Book Description
A gripping personal narrative of the struggle for Israeli-Palestinian peace
Dennis Ross, the chief Middle East peace negotiator in the presidential administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, is that rare figure who is respected by all parties: Democrats and Republicans, Palestinians and Israelis, presidents and people on the street in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Washington, D.C.
The Missing Peace is far and away the most candid inside account of the Middle East peace process ever published. The maneuverings of both sides, and of the United States as well, are described. For the first time, the backroom negotiations, the dramatic and often secretive nature of the process, and the reasons for its faltering are on display for all to see.
Ross recounts the peace process in detail from 1988 to the breakdown of talks in early 2001 that prompted the so-called second Intifada. It's all here: Camp David, Oslo, Geneva, Egypt, and other summits; the assassination of Yitzak Rabin; the rise and fall of Benjamin Netanyahu; the very different characters and strategies of Rabin, Yasir Arafat, and Bill Clinton; and the first steps of the Palestinian Authority.
The issues Ross explains with unmatched clarity--negotiations over borders, Israeli security, the Palestinian "right of return"--are the issues behind today's headlines. The Missing Peace explains, as no other book has, why Middle East peace is so difficult to achieve.
Customer Reviews:
A wonderful book.......2007-04-09
I have only read a few books on the Middle East and one other on the peace process being "Waging Peace" by Itamar Rabinovich. Dennis Ross is committed to the Midele East peace process. It is very clear that he has been at the "coal face", the one who has guided the key players in their neogotations. The book is a fantastic insight into what went on behind the scenes that were played out in the international media. Apart from a blow-by-blow description that would appeal to any history student focused on the Palesinian-Israeli peace process, there are a number of reasons why anybody vaguely interested in this subject would enjoy this book: (1) It is a thriller! The expression "truth stranger than fiction" tales on true meaning as this book is like a "cannot put down" suspense novel. (2) The story of the peace process is recorded in great detail (3) Ross gives us hope that somewhere in the distant future the Palestinian-Israel issue can be resolved. Anybody reading this book will learn a great deal about what the truth is in the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy. I loved this book and read most of it, certainly 550 out of 800 pages, over the Easter weekend. This is a great book and is written in elegant style. Read the Publishers' Week and Washington Post reviews but buy this book even if it is from Amazon Marketplace, It is a "must have" and a gripping, cannot put down book to read
Detailed view of a 12 year negotiation.......2007-03-15
This is no survey book - Dennis Ross takes the reader into the darkest details of 12 years of peace negotiations between the Israelis and their neighbors. What almost happened with Syria? Why'd it fall apart? Who really cares about 400 yards of borders? What deal fell apart between the Israelis and Arafat? Who does Clinton blame? When were the Israelis at fault? The book covers the broad themes as well as how the participants willingly and unwittingly push each other's buttons, and balance external attempts for peace with internal political tactics.
This differs from other books on the Middle East in several ways: It's written by a participant, but not the senior-most politician. As such, you get working level ins and outs of the negotiations, the participants and the low level details. This isn't a book written to advance a political career or push one side or the other - it's about negotiation as a hard detailed process.
The book's neither perfect, nor for everyone, but for someone willing to devote time understanding the Middle East, it's a fantastic primary source. For that, it deserves 5 stars in my eyes.
A Must to understanding the Middle East.......2006-12-15
Athough 800 plus pages, it is a gripping book, which unveils the complexity and personnal influence of it's main figures. How chances are missed, and the consequenses that the everyday person in the involved countries has to live with.
How the Peace Was Lost.......2006-07-31
There are two quips by former Israeli Foreign Secretary Abba Eben, that seem appropriate to reflect upon whenever one discusses the Israeli-Arab attempts at peace negotiations "The Arabs" Mr. Eben had famously said "Never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity". The Israeli government, on the other hand "only does the right thing after having exhausted every other possibility"
"The Missing Peace" is the frustrating but illuminating memoir of the Dennis Ross, the Chief American negotiator in the Israeli-Arab peace process. Ross's book is an exhaustive record of Ross's schedule: No meeting is too trivial to recount, no quarrel too tiresome to include, no thought too minor to mention.
Ross's focus is squarely on the Israeli- Arab negotiations, and specifically the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian meetings (with the Jordanians guest starring for one chapter, and the Egyptians, Saudis and Moroccans making sporadic appearances). If you are looking for a comprehensive treatment of Israeli-Arab relationships, or the Peace Process in the 1990s, look elsewhere: This is squarely about the meetings, negotiations, and tactics. Worst still, because the US had only a limited role in the Oslo accords, the very start of the historic process between Israelis and the Palestinian Liberation Organization is under reported.
In his conclusion, Ross concedes that "negotiations do not take place in a vacuum" and that the broader picture, and the Israeli and Palestinian publics have to be considered. But Ross's book fails to include them; We get amazingly little about some of the major players in this drama: Israeli Refusniks, Palestinian Militants, and Oslo Skeptics generally. Given Ross's friendship with Natan Sheransky, then leader of Israel's Center-right Israel Ba'alyah Party, it's astounding how little insight we get into him, or anyone else not intimately involved in the negotiations. Even events that had major effects on the negotiations, such as the construction in Har Homa, are explained in the context of the negotiations only, and not in a wider context.
