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aving served in five administrations over the course of four decades and having worked with six Israeli prime ministers, Dennis Ross has unparalleled experience and a unique vantage point with respect to the U.S.–Israel relationship. His history of the 12 presidencies since 1948 is an important one for policymakers, politicians, scholars, and students. It deserves a wide readership, even though—or even because—the history he recounts does not support the title of the book.

Ross writes that on reviewing the historical record, he was surprised to find that arguments in later administrations were “recycled [and] often (to my amazement) couched in the exact same terms” as in the earlier ones. He found within each administration “the same failure to learn from mistakes” and to question three erroneous assumptions: that (1) distancing from Israel was required to generate Arab support for America; (2) cooperation with Israel involved significant costs; and (3) resolution of the Palestinian problem was critical to resolving other issues in the Middle East. The assumptions were consistently contradicted by experience, and yet they continue today.

Harry Truman faced enormous resistance within his administration over his decision to recognize the Jewish state in 1948. None of his senior national-security advisers saw any benefits; all predicted significant costs. Two days before Israel’s declaration of independence, Secretary of State George Marshall, in an emotional meeting, told Truman he would vote against him in the upcoming election if he proceeded. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was also adamantly opposed. The CIA predicted the Jewish state would not last more than two years.

Truman’s counsel, Clark Clifford, rebutted each of the concerns. He argued that failure to support the Jewish state—for which the U.S. had voted at the UN—would be exploited by the Soviets as a sign we did not stand by our commitments. He warned that it would put America in the “ridiculous role” of “trembling” before the threats of the Arabs, with our “shillyshallying appeasement” of them having already done significant damage. He asserted the oil supply would not be jeopardized, because the Arabs depended on oil revenue to survive. He concluded that recognition of Israel would regain the prestige the United States had lost during months of wavering.

Clifford’s judgment proved correct on all counts: In 1948–49, Israel survived an assault from five Arab countries; U.S. access to oil continued; and Arab cooperation with the United States actually increased thereafter. Truman’s decision became an enduring example of his vision and courage.

By contrast, the Eisenhower administration sought to curry favor with Arab leaders by distancing the United States from Israel. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles assured the Arabs that U.S. policies “would be more fair and more just,” and he offered arms to Egypt, ignoring Israel’s fears that they would be used against it. Economic assistance to Israel was reduced, and the U.S. sided with Egypt against Britain, France, and Israel in the 1956 war resulting from Nasser’s takeover of the Suez Canal. But Nasser turned to the Soviets despite Eisenhower’s efforts, and U.S. policy succeeded only in worrying moderate Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Libya, which felt more threatened by Egypt than by Israel. Ross concludes that:

Eisenhower and those around him were incapable of seeing that…[s]o long as the Arabs felt that we would stand by them if they were threatened by their neighbors, this would trump other considerations, including Israel. What damaged the United States was the perception that it would not stand by its friends.

Eisenhower did not meet with Israel’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, until the final year of his administration; JFK met with him in his first, and later offered advanced arms to Israel. State Department fears that such aid would hurt U.S. relations with the Arabs proved wrong again: When the Saudi crown prince visited America, his overriding concerns were Egyptian actions in Yemen, not arms sales to Israel. Kennedy also knew how to use Israel as a strategic asset: When Egypt threatened Jordan, Kennedy warned Nasser that the U.S. would not stop Israel from responding to any Egyptian move—and Nasser backed down.

Lyndon Johnson became the first president to provide Israel with offensive as well as defensive weapons. At the time, a special National Intelligence Estimate predicted serious anti-American responses in every Arab state. But Johnson provided tanks, and later Skyhawk bombers, and the bureaucratic predictions proved wrong again. The run-up to the Six-Day War in 1967 also showed that distancing America from Israel was dangerous. After Egypt mobilized its forces, moved into Sinai, demanded removal of the United Nations force, and blockaded the Straits of Tiran, LBJ informed Israel that America would not support preemptive military action—even though Eisenhower had promised such support if the Straits were ever closed. After waiting as long as it could in the face of Egypt’s genocidal rhetoric, Israel decided it had to act alone.

