[Spiegel]: You were there in 2000 when Yasser Arafat rejected an agreement with Israel’s then Prime Minister Ehud Barak and US President Bill Clinton on a two-state solution at Camp David. Some say there would have been peace for 20 years if the Palestinians had gone along with this agreement?
[Ross]: I agree with that. Exactly. I had dinner with one of the former Palestinian negotiators just before the corona crisis and he said to me: Can you imagine where we would be now if we had said yes to the Clinton parameters of December 2000? The Palestinians would now have their own state, with East Jerusalem as its capital. It’s a tragedy for the Palestinians that they didn’t say yes back then.
Dennis Ross, born in 1948, is one of the best experts on the Middle East conflict in the USA. The former top diplomat served as the American negotiator for the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians under both President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. He later advised US President Barack Obama in a leading role in the White House on Iran and the Middle East. Ross teaches at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and works at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank.
Just as Arafat could not expect to expel all of Israel, Israel will not be able to expel the Palestinians today. This historic rejection of compromise by Arafat (probably also under pressure from other states in the Middle East and further east) is a drama of far-reaching significance and impact, as can now be seen in the Gaza Strip. The current political development in Israel with the “most conservative government in its history” (US President Biden) and its indiscriminate bombing makes a solution like that of the year 2000 hardly possible. Likewise, the ever-growing fundamentalism in Islam, which does not want to see any other solution than the complete destruction and annihilation of Israel, is a massive barrier to such a solution.
However, the focus must be directed even more broadly at the global situation.
China with an insatiable desire to subjugate the planet economically.
Russia with great power fantasies that are completely at odds with the realities at home and can only be maintained in appearance because nuclear warheads are lurking in missile silos.
The USA, ethically failing as a world power since the bogus Iraq war, in danger of finally throwing democracy to a dark figure, and internally falling back into the deep Middle Ages of misanthropic religion.
In these developments, which propagate human devaluation and the striving for power of narcissistic egoism, lying is being cultivated worldwide and the truth is being strangled.
Will there be a Messiah? How should He reveal Himself among all the hypocrites? How should an external revelation maintain His credibility, and by what decisive number could it be enforced? In what outward form, in what field of human serious action? In politics? In education? Is it right to sit back and wait for Him or Her? How long to wait?
It is unlikely that there will be a Saviour in the next 40 years and it would be helpful if everyone who is waiting would draw up a programme on how He/She can achieve a worldwide presence.
Christ taught in a small circle and already failed in the – then large – city due to lies and fundamentalism. Every new spiritual impulse takes decades to become effective.
We see the only possibility at present in acting in two directions:
To refresh the universal teachings given over the last hundred years, connecting and explaining them, and to present them in a contemporary way. This impulse is useful for those who already have prior knowledge. We have started it and are continuing it.
Beyond that, all that remains is to offer the essence of the teachings in an unadulterated, concise and condensed form to those who are not yet familiar with them, to use them as a driving force for their spiritual hearts without criticising their lives and without fear.
This is the path we want to take. To do this, we need coagulated spiritual substance in the form of capital that is freely available. The method of dissemination must be modern and have the character of a campaign. The word is at the centre, not people. It is not for nothing that the original initiator of this work emphasised anonymity.
We will soon be asking for donations to enable us to launch a more extensive fundraising campaign, which can then be used to feed the “Word” campaign.
