ITHACA, N.Y. -- "We have a moment. A moment to transform the situation. It is not a moment, by the way, to make peace. It is a moment to end the war," said former U.S. Ambassador Dennis B. Ross, speaking April 27 in the Statler Auditorium at Cornell University as this year's Bartels World Affairs Fellow.

Ross was referring to the decades-old war between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But since Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's decision last year to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and a small section of the northern West Bank, the death of longtime Palestinian Prime Minister Yasser Arafat, the recent election of new Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the Iraqi elections, Ross believes a "loss of fear" is spreading across the Middle East. This, he believes, is creating a unique set of opportunities that, if seized properly, could eventually lead to peace throughout the region.

From 1988 to 2000, Ross played the leading role in shaping U.S. involvement in the Middle East peace process, serving under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He helped the Israelis and Palestinians establish the 1995 Interim Agreement and brokered the Hebron Accord of 1997. Currently Ross is counselor and a Ziegler distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He also is the first chairman of a new Jerusalem-based think tank, the Institute for Jewish People Policy Planning, funded and founded by the Jewish Agency.

Clinton once said of Ross, "No one worked harder for peace than Dennis. He gave it everything he had and served our nation very well."

"Ambassador Ross is the ideal person to put those [recent Middle Eastern] developments in perspective," remarked Cornell President Jeffrey Lehman as he introduced Ross at the Bartels Lecture. "We are especially fortunate to have him at Cornell when so much is happening in the Middle East."

Declared Ross: "What's new about the current situation is a loss of fear. Every Arab regime throughout the Middle East has always ruled on the basis of coercion, intimidation and brutality. Fear was a currency of power." As a sign of change, he cited the protesting Lebanese civilians over the past several weeks, which recently led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon after 29 years of occupation. "The power struggle that you see in Lebanon, will resonate elsewhere, in some ways more than what's happening in Iraq," he said. 

"Part of the loss of fear comes from the fact that people voted in Iraq," he argued. "They were told, 'You vote, you die,' and they voted anyway. This was a picture that others saw in the region. The voting cemented a notion: 'Don't give in to fear.'"

Ross also pointed to the spread of free press in the Middle East, in particular to Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based television news channel. "Al Jazeera broke the taboos. Al Jazeera made it legitimate to question. Al Jazeera made all news accessible." He said that whereas the old regimes created their own realities and excluded everything else, they can't do that anymore.

He said the single most important factor of change, however, has been the death of Arafat. "[As long as] Arafat was there, there was no potential for change. … Mahmoud Abbas is everything that Yasser Arafat was not," said Ross, noting that Abbas not only believes in secular politics, institutionalization and sharing power under the rule of law but also in nonviolence and coexistence.

"Our policy should be focused right now on making sure Mahmoud Abbas succeeds," Ross insisted. He noted that since the election of Abbas on Jan. 9, other countries have pledged more than $2 billion to help the Palestinians, but little money has materialized so far. "The first place we should be helping to make sure he delivers is in the economic area," he said.

Ross warned that if we ask for democracy in the Middle East, we are going to have to live with the results. "We are going to see an election in Lebanon at the end of May, and you heard it here it first: Hezbollah will double its seats in the elective Parliament. We will also see an election among the Palestinians on July 17. If things don't change, Hamas is going to win the Legislative Council. ... We can't be pushing democracy and then reject the consequences of the election. So we are going have to contend with that, as a reality."

Ross has written extensively on the Middle East and former Soviet Union, and is the author of the 2004 book "The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace."

Thomas Oberst is an intern at the Cornell News Service.