The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine

by Nathan Thrall,
The Jerusalem Post, June 2, 2017

In a memoir, Martin Indyk, who served as US ambassador to Israel in the 1990s and special envoy for Israel-Palestinian negotiations in 2013 and 2014, opined that “American presidents can be more successful when they put their arms around Israeli prime ministers and encourage them to move forward, rather than attempt to browbeat them into submission.” Dennis Ross, president Bill Clinton’s special Middle East coordinator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s special adviser for the Persian Gulf, made a similar claim in his book Doomed to Succeed: The US-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama. “When the United States pressured Israel,” Ross wrote, “we never benefited.”

Read the full article