Dear Ambassador Ross: Welcome to Israel

It has now been three months since you have been to the region – three months during which Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been struggling to survive a series of domestic political crises, and hopes for peace have been waning on all sides. Three months in which Yasser Arafat has withheld security cooperation and fanned the flames of low-level violence to pursue his political goals – seeking the intervention of the international community to increase pressure on Israel to make unilateral concessions. All in the hope that he can somehow cause a rift in the relationship between Israel and our closest friend and ally – the United States.

We truly are pleased that you have returned, as the government you represent has a key role to play in breaking the logjam in the peace process. We sympathize that once again it has fallen on your shoulders to try to put Humpty Dumpty back together – especially after the humiliating treatment and none too subtle antisemitic barbs to which you were subjected during your last visit to the region. We understand why, in view of the problems confronting the peace process, your boss – Secretary of State Madeleine Albright – has not yet visited us.

We suggest you set moderate goals for your visit. Both Netanyahu and Arafat prefer to make concessions to the president, who will be golfing. They will hold out at least for a meeting with the secretary of state who, depending on the results of your mission, may visit here at the end of the month. As everyone knows, nothing really happens in Washington in August.

Moreover, if you are truly determined to halt construction at Har Homa, as Arafat will demand, you will have to help persuade Labor Party leader Ehud Barak to enter a national unity government, which he surely would not consider before September, when Shimon Peres no longer is slated to be the senior minister in such a government.

During your visit, Netanyahu will no doubt insist that Palestinian security cooperation be resumed, something they have promised on numerous occasions in the past. We trust you understand that Palestinian compliance with their existing undertakings is a precondition to continuing the Oslo process and is not to be traded off against a halt in construction at Har Homa. If there is to be a renegotiation of the agreements signed to date, then surely both sides – not just Israel – will have to make equivalent concessions and not ones that have been made before. May we respectfully suggest that, in considering the issue of Palestinian efforts to combat violence, the time has come to tell the truth.

We understand you believe personally that Arafat should not be pressed to fulfill his commitment to amend the Palestinian Covenant. We respectfully suggest that the time has come for you to reconsider this view. It is true that you cut your teeth in the world of diplomacy at the feet of a Republican secretary of state, James Baker. We commend to your attention, however, a comment of another, perhaps wiser one – George Shultz. In the Mideast, he said, words matter – as he persisted in his efforts to force Yasser Arafat to forswear the use of terror to achieve political ends. And as the current secretary of state said in reference to terror in her speech on Tuesday, “On this issue, there can be no winks, no double standards, no double meanings, and with respect to the imprisonment of terrorists – no revolving doors.”

Today we understand that not only do words matter, but it is particularly important that the words be said in Arabic and not only in English or French. Yet you have worked hard to persuade successive Israeli prime ministers that it is not worth forcing the Palestinians to keep their commitment to amend the Covenant.

The document in question asserts that armed struggle is the strategy, not the tactics, to liberate all of “Palestine” and exercise sovereignty over it. It calls it a national duty to purge the Zionist presence, as there is no historical link between Jews – who in any event do not constitute a people – and the Land of Israel. Zionism, the Covenant contends, is a racist and fanatical movement, a concentration and jumping-off point for imperialism in the heart of the Arab homeland.

Ambassador Ross, we think you will agree that the Covenant does not reflect the degree of mutual recognition that Secretary Albright has cited as one of the cardinal achievements of the Oslo process. We do not know when you last reviewed it, but are you surprised that in a recent radio interview, Arafat embraced the military wing of Hamas as “a patriotic movement?” Is it any wonder that he has not moved to root out their infrastructure and disarm them, as he committed to do as recently as the Note for the Record signed in your presence as part of the Hebron agreement? Do your intelligence services and huge media monitoring group in Tel Aviv not regularly provide you translations of Arafat speaking in Arabic of jihad? Are you truly surprised that young Arab men are still willing to blow themselves to smithereens to “prepare an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity in the Holy Land,” as promised in the Covenant?

You will recall that Arafat first promised to amend the Covenant in an exchange of letters with Yitzhak Rabin on September 9, 1993 – nearly four years ago. You expended considerable effort to persuade Rabin not to force the issue. Apparently you succeeded, because two years later, it became necessary to set a deadline in the Interim Agreement (Oslo 2), signed in Washington on September 28,1995.

According to this agreement, the Covenant was to be amended within two months of the inauguration of the Palestinian Council. This council came into being on March 7, 1996 – and the Palestinians were obligated to amend the Covenant by May 7. So in April 1996, the world was treated to the spectacle of then prime minister Peres greeting the PNC resolution that purported to amend the Covenant as “the most important event in the Middle East in the past 100 years.”

You recall how hard you worked to coordinate the American and world spin with Peres, who was running for election at the time. The only problem was that Palestinian spokesmen within hours denied they had made any changes; at the most, some suggested that the process of defining a new charter had begun, but that the existing Covenant had been frozen, not annulled. What is most troubling about this is that they, not you and Peres who represent democracies, appear to have told the truth.

While this was a great matter of dispute during the election campaign, the cat was let out of the bag in the Note for the Record accompanying the Hebron redeployment agreement. In it, the Palestinians committed under your supervision to complete the process of amending the Covenant – a curious commitment if your government and Peres were to be believed. You have told many Israelis that it is not worthwhile to press this issue, as the new Palestinian Covenant would certainly include noxious provisions, such as a demand for a state with Jerusalem as the capital. So be it. Either side can take whatever position it wants at the outset of negotiations. At most this means that a further revision will be required to reflect the outcome of the negotiations.

In the meantime, however, a document negating Israel’s existence and advocating armed struggle to liquidate the Jewish state would have been thrown into the trash can.

We do not accuse you of bad faith, but rather of misguided policies that have had serious consequences. You have participated in an attempt to hoodwink the Israeli electorate. You have helped teach the Palestinians that they can wiggle out of signed commitments. You have assisted them in pursuing a twin-track approach of talking peace and pursuing violence for the past four years. All of which has meant the death and dismemberment of many innocent people, and declining public confidence in a vital process that you have worked so hard to advance. Please don’t give us any more summits against terrorism like the one cooked up at Sharm el-Sheikh during the last election campaign. We ask you instead to examine your conscience and change your ways. Human lives, indeed the fate of the region, depend on it.