Why did Dennis Ross Roll Out the Red Carpet to Welcome the Fateh Tanzim in Washington?

Dennis Ross, the special Middle East coordinator during the Clinton administrations from 1993 to 2001, and now the director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the new head of the “Jewish People Policy Planning Institute” of the Jewish Agency, brought three leaders of the Fatah Tanzim to Washington, D.C., to advance their cause with the U.S. Congress and with various Jewish organizations. That is what I heard on the Saturday night late night broadcast of the Voice of Israel Radio last week.

The next news item on that late night Voice of Israel Radio reported a drive by terror attack north of Jerusalem, where the same Fatah Tanzim took credit for wounding the driver… except that the driver riding with Israeli license plates was a Palestinian Arab driving a stolen Israeli vehicle. The Fatah Tanzim apologized for shooting the wrong guy, who meanwhile was getting treatment in an Israeli hospital.

Meanwhile, the Fatah Tanzim were more efficient on Sunday evening because just as their leaders were landing in Washington, they laid an ambush for an Israeli army foot patrol north of Jerusalem, where they wounded four young Israeli soldiers and then executed three of them while their fourth buddy was writhing in his wounds in the bushes nearby.

Earlier that same day, the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center (JMCC) issued results of a poll which boasted that 75 percent of the Palestinian Arab population endorsed the October 3rd Arab terror suicide bombing in the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, in which 21 Israeli men, women and children were murdered.

The JMCC, set up by the Fatah Tanzim and funded in part by the European Union, runs these polls through recorded personal interviews with families, with no confidentiality assured in any discrete method of polling.

In other words, the interviewee expresses what the Fatah Tanzim wants the media to hear… which is that the Palestinian Arab people favor continuing the campaign of premeditated, cold blooded murder that has plagued Israel for the past three years.

Yet for some reason, Dennis Ross, who is supposed to be one of the leading experts in Middle East research, somehow posits that the Fatah Tanzim represent a force of “moderating influence.”

Writing in the Baltimore Sun on June 24, 2003, Dennis Ross wrote that the “activists of Fatah, the Tanzim, who led the first intifada more than a decade ago and who have played an instrumental role in this one, believe that it’s time for change. In meetings with several Tanzim leaders, I heard: Force cannot work on Israelis or Palestinians.”

For whatever reason, Ross ignores the reality of the Fatah Tanzim, who have taken “credit” for the vast majority of the 18,000 Arab terror attacks that have been inflicted on Israel over the past three years, which have claimed the lives of 897 men, women and children.

The four Fatah Tanzim who have been Ross’ “guests” this week in Washington have directed that very murder campaign.

Hatem Abed Al-Khader, one of Ross’ “guests,” stated in a news interview on Israel’s Independence Day to a Palestinian Authority publication that, “We have no objection to suicide attacks, so long as these attacks advance our purposes.” (Source: www.amin.org, on May 15, 2002).

Achmed Renam, another of Ross’ “guests” in Washington, wrote in a news article in the Jordanian publication Al Hadej on June 25, 2001 that: “We have the right to fight Israel. We will choose the way in which we defend ourselves.”

During his eight-year tenure as the special Middle East coordinator during the Clinton administration, from 1993 to 2001, Ross acted as the salesman of Clinton’s Middle East “peace package” to the world.

It would seem that Ross continues to do so, as he spent the better part of Monday and Tuesday escorting his “guests” to meet leading congressmen and congressional aides and Middle East policy makers. The height of Ross’s visit was the meeting that Ross organized for the leaders of the Fatah Tanzim with David Satterfield, the Deputy Asst. Secretary of State.

The only question is whether the FBI and the INS should have met Ross’ cherished Fatah Tanzim instead of the leading policy makers and congressmen in Washington.

The consistent premise of the U.S.-sponsored Oslo Process, Road Map, Mitchell Plan and Tenet Plan was that all negotiations with the representatives of the PLO and its Palestinian National Authority were to be predicated on the absolute commitment of the Palestinian Arab interlocutors to cease and desist from advocating the murder of Jews.

Dennis Ross has ignored that premise, even though he was the architect of the very premises of the current Middle East “peace” process.