Brokering the Peace; An insider's account of mediating the Mideast conflict.(The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace)(Book Review)

Byline: Dan Ephron

In the waning days of his presidency, Bill Clinton received a call from Prime Minister Ehud Barak. The Israeli leader was about to lose an election to his right-wing rival, Ariel Sharon. But if Clinton could make one more trip to the Middle East to clinch a long-elusive Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, Barak suggested, it might help him eke out a victory. Clinton was inclined to go. But first he summoned his main Middle East troubleshooter, Dennis Ross.

Ross, an American Jew who mediated between Israelis and Arabs under two presidents, relates the story in his captivating book, "The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace" (872 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux ). He opposed the eleventh-hour mission, he writes, because he was deeply skeptical about one man: Yasir Arafat. Still, he urged Clinton to call the Palestinian leader with a proposition. If Arafat could iron out final disputes with Israeli negotiators in a 24-hour talkfest, Clinton would make the trip. Arafat's response: not now, I'm busy. "You are prepared to take this enormous leap and he is too busy," Ross scrawled while Arafat dithered on the phone. "What does that tell us?" It told Ross what he had intuited for years: that Arafat was constitutionally incapable of reaching a final peace with Israel.

Ross's record as a go-between is mixed. He helped Israelis and Palestinians reach a series of interim accords in the 1990s, and brought Israelis and Syrians to the brink of an agreement in Geneva four years ago (though no deal ...