After the war, Israel requested F-4 Phantom planes to defend against the Soviet rearmament of its Middle East clients. Both the State Department and the Pentagon civilian leadership argued—yet again—that it would complicate relations with the Arabs and make Israel less flexible. But LBJ, backed by the joint chiefs of staff, overrode the objections. Relations with Arab allies were unaffected, and Israel signaled its readiness to trade land for peace. Ross notes that, once again, there was no reflection within the bureaucracy about its mistaken premises and erroneous predictions:

[N]o one asked why the dire consequences that were predicted did not materialize. No one wondered why the Arab countries that got their arms from us still wanted that to continue. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that Arab priorities centered around their security and that getting U.S. arms implied an American commitment to them. . . . Once again, the inter-Arab competition drove Arab priorities.

The Nixon administration sometimes held up arms to Israel (including arms promised by the Johnson administration), pressured Israel to make concessions, and purposely created distance, hoping to gain influence with Egypt and Syria—which failed again. In 1970, as Jordan was teetering under a Palestinian attack and the United States was bogged down in Vietnam, Israel responded to a U.S. request and mobilized its forces, warding off an invasion from Syria and proving again its value as a strategic ally. Ultimately, Sadat turned to America rather than the Soviet Union, because American ties with Israel had given the United States greater influence in the region.

In the administrations in which he served, Ross observed the same three mistaken assumptions in action. Carter, Bush 41, and Obama all distanced themselves from Israel and gained no benefit from doing so. U.S. cooperation with Israel did not produce the negative fallout the State Department had predicted since 1948. Arab leaders rarely did anything about the Palestinian issue, other than posture: “The hard truth” about the Palestinians, Ross writes, “is that they are not a priority for Arab leaders.” In his 2009 book, Myths, Illusions & Peace, written with David Makovsky, Ross called the linkage between the Palestinian conflict and other Middle Eastern issues “the mother of all myths.” His latest book provides ample additional evidence to repudiate that myth.

Nowhere have the three flawed assumptions been more evident than in the Obama administration. Starting with his first press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2009, Obama supported the idea of linkage. He reneged on the understanding the second Bush administration had reached with Israel in 2003 on settlement activity, and he refused to affirm—in a move that stunned Israel—the 2004 Bush letter given in connection with Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. He deliberately avoided visiting Israel on his trips in the Middle East. He gave his first foreign interview to the Arab press and then did not grant the Israeli media an interview for another 18 months. He continually demanded Israeli concessions while asking none from the Palestinians. He re-joined anti-Semitic organizations at the UN and had his UN ambassador, Susan Rice, combine the U.S. veto of a one-sided anti-Israel UN resolution with a vitriolic speech against Israel. He treated Israel not as a strategic asset against Iran but as an impediment to the outstretched hand he offered in his Inaugural Address.

Ross devotes a 50-page chapter to “Obama and Israel,” in which he writes that from the beginning of his work in the Obama administration, he believed that the U.S. approach to Iran would be “the linchpin for what would happen in the region and our place in it.” He believed it was “unthinkable” that Netanyahu would consider taking risks with the Palestinians if he did not feel secure about Iran. In addition, Iran was the issue on which “all America’s key Arab friends were preoccupied,” not the Palestinians. Thus, “our approach to Iran was going to be the centerpiece” not only of the U.S. relationship with Israel, but with Arab allies as well.

Ross writes that he thought Netanyahu could be induced “to take hard steps on the Palestinians if he had a commitment from the president to act militarily against the Iranian nuclear threat in the event that diplomacy failed.” But Obama “was not prepared to make such a commitment.” One can only imagine the effect on the Israeli leadership upon learning that the U.S. president, while intoning in public that “all options” were on the table, was privately unwilling to commit to the final one, even as a last resort, even in exchange for significant Israeli concessions.

When Netanyahu addressed Congress in March 2015, he was undoubtedly aware of the cascade of concessions that Obama was making to secure his Iran deal, but which had not yet been made public. Ross calls Netanyahu’s speech a “mistake.” But given Netanyahu’s understanding that Obama’s “all options” rhetoric was disingenuous, and his knowledge that the impending deal was much worse than the American public and its elected representatives knew, one can better appreciate his decision to speak directly to Congress, before time ran out.

