http://lobelog.com/a-bit-more-on-dennis-ross/

A Bit More on Dennis Ross

by Ali Gharib
By way of a brief update to my recent post on Dennis Ross’s Blame America First outlook on the rocky US-Israel relationship, I think it’s worthwhile to come up to speed on a couple of late-developing points. First, I’d like to point to Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker‘s recent write-up of Ross’s book (which I haven’t read and, frankly, probably won’t). In the course of a review of a book about the killing of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Filkins takes four paragraphs to discuss Ross’s book. Here’s the whole passage:
It’s jarring to contemplate the assassination of Rabin and then read Dennis Ross’s “Doomed to Succeed” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a detailed account of U.S.-Israeli relations since 1948. In four hundred-plus pages, there is almost no mention of the changes that have transformed the Israeli polity in the past six decades, and surprisingly little discussion of the steady growth in the settlement population, which now exceeds half a million. For Ross, who was the State Department’s director of policy planning under President George H. W. Bush, the special Middle East coördinator under President Bill Clinton, and an adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the settlements are evidently problematic only insofar as they present an obstacle to a smoothly functioning bilateral relationship. The United Nations and most foreign governments consider them illegal, but for him they are a political difficulty to be finessed. There is no talk of justice. Pressure on Israel—by Palestinians, by Europeans, by President Obama—appears to Ross bewildering and unreasonable.http://lobelog.com/a-bit-more-on-dennis-ross/