Wells Fargo Program on Ethics - 11/30/2005
Dennis Ross
For more than twelve years, Ambassador Dennis B. Ross played the leading role in shaping U.S. involvement in the Middle East peace process and in dealing directly with the negotiations. Ambassador Ross was this country’s point man in both the Bush and Clinton administrations for exploring all avenues and approaches to settling this age-old conflict. As the architect of the peace process, he was instrumental in assisting the Israelis and Palestinians in reaching the 1995 Interim Agreement, and Ross successfully brokered the Hebron Accord in 1997. He facilitated the Israeli-Jordan peace treaty and intensively worked to bring Israel and Syria together. Mr. Ross has been credited for managing the peace process through periods of crisis and stalemate. His tireless approach centered on making progress wherever it was possible, building new baselines of understanding, and refusing to accept that failure was an option.
Ambassador Ross’s latest book, The Missing Peace – The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace tells the story of the effort to negotiate peace over the last decade and outlines the key lessons to be drawn from that experience.
Currently, Ambassador Ross is Director 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 Institute for Jewish People Policy Planning.