, he received nothing but urging promises from Britain, which inherited a sense of abandonment among the Arabs and created the seeds of a psychological crisis among them towards peace, he said.

Here Ross tries to play with the language in order to portray the Arabs as being on an equal footing with the Zionist immigrants in their feeling of suffering and in their being without a comprehensive identity, ignoring that the Arabs are the original inhabitants of the land, and that their affiliations were not absent, but rather changed like any other people in the world throughout its history. And it brought together many circles of identities such as Arab nationalism, Islamic nationalism, and Qatari nationalism.

The other thing is that Ross tried to reduce Arabism to Sharif Hussein and his revolution as the first realistic political formation of Arabism, as if Sharif Hussein is the representative of Arabism and with him it began, and then the Arab nation is also newly born like Israel, so it should not talk about historical rights in its land.

Ross sought, through his narrative, to imprison the Palestinian inhabitants of the land within a specific ideological framework that denies them their historical rights and makes them and the colonizer alike.

The Palestinians are just a people struggling to find an identity and a homeland just like the Jews, according to his narrative, which ignores the element of Arab and Islamic solidarity and even the third world with the Palestinian cause, and also ignores that those who sacrificed themselves for the cause over the decades did not all come out under the banner of Arab nationalism, as some of them were Islamists, some communists, and some Arabists, but what brought them together is one issue that is greater than being a psychological crisis.

The "evasive Arafat" did not accept the chance for a comprehensive peace

The information mentioned by Ross about the Peel Committee sent by Britain in 1937 responded to the Arab Revolt by proposing the division of Palestine is false information.

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Ross was one of the architects of the reconceptualization of the Palestinian question, the only way to try to persuade new Western generations to continue the biased role in their foreign policy against the Palestinians.

He sought to establish philosophically the right of Israel to exist, and that the Arabs were the ones who initiated the brutal attacks. He even mentioned false information, including that the Peel Committee sent by Britain in 1937 responded to the Arab revolution by proposing the division of Palestine.

In fact, the documents of what happened during the Peel Commission are available, as the representatives of the Palestinian people, including Hajj "Muhammad Amin Al-Husseini", "Muhammad Azza Darwaza", "Awni Abdel-Hadi" and "Jamal Al-Husseini" presented all the arguments regarding Palestinian rights before the committee and the Palestinians' adherence to their land The whole history and they got angry after the recommendations for partition came out, and not, as Ross says, that the partition came in response to the revolution.

After Ross established an undocumented history, he was able to denounce Arafat, the enemy of peace in his eyes, as he is a devious man who missed the historic opportunity for peace in 2001, when Israel finally agreed to the plan formulated by Ross and Clinton, and it was the first serious American attempt to end the conflict completely and decisively.

Each party, according to Ross, had to abandon some of its "historical myths", and the offer included that Palestine would be based on Gaza and large parts of the West Bank and its capital would be in the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, and that the Israelis would give up the idea of ​​keeping the Jordan Valley in return for the Palestinians giving up what it calls Ross dream of returning to Israel.

The importance of the historical and philosophical rooting of Ross' novel appears here.

Imagine, for example, that a Western writer writes that Ukraine missed the historic opportunity for peace with Putin because it refused to give up half of its land.

Of course, this cannot be said without rooting in the idea that the attack was not an attack and that Russia has the right to take Ukrainian lands, because Ukrainians should not live in “historical myths” and that they are a people who are new to their national identity.

However, what Russia did with the Palestinians is completely different from the clear solidarity it shows today with the Ukrainians.

Why this position on Palestine?

After Ross established a history contrary to documents, he was able to denounce Arafat, the enemy of peace in his eyes, as he is a devious man who missed the historic opportunity for peace in 2001. (AFP)

According to Ross, there is a fact that should not be ignored, which is that Israel, in the end, has a Western democratic culture like the United States, and thus America defends it.

But on the other hand, there is a very important reason that Ross ignores, and it is a religious reason par excellence.

Fross, who represented the United States in the most important negotiations in the Middle East between the Arabs and Israel, described himself as a committed Jew after his marriage and frequented the synagogue regularly, and although he said that this did not affect his integrity in the negotiations, even if we recognize that integrity in the negotiations in their technical sense, we cannot He ignored the religious dimension of a devout Jew in a political file tinged entirely with religious dimensions, a bias that appeared clearly in the novel he created to equate Arabs and Jews in the first place, and creates a biased orientation against the Palestinians in its essence without embarrassment.

The other dimension in the religious angle is the association of some Christian groups influential in American politics - specifically the evangelicals - with a belief that leads to the need for Jews to control all of the Palestinian lands for the sake of the second return of Christ.

According to a poll conducted by the Gallup Foundation in 2021, 85% of Republicans in the United States see Israel positively, as well as 77% of independents and 64% of Democrats, and it is likely that the most religious Americans who go to churches are the most loyal for Israel.

It is worth noting that things have begun to change slightly in the Western world. The last battle, "Saif al-Quds" in 2021, showed that wider segments of the new youth generation in the United States and Western capitals tended to sympathize with the Palestinian cause, and even to go out in demonstrations for it.

According to the Gallup poll itself, although bias with Israel is still prevalent in American society at a rate of approximately 58%, the percentage of sympathizers with the Palestinian cause reached its highest degree in years, at 25%.

Perhaps the philosophical arguments built by Ross and his ilk are no longer credible to large sections of the new generations.

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