Abstract
The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace' is a book by Dennis Ross, it was published in 2004, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ross is an American diplomat, he served as the Director of Policy Planning in the State Department under President George Bush and he became the special Middle East coordinator for President Bill Clinton. Thus, he has great knowledge and experience in negotiations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His work was published in the context of the al-Aqsa Intifada. In The Missing Peace, Ross retraces briefly the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, going back to the British Mandate. His focus is on the contemporary process of negotiations, started with the 1991 Madrid Conference. His work deals with the talks between Israel and Syria, the Oslo process, the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in 1994, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the election of Benjamin Netanyahu. He also covers the 1997 Hebron Agreement, the Wye River Memorandum and the victory of Ehud Barak in 1998. This leads him to the Camp David Summit, which is at the core of this book review. Camp David has been the subject of many analyses and mythologies. As Slater explains, it is very difficult to assess Camp David because 'all of Barak's proposals were verbal' since he 'refused to allow the creation of an official record.' Thus, significantly, each participant came out with a different version of what had happened. The dominant view is that Prime Minister Ehud Barak formulated the most generous proposals ever made by an Israeli leader and that Yasir Arafat doggedly refused them. Nonetheless, this argument has been largely challenged.