Writing about the “peace process,” Ross notes that Ronald Reagan and all subsequent presidents described Israeli settlements as an “obstacle to peace”—which made the issue one for negotiation. Obama changed the formulation to “illegitimate,” which made it a legal issue to be adjudicated. Ross advised Obama in 2009 that his new language was “changing our historical posture,” but Obama nonetheless repeated the charge in his UN address later that year, after Ross’s attempts to change the draft failed. Combined with his other acts of concerted distancing, Obama had lost the Israeli public by the end of his first year. Ross notes that Obama failed to understand that alienating Israelis while urging Israel to follow his lead contained a “built-in contradiction.”

But there was a larger problem with the entire process, from its beginning, epitomized by two anecdotes in the book. In 1998, while negotiating a further redeployment of Israeli forces on the West Bank, Ross found that Arafat demanded a 13 percent additional withdrawal, while Netanyahu would agree to only 11 percent. Ross describes how he bridged the gap with a “new idea”—using “green areas,” where construction would be banned, to make up 2 percent. He took the idea to President Clinton, who “loved it.” Ross also repeats a story he told in The Missing Peace, his 840-page 2004 book on the peace process, on how he bridged another gap with a suggestion to have Saudi Arabia attend the 1991 Madrid peace conference indirectly rather than directly. He conveyed the idea to Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, who, Ross writes, “loved it.”
The peace process has never lacked for plans, parameters, bridging proposals, roadmaps, and steps to finesse the problem du jour—many of them quite ingenious. What has been missing is a larger recognition that—to use Ross’s analytical framework—the process has repeatedly reflected a mistaken assumption and a lesson often encountered but never learned: The Palestinians do not want a state, much less a “solution,” if it comes at the cost of recognizing a Jewish state.

After the Palestinians rejected a state three times—in 2000 at Camp David, in 2001 by rejecting the Clinton Parameters, and in 2008 by walking away from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s offer in the Annapolis Process—and after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza produced not peace but multiple rocket wars instead—it was obvious that there was a fundamental problem with the process.

Indeed it was apparent to some well before that. In a 1998 Commentary article entitled “Israel and the United States: A Complex History”—which analyzed the U.S.–Israeli relationship from Truman to Clinton—Norman Podhoretz identified the basic issue: It was foolish, he wrote, to expect Arab–Israeli peace “until the Arabs first made their own peace with the existence of a Jewish state.” He noted “the sheer absurdity of sitting around with a map trying to figure out if a withdrawal from another 13.1 percent of the territories…would have any more effect on the prospects for peace than one of 9.2 or 8.6 percent.”

Two administrations, 18 years, and three offers of a Palestinian state later, the Palestinians regularly deny any historic connection of Jews to the Land of Israel, claim Jesus was an Arab, repeatedly name streets and squares after mass murderers of Jews, remove Israel from school maps, and assert a specious “right” of return to Israel that can never be relinquished. Nor have the Palestinians built the institutions necessary for a peaceful state: They lack the rule of law, a peaceful civil society, and even the ability to hold an election. Under those circumstances, the idea that a Palestinian state is a “solution” is delusional.

Ross writes that in 2011—after extensive work with Netanyahu, Quartet representative Tony Blair, and EU foreign minister Catherine Ashton—the United States prepared a paper for renewed peace negotiations that was then rejected by Mahmoud Abbas because it specified the outcome of the talks as “two states for two peoples.” Ross writes that Abbas “would not accept anything that suggested Palestinian recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people.” Then Ross ponders whether Abbas actually means what he has always said:

Was this a tactic, because Netanyahu had made it a public issue and he wanted to get something for it? Or was it strategic and he was not willing to acknowledge Israel this way? The answer in 2011 was not clear—and it would be no clearer after John Kerry’s efforts in 2014.

It is indicative of the nature of the peace process that its future depends on the hope that a holdover president, elected 11 years ago to a single four-year term, who turned down the offer of a Palestinian state when he was legally in office, and who repeatedly refuses to endorse the idea of a Jewish state, is merely stating a tactical position.

Ross considers the title of his book optimistic—a reflection of his belief that the U.S.–Israel alliance will always transcend individual leaders. But readers may finish this book unconvinced by Ross’s confidence in fate, because the book demonstrates that individuals matter—particularly presidents. Unless the next one pivots back into the world, aware of the lessons of the past, ready to support America’s principal ally in the region unambiguously, the U.S.–Israel relationship—and much more—may be doomed to fail.