VDH reviewing Ross

The incomparable Victor Davis Hanson reviews Dennis Ross's new Middle East diplomacy memoir The Missing Peace in Policy Review. A nice passage:

Ross’s narrative reminds us of the Europeans’ vain attempts through much of the late 1930s to mollify Hitler’s incessant demand for the return of “stolen” territory — liberal elected politicians in vain parleying with a dictator who saw every concession as appeasement and thus an invitation for still more abuse.

Finally, even Ross, the perennial optimist, sensed that irony: Though he criticizes a disengaged Bush administration for entering office with a determination to keep Arafat out of the Lincoln bedroom, he used such toughness on the horizon as a warning to Arafat to cut a deal while he still had a lame-duck but compliant Clinton. Ross concludes with all sorts of fair and judicious outlines for a comprehensive settlement based on the premise of land for peace, something akin to the 95 percent or so of the West Bank offered up at Camp David. But the data supplied by his comprehensive narrative often refute his own conclusions and hopes — and de facto argue for an alternative roadmap more attuned to the lessons of history than the social science of conflict resolution theory.

Peace comes, whether in Germany, Japan, Vietnam, or the Falklands, when victory and defeat adjudicate the issues at hand. Thus, there will be no settlement in the Middle East until the Palestinians accept that the effort to destroy Israel leads not to political advantage but to their own destruction, a realization that might just discredit the corrupt tribal apparatus of the Palestinian Authority. The present cold war of sorts, akin to our own struggle with the Soviet Union, will eventually lead to a day of reckoning for the Palestinians after Israel has finished its fence, withdrawn from Gaza, and consolidated remaining settlements in line with its own strategic advantage.

And that's the whole ballgame, really. When Palestinians stop trying to kill Israelis - everything else they have always wanted becomes possible. If Palestinians don't stop trying to kill Israelis - nothing they have ever wanted is possible.