On the seventh day of the summit, Clinton's patience was exhausted and he flipped his lid. Barak gave Clinton a paper that he wanted him to present to the Palestinians as his own. Not only did the paper pose questions as if the Palestinians had a test they must pass, but it walked back some of the key moves that Shlomo Ben-Ami, Barak's foreign minister, had made earlier. Clinton exploded: "You want to present these ideas directly to Arafat, to the Palestinians, you go ahead and see if you can sell it. There is no way I can. This is not real. This is not serious. I went to Shepherdstown and was told nothing by you for four days. I went to Geneva and felt like a wooden Indian doing your bidding." His voice rising and his face red, Clinton shouted, "I will not let it happen here. I will simply not do it." This outburst evidently had a sobering effect, for the next day Barak finally presented his bottom lines. Clinton duly conveyed the new ideas to Arafat, underlining their historic significance. Were they a basis for concluding an agreement, yes or no? The answer came back: No. Nor did Arafat make any counterproposal. This sealed the fate of the summit. Clinton promptly laid all the blame for the failure of the summit at Arafat's door, breaking his promise that there would be no finger-pointing in the event of failure.

With Clinton's support, Barak's version of events rapidly gained ground, particularly in Israel and the United States. According to this version, Israel made the most generous offer imaginable at Camp David, but Arafat rejected it flatly and made a deliberate decision to return to violence. This allegedly demonstrated that there is no Palestinian partner for peace. In The Missing Peace Dennis Ross supports this version, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly. During the crisis at Camp David, he muses that Arafat may simply not be up to making a deal: "He is a revolutionary; he has made being a victim an art form; he can't redefine himself into someone who must end all claims and truly end the conflict."

The Barak-Ross version of the collapse of the Camp David summit is simplistic, selective and self-serving. It is also contradicted by Ross's own account. If he and Barak didn't think that Arafat was up to doing a deal, why did they convene the summit and pressure Arafat to attend it? Didn't the intimate relationship with the Israelis cast some doubt on America's claim to be acting as an honest broker? Was there no basis for Arafat's suspicion of an Israeli-American conspiracy to corner him at Camp David? Arafat has many faults, but he has demonstrated his ability to make historic choices, notably by opting for a two-state solution in 1988 and by signing the Oslo Accord in 1993. By contrast, Barak had been unhappy about the accord with the PLO; he abstained in the cabinet vote on the 1995 Oslo II agreement; and he had never been a member of what Yossi Beilin calls "the peace mafia" in Israel. The most fundamental cause of the failure of the Camp David summit lies not in Arafat's psychological makeup but in Barak's package. On the one hand, he offered only limited concessions on Jerusalem and the refugees, and on the other hand he insisted on an absolute end to the conflict. He insisted that the Palestinians sign on the dotted line that they had no further claims against the State of Israel. This remorseless insistence on finality was in fact part of the problem, not the solution. Peace by ultimatum did not work.

Barak's package was a reasonable basis for an interim agreement, not for the final end of the conflict, which he wanted so badly. Israelis like to demonize Arafat, but no Palestinian leader, however moderate, could accept the package on offer at Camp David. Arafat, in fact, represents the broadest consensus within the Palestinian community. That is the source of his legitimacy and the secret of his strength. Arafat's real mistake was not to reject the much-vaunted "generous offer" but to encourage, or at least to tolerate, the resort to violence from his side following the collapse of the Oslo peace process. The Palestinian resort to violence in the al-Aqsa intifada had disastrous consequences. It came close to destroying the peace camp in Israel, convinced the public that there is no partner for peace and brought to power the most aggressively right-wing government in Israel's history.

The Missing Peace is a comprehensive and fascinating memoir about the trials and tribulations of an American peace processor. It covers a period of thirteen years on all the tracks, and it ends with some general reflections on the perils and pitfalls of peacemaking. It is easy to pour scorn on a process that absorbed so much time and energy from all the parties involved and yielded such meager results. But the years since the end of the Clinton presidency have shown all too clearly the cost of not having a peace process. A peace process does not invariably produce a settlement, but it usually keeps the dogs of war at bay. Talking, however protracted and inconclusive, is preferable to fighting and mutual carnage. As Winston Churchill used to say, "Better to jaw-jaw than to war-war." Dennis Ross and the other members of his team therefore deserve our gratitude for all their efforts to bring a measure of peace and stability to a region that is notoriously prone to irrational behavior and violence. And Ross himself deserves special commendation for producing such a revealing record of these efforts.

Yet The Missing Peace raises serious questions about the soundness of the Israel-first school of which Dennis Ross is a prominent member. The American emphasis on Israel's security at the expense of Palestinian rights was one of the reasons for the failure of the American-sponsored peace process. The asymmetry in power between Israel and the Palestinians is such that a voluntary agreement between the parties is simply unattainable. A third party is needed to push Israel into a settlement, and that third party can only be the United States. What is more, the Americans have the capacity to bring effective pressure to bear on Israel. America supports Israel to the tune of $3 billion a year. Never in the annals of human history have so few owed so much to so many. It simply does not make sense for America not to exert this leverage in the cause of peace. Paradoxically, the most serious charge against the Israel-first school is that it does not serve Israel's true, long-term interests. Israel's real interest, like that of the Palestinians, lies in an end to the occupation and a two-state solution. In the absence of a fair and equitable solution, the two communities will remain locked in a fatal embrace, an endless dance of death.

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