The human factor of Mideast talks
Print Edition
READY for a documentary about three decades of agonizing fits and starts of the Mideast peace process, from the perspective of US negotiators? You’re probably thinking that doesn’t sound too enticing right about now. But there’s a reason “The Human Factor,” by Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh, escapes what would seem a likely fate of being interesting only to policy wonks and those with a direct stake in the issue, and it has something to do with the title. It’s a reference to a line from Dennis Ross, the best-known negotiator of the bunch.
“You can’t ignore the human factor,” he said. “Someone who has a human touch treats someone else with respect. He doesn’t think they’re going to outsmart anybody.”
The film goes on to prove the point, threading a delicate line between giving us necessary facts and sounding like a dry history lesson. But the value is in the small, human details. The film is full of such humanizing touches, not just about Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat but about Israeli leaders and American ones, too. Like Bill Clinton as a man on a career-defining mission to achieve a peace deal. The film traces the long peace efforts through archival footage and interviews with key negotiators: Ross, who played a huge role for more than a decade, working for presidents from Reagan to Obama; Martin Indyk, twice the US ambassador to Israel; and negotiators Gamal Helal, Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer.
There’s a fascinating description of a meal in the small dining room off the Oval Office between Clinton, Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and King Hussein of Jordan. Ross describes an offended Hussein admonishing Netanyahu as if he were a wayward schoolboy: “You don’t have the maturity to be a leader,” he tells him. “You have to grow up and become a leader.”
At another point, Ross describes Clinton exclaiming about Netanyahu: “Who does he think the superpower is?”
This is, of course, after the death of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of a Jewish extremist in 1995, as he pursued peace. The film effectively portrays the grudging respect that had slowly formed between Rabin and Arafat. Ross recounts the news of Rabin’s death. His wife had to explain to their children why Dad was crying. “They’d never seen me cry before,” he says. Ross would stay on the job, trying to broker peace between Arafat and Netanyahu, or Arafat and Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Clinton was determined, but that wasn’t enough. The 2000 Camp David summit fails to produce an agreement, and we see Clinton in his last days in office in January 2001, in a call with Arafat, who calls him a “great man.”
“No I’m not,” Ross quotes Clinton as saying. “I’m a failure.”
The film does not, of course, answer its primary question: What went wrong? But there’s a hint. Miller raises one of the most serious issues: Was the US really equipped to be an honest broker? Was peace ever possible when the Americans were, as Miller puts it, acting as Israel’s lawyers? He asks: “Did we have Palestinian lawyers?”
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