When it comes to the peace issue, President Obama unfairly puts the entire onus on Israel to act because he views Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as ‘too weak,’ said Dennis Ross, author of Doomed to Succeed. ‘If you say they are too weak to criticize then they are too weak to be accountable, they are too weak to be responsible, they are too weak to have a state,’ said Ross. ‘I have no problem with being prepared to criticize the Israelis when they warrant it. I do have a problem when we are prepared to only criticize the Israelis and never criticize the Palestinians.’ Ross is the Counselor and Davidson Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown. He was the director of policy planning in the State Department for George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton’s Middle East Peace envoy, and a special assistant to the president under Barack Obama. In his book, Ross said there has been an institutional bias against Israel in the U.S. State Department since the country’s founding in 1948. According to Ross, this is partly because most experience for U.S. Ambassadors comes from being posted in the Arab world. ‘There is an irony in this administration, at least in the second term, that the White House has been more combative in its view of Israel than the State Department,’ said Ross.
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