Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Jewish Studies Symposium — Ambassador Dennis Ross (Washington Institute for Middle East Policy) on “The Trump Administration’s Policy on Israel, Palestine and the Middle East”

Ambassador Ross is counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.  He served two years as special assistant to President Obama and National Security Council senior director for the Central Region, and a year as special advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.  For more than twelve years, Ambassador Ross played a leading role in shaping U.S. involvement in the Middle East peace process and dealing directly with the parties in negotiations.  Ambassador Ross was U.S. point man on the peace process in both the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. He was instrumental in assisting Israelis and Palestinians to reach the 1995 Interim Agreement; he also successfully brokered the 1997 Hebron Accord, facilitated the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, and intensively worked to bring Israel and Syria together.  Ambassador Ross is the author of several influential books on the peace process, including Myths, Illusions, and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East, coauthored with peace process expert David Makovsky.  An earlier study, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace, offers comprehensive analytical and personal insight into the Middle East peace process. The New York Times praised his 2007 publication, Statecraft, And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World, as “important and illuminating.” His most recent book is Doomed to Succeed: U.S.-Israeli Relations During a Time of Change (2015).  Ambassador Ross is a 1970 graduate of UCLA where he studied Soviet international policy and from 1984-1986 served as the executive director of the Berkeley-Stanford program on Soviet International Behavior.  He is the recipient of UCLA’s highest medal and has been named the UCLA alumnus of the year.  He has been awarded honorary doctorates from Brandeis, Amherst, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Syracuse, and was named 2016-2017 senior fellow by Yale University’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs.