The lanky, unflappable American was privy to virtually every consequential Arab-Israeli diplomatic transaction over twelve years. Well aware that the moment for a bold resolution has truly passed, leaving the less congenial role of conflict management in its wake, the tireless mandarin decided to retire along with the Clinton Administration. "I had done that a long time and I wasn’t prepared to switch gears personally."

Now, released from government service and ensconced at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy writing his account of those twelve years, Ross speaks freely about them. The Jewish State Department official – and he was known and occasionally criticised for his Israeli sympathies – is punctilious on detail and not afraid to own up to mistakes, albeit with qualifications.

Sitting high in Melbourne’s Grand Hyatt, Ross explains the terminal phase of negotiations, from the Camp David Summit’s investigation of final status questions such as borders and Jerusalem, to President Clinton’s last-ditch proposals to bridge what appeared to be a maddeningly narrow but unyielding gap between the Israelis and Palestinians. Why did Arafat say no?

"I believe the reason Chairman Arafat said no to them was that he really personally is not up to doing a deal on all the issues," is Ross’ sober assessment. "For reasons related to who he is, his self-definition, having been a revolutionary all his life, somehow transforming himself was something he couldn’t do by the end of the Clinton Administration."

"He had, frankly, an unprecedented opportunity, given the ideas President Clinton put on the table. He had a historic moment and he could not seize it and I think it’s very unfortunate and tragic for both sides that that was the case. Even though he had the possibility of having the essence of Palestinian needs being met on every issue – on every issue – on borders, on Jerusalem, on security arrangements and even on refugees, he couldn’t do it. Now I will say he had to make some hard decisions himself. Arafat had to give up one of the animating beliefs of his movement and that was the right of return to Israel. Not the right of return to his own state, but the right of return to Israel. Now, in 1988 he adopted a two-state solution. Throughout the Oslo process, he emphasised that he was committed to a two-state solution. The idea of a two-state solution and the right of return, not just to your own state, but to Israel: those two ideas are contradictory. You can’t have it both ways."

"You had an Israeli government prepared to stretch further than anybody thought possible and many in Israel thought wise," continues Ross, "but they were prepared to live with it. You had an American president prepared to invest the prestige of the United States, prepared to put his ideas on the table that I don’t think any other president is about to put on the table. And he also made it clear that those ideas would be withdrawn if they weren’t accepted. So I don’t think you can recreate those circumstances so easily."

"You also have a new Israeli government, in no small part, because of the violence, because of the rejection of the Clinton ideas, and that means you don’t have the same possibility in Israel. So, I don’t believe that one can focus now on the solution. You have to focus on management and defusing of the conflict."

Ross admits it. "We made what I think was a heroic effort to help the parties – God knows how much time and travel and energy was expended in pursuing this. But I do believe that we were not vigilant enough in understanding that you could have a very corrosive effect if you allowed one environment to exist at the negotiating table and another environment to exist on the ground."

"There was an ongoing ambivalency. Could you tolerate certain kinds of behaviour that seemed to be inconsistent with peace? We heard Israelis oftentimes say to us, ‘some of these Arab attitudes will change only after we have an agreement; don’t try to make the change of attitude a condition for reaching the agreement because then you won’t reach an agreement, but if you reach the agreement, the attitudes will follow.’ And that was something that was held with some genuine conviction."

"It’s very clear that Hafez al-Assad was a very tough negotiator who moved at a glacial pace. He was someone who was never in a hurry. Interestingly enough, at the end of [1999], suddenly he seemed to be in a hurry for the first time in this process. Ehud Barak, who oftentimes seemed to be in a hurry at that point found certain political limitations on his side and decided to go slower. I think the combination of that, the leak of the draft peace treaty that we put together when we were at Shepherdstown with Barak and with Foreign Minister Shara and their teams, that seemed to have a profound affect on Assad. Was this the sort of issue that would put at risk his most important priority, which was managing succession?"

In this version, the opportunity was there, and only an unfortunate concatenation of circumstances prevented its fulfilment. Some might regard that as an overly generous assessment of both Assad and the Americans who proceeded on this basis. But what of the proxy war Syria continued to wage through Hezbollah against the Israelis? Surely this must have set off alarm bells?

"Absolutely it did, throughout the whole period," Ross replies unflinchingly. "Rabin from time to time said to me he didn’t want to make any efforts on the Syrian track. There were times I’ll tell you when Rabin told me that ‘between the two tracks, I see Arafat doing things that are difficult for him’ – especially when he was putting Hamas in gaol. He said, ‘I don’t see Assad doing things that are difficult for him.’"

Perhaps so, but why the persistence in the face of Syrian belligerence on the ground, with alarm bells ringing, so we are told, throughout the whole period?

For it is not quite the case that Israeli willingness to suspend disbelief in Arafat and Assad’s bona fides endured. The Israeli leadership and public became more sceptical as the fatality count from Palestinian terrorism mounted. Successive Israeli governments protested Palestinian failure to honour commitments on disbanding armed groups, or even renouncing their Charter with its prescription for Israel’s elimination. The Netanyahu government sought to render further progress conditional on Palestinian performance in the Wye River Agreement in October 1998, and Washington theoretically agreed to duly monitor compliance. It proved a doomed business. The Americans at the time, contrary to Ross’ retrospective preference, preferred progress on the table to tranquillity on the streets.

