Experts keep getting it wrong

FARLEY WEISS

Reading an article by Dennis Ross ("Abbas keeps eye on the big picture," Jewish News, July 18) and a letter to the editor by Professor Gordon Weiner ("Not the same hard-line position," Jewish News, July 18) reminded me of Sen. John McCain's critique that so many commentators were wrong about the Persian Gulf War with Iraq and yet are still being paid to comment on the recent war with Iraq.

Ross' article on Abu Mazen shows that he has not learned his lessons from mistakes that he admitted he made in the State Department. Reading his column, one would not realize that Mazen allegedly was the financier behind the Olympic Munich Massacre in which 11 Israeli Olympic athletes were murdered in 1972, and that Mazen kissed the terrorist Abu Daoud and wished him luck on his way to commit this mass murder. Abu Mazen also wrote a book in 1982 titled "The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism," in which he wrote: "only 800,000 Jews were murdered (in the Holocaust), because there were no gas chambers."

As recently as March 3, Abu Mazen said in the Arab Daily al Sharq al Awsat: "We didn't talk about a break in the armed struggle. ... It is our right to resist. The intifada must continue and it is the right of the Palestinian people to resist and use all possible means." Finally, after being named prime minister, Abu Mazen told the Egyptian weekly al-Mussawar: "We will not do anything without (Arafat's) approval."

Even if Ross felt that Mazen somehow would represent better leadership, Mazen assures us that Arafat will always still be the leader.

Ross met with Arafat more than any American diplomat and today writes that "at no point during Camp David or in the six months after it did (Arafat) ever demonstrate any capability to conclude a permanent status deal." ("In Response to Camp David - The Tragedy of Errors," New York Review of Books, Sept. 20, 2001)

Furthermore, Ross admits that "those who say Arafat cannot carry out his security responsibilities because Israeli military incursions have devastated his capabilities fail to recognize that Arafat didn't act even before Israelis destroyed his infrastructure." ("Yasser Arafat," Foreign Policy, July/August 2002)

During his many years in the U.S. State Department, Ross pressured Israel to make concessions to Arafat and now has admitted that he ignored the obvious evidence that Arafat was not interested in reaching a final peace deal with Israel.

Ross should have learned from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who wrote in his book, "The White House Years": "When the pursuit of peace becomes the sole objective in foreign policy, it becomes a weapon in the hands of the most ruthless."

As for Professor Gordon Weiner, I debated him on the Oslo Accords at Arizona State University a few months after they were signed in September 1993. I recall Weiner saying he felt we had reached peace in our time and that Arafat had changed his spots and was now a man of peace. Weiner's predictions in that debate have been proven wrong by history.

Now Weiner claims that an ASU forum that mainly had only left-wing Israelis and a noted Arafat defender showed moderation on the Arab side, and that the peace offered at Camp David by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak is just around the corner. But Weiner has offered no explanation for the violence that erupted at Arafat's direction when peace was evidently so close.

I suggest that the Jewish News take Sen. McCain's comments to heart and stop printing articles and letters from those who have learned nothing from history and are duly repeating their historical mistakes.

Dennis Ross responds

Farley Weiss, a Phoenix resident, is national vice president of the Zionist Organization of America and associate vice president of the National Council of Young Israel.

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