In this short video we hear Dennis Ross, a Neocon friendly adviser to Obama, discuss his views on Iran’s threat to Israel. It is curious that in this interview Mr Ross fails to disclose the fact that Israel currently has over 150 undeclared nuclear weapons. He does emphasize that Israel could potentially be taken out by just one Nuclear bomb.
Mr Ross is unabashedly unilateral in his discussion of the situation in the Middle East. It has been known for many years that Mr Ross is a rabid Zionist. In fact, one of the most vocal critics of Jimmy Carter’s book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” was Dennis Ross.
Brief Biographical sketch of Dennis Ross:
Ross was born on November 26, 1948, in San Francisco. He lives in a suburb of D.C. with his wife and three children. According to his book, he was raised in Marin County, California, by his Jewish mother and Catholic stepfather, who maintained a non-religious household atmosphere. Ross did his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and did graduate work in political science at the same institution, focusing on study of the Soviet Union. Ross continues to teach at various prestigious colleges. Ross is well sought after for his public speeches.
Criticisms:
During his years of trying to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations he was criticized by people on both sides of the conflict. Palestinians made repeated references to the fact that he is Jewish, and some right-wing conservative Israelis branded him “self-hating” — each questioning his ability to be unbiased. According to Aaron David Miller, a member of the Ross-led US negotiating team in 1999-2000, under Ross they frequently acted as “Israel’s lawyer.”
According to Miller:
“With the best of motives and intentions, we listened to and followed Israel’s lead without critically examining what that would mean for our own interests, for those on the Arab side and for the overall success of the negotiations. The “no surprises” policy, under which we had to run everything by Israel first, stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking. If we couldn’t put proposals on the table without checking with the Israelis first, and refused to push back when they said no, how effective could our mediation be? Far too often, particularly when it came to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, our departure point was not what was needed to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides but what would pass with only one — Israel.
Currently, Ross is counselor and Ziegler distinguished fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is the first chairman of a new Jerusalem based think tank, the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, funded and founded by the Jewish Agency. Ross’s involvement in the Institute led some to assume that he would not resume his role as Middle East peace envoy, M. J. Rosenberg of Talking Points Memo commented, “I had thought that former Middle East peace envoy Dennis Ross hoped to return to mediation when the next administration comes in. Apparently, he’s had it. He is currently in Israel chairing a major Jewish leadership conference on the future of Israel and the Jewish people — with Netanyahu, Zuckerman, top AIPAC leaders and many of the other ‘usual suspects.’ This is not the kind of thing one does if one intends to get back into the ‘honest broker’ business. This is like George Mitchell (a Lebanese-American) chairing a session in Beirut on the Arab future. If he did that, Mitchell could still work on Ireland but not the Middle East.”
In the fall of 2005, taught a class in Mid-East Peace at Brandeis University, and taught it again at Georgetown University in the fall of 2006. In Spring 2007 he taught Strategic Negotiation and Statecraft at Georgetown and is teaching a similar course in Fall 2007. In Spring 2008, he is teaching a course in statecraft at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Ross is a Foreign Affairs Analyst for the Fox News Channel in addition to being a frequent commentator in The Washington Post and The New York Times. Ross’s first column at The New Republic, “Statecraft”, was published on April 9, 2007.
Ross was a noted supporter of the Iraq war, although he opposed some of the Bush Administration’s policies for post-war reconstruction.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Ross along with James Steinberg and Daniel Kurtzer are among the principle authors of Barack Obama’s address on the Middle East to AIPAC in June 2008, which was viewed as the Democratic nominee’s most expansive on international affairs