"I am convinced as I think more about it, that you cannot have a peace only of negotiators and leaders, and not of publics, and if you want to build that kind of peace that will endure, you have to begin to reach out to publics too and that means not only avoiding bad behaviour but also promoting good ones."

The question seems unavoidable. "Did the Americans, did the President, did you yourself do the right thing in trying to bridge what at the moment appears unbridgeable, or was it the case that violence was rewarded when further attempts were made to meet by concessions the Palestinian case?"

Ross answers carefully. "Well, we did see a round of violence in May which went on for a week and it was between the Tanzim, the Palestinian security forces and the IDF and that, I felt, was a harbinger of things to come because there was a seething tension on the Palestinian street for a variety of reasons. Frustration with a process that hadn’t come close to fulfilling its promise, a process that seemed to legitimise continuing Israeli control of their lives, not end it; tremendous corruption in the Palestinian Authority, which was no small source of anger and frustration and alienation with the Palestinians."

All these conditions, however, in Ross’ view, only indicated that a last-ditch effort at peace had to be made; that indeed, anything less would have been irresponsible. "Going with them at Camp David was one thing, because then there wasn’t violence but you had a possibility. In December, after you’d had violence for a couple of months, it was a legitimate question to say ‘should you go with ideas that went beyond Camp David?’ All I can tell you is that both sides were asking us to do it. And it’s hard for the United States in that role, when both sides are asking us not only to play a certain kind of role but to specifically put certain ideas on the table."

He also seems to endorse the Mitchell Commission, that indirectly or otherwise delivered Arafat one victory: the idea that an Israeli settlement freeze, strictly a final status issue all along, be implemented now merely to facilitate a resumption of talks. "If the Israelis don’t want the Palestinians to act in ways that are completely inconsistent with peace then also they shouldn’t confront the Palestinians with behaviours that create a deeper sense of grievance and greater sense of powerlessness. It’s wrong, but you can also understand that if they feel like they’re in the corner all the time, they feel powerless, when their homes are demolished, when there’s confiscation of property or expansion of settlements, they feel powerless."

But Ross is uncomfortable with his own qualification, for he adds: "But that can’t ever justify terror. There cannot be any tolerance of terror or acceptance of terror whatsoever. And I think it’s very important for the Palestinians to understand that those they would like to influence on the world stage with the legitimacy of their case that they do great damage to their own cause when they in any way support terror or even when they promote violence. You cannot be promoting incitement to violence and say you’re committed to peace. The two are contradictory."

"What we didn’t do enough with was people-to-people programmes, because those break down the barriers between the two sides, those basically do away with stereotypes and they also make it hard to sustain demonology. Australia could play a very useful role in that regard."

"In a word, I would say I did not find on a consistent basis that the UN could play a helpful role. The fact is that there was an imbalance in terms of approach. Those who think there can be some kind of imposition; they’re not living on this planet. I often say that those who talk about putting international forces in there, I want to know who’s signing up to put their forces in there if the two sides don’t agree. There’s not going to be a long list of takers. If [the Palestinians] think there’s some kind of quick fix which they think they can pursue outside the negotiating framework and that someone else is going to provide the answer and they don’t have to do anything, they’re kidding themselves, they’re living an illusion."

Perhaps they are. But illusions have not prevented Arafat from becoming a dictator on his own turf without signing off on peace, nor from gaining concessions at the table despite periodic violence. If a final agreement is now off the cards for years, lessons will have to be drawn about the process that led to this lamentable pass.

"I wouldn’t shirk my own responsibility," Ross sums up. "I felt given what we were hearing from the two sides, it was not responsible for us not to do it. In the end, given where we were, given the nature of the gaps, given what both sides were saying to us, if we had been afraid to do it and not done it, we would constantly second-guess ourselves afterwards, saying ‘Did we miss a historic moment?’"

One can sympathise with the dilemma the Americans, and of course, Barak, were facing. The process had proceeded too far to risk failure for want of tenacity. It recalls the afterthought of Sir Nevile Henderson, last British Ambassador to Berlin before Hitler’s war, recorded in his appositely titled Failure of a Mission, that nothing was lost in the British attempt to reason with Hitler; that on the contrary, the British Empire would not have entered upon war united with neutral opinion behind it if the attempt had not been made. (Not that there is much neutral opinion either in existence or charitable to American and Israeli efforts.) In both cases, the judgement could be that matters were too far gone to avoid an explosion that an earlier watershed decision – sending a force to reoccupy the Rhineland; holding Palestinians to their commitments to fight terror – might have averted.

I put it to Ross that he is saying in effect that, almost regardless of what was happening, the effort had to be made. "Yes" he responds sotto voce before I’ve finished. But when asked he admits the prudential issues of compliance were neglected and politicised by the Americans in favour of keeping talks afloat.

"Without a doubt. I think when you try to learn lessons you have to be honest with yourself, and believe that we, like the two sides, became so preoccupied with this process that the process took on a life of it’s own. It had self-sustaining justification. Every time there was a behaviour, or an incident or an event, that was inconsistent with what the process was supposed to be about, the impulse was to rationalise it, finesse it, find a way around it and not allow it to break the process, because the process seemed to have promise."

"The Clinton ideas have been relegated to history. They probably represent the closest thing you will get to what really does respond to the essential needs of each side. In one way or the other, somewhere down the road, they will probably reappear. But when they reappear, they ought to reappear as something the parties have put on the table, not the US has put on the table."

Having witnessed American mechanisms turn on their maker, will George W Bush play sorcerer’s apprentice or will he get the mixture right? We are about to find out.