Within the process itself, Ross's approach is remarkably free of analysis. The main feature of the Oslo accords was its piecemeal construction - instead of coming up with a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian predicament, the architects of Oslo conceived a series of steps, spreading over years, between the initial signing and the final accords. The idea was to get the Israelis and Palestinians used to working together; In hindsight, that clearly failed. The obvious shortfall was that, if the process was to collapse in some point, a heavily armed Palestinian Authority would inevitably clash with the Israelis, leading to many casualties on both sides. Since that is exactly what happened, some meditation about the original decision is in order, but Ross offers none, save for Rabin's assertion that this piecemeal progress was as far as the Israeli public was ready to go at the time.
Sometimes, Ross's narrative demonstrated how amazingly incompetent the people who run the world are: Israeli premier Rabin and Syrian President Asad talked past each other regarding the meaning of "Full withdrawal" for about a year. Later, Benjamin Netanyahu's envoy to the Asad, Ron Lauder, actively deceived the following Israeli Premier Ehud Barak, and the Americans, regarding the agreements reached with Asad. Palestinian Chairman Arafat meanwhile, was childish and prune to fantasies; in one of the worst, he insisted that the Ancient Jewish temple was in Nablus, not Jerusalem (p. 718).
To summarize an 800 odd word book in a several paragraphs: the bottom line in the Israeli-Syrian negotiations was that Israelis and Syrians were out of Sync. Barak's mood about a summit meeting with Syrian Foreign Minister Shara swinged sharply. By the time he became committed to a deal, the Syrians were uninterested.
With the Palestinians, the fixing the blame is both simpler and more complicated: Ross clearly sees Arafat as "not up to ending the conflict" (p. 756). It's hard to argue against that position; in the end, Barak went further then anyone could have expected. Saudi Prince Bandar told Ross "If Arafat does not accept what is available now, it won't be a tragedy, it will be a crime" (p. 748).
Reading Ross's account, I became more convinced in my earlier conviction that the main fault in the fall of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process lies with Israeli Premier Ehud Barak. Barak went far (one of the surprises I had was that he probably went too far - most Palestinians would have settled for less, p. 719), truly striving for peace, and Clinton accommodated him in bringing all pressure on Arafat to accept or offer a reasonable counter proposal - but since Arafat could not make peace with the Israelis, all this effort was in naught. Although Ross does not necessarily accepts the thesis that Arafat was behind the outbreak of the 2000 al Aqsa Intifada, he clearly did nothing to prevent it. By all accounts, Arafat, feeling the pressure on him, released it in the only was he could: through violence.
But there were those on the Arab Side, principally current President Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Qurei, who genuinely strived for peace. Arafat could not have lived for ever - why not wait for the next generation of Palestinian leaders and make the deal with them? Ross argues that the Israelis and the Americans had to find out whether Arafat had it in him to deliver (pp 767-769). Fine, but they needed a contingency plan in case he did not. Alas, Barak and the Americans had none. Instead of probing whether Arafat was capable of making a final deal, they pressured him as hard as they could, forcing him to chose between Peace and War. Arafat, who never liked to be forced to make choices such as these, was forced to make it. Six years and thousands of casualties later, we are still paying the price for Barak's hubris.
Essential reading on the Middle East conflict.......2006-04-26
Dennis Ross is one of those guys who's never in the forground of the photograph, except when it's not on the front page of the paper. He's the guy in the background somewhere, looking a little unsure of himself in the flash of the cameras and so forth, unused to the attention and not running for office. He's also one of the guys who get things done, when things get done. He spent a decaded and a half in government (1986-2001) and spent most of that time trying to negotiate peace between the various Arab factions and nations on the one hand and Israel on the other. Jordan recognized Israel during that time, and signed a peace treaty, but other than that Ross has little to show for about 12 years of hard work. Frankly, having read this book, it's hard not to conclude that all his work and dedication deserved a better fate than the one the received.
Ross spent two years on Vice President George H.W. Bush's National Security team, then planned to return to academe. The Bush people had other ideas, though, and hired this life-long Democrat (he volunteered for George McGovern!) to work in James Baker's State Department. Three years later, when Bush was running for reelection, Ross followed his boss Baker into Bush's White House and helped with the campaign. When Bush was defeated by Bill Clinton, Ross again packed his bags for a return to the private sector, but Clinton surprised everyone by insisting on hiring him as a special envoy to the Middle East, and he held that post for the eight years Clinton was in office. He left his post at the end of the Clinton administration.
During his tenure, he negotiated with five Israeli Prime ministers (Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, and Barak) and everyone else in the region from Hafez al-Asad to Yassir Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan. He repeats a joke towards the end of the book: after negotiating with the newly crowned King of Morocco, who's younger than he is, he tells his staff that his David Letterman Top 10 list of reasons he should retire would include "When you've gone from being younger than all the people you negotiate with to older than everyone else." There are as a result thumbnail sketches of most of the leaders of the Middle East, especially Yassir Arafat and the various Israeli Prime Ministers. The negotiations that the elder Bush and then Clinton arranged and tried to guide towards peace are dissected, sometimes in agonizing detail.
The book seems to slow down as it goes along. Though the text covers 12 years, the first four are covered in about a hundred pages. Netanyahu gets to the Prime Ministership about page 250, and that was in 1996. His era covers another 250 pages or so, with Barak getting the last 300 pages for his tenure. The Camp David talks in 2000 receive about a hundred pages, including preliminaries and the aftermath. Ross is pretty merciless in his judgements: even Clinton occasionally is chided for not emphasizing things the way Ross would have liked, and the author himself comes in for self-criticism on more than one occasion for some mistake he made. He doesn't have anything bad to say about his three bosses at the State Department (though Madeline Albright comes off as less involved in the negotiations than Warren Christopher). However, he has a lot to say about Arafat (who he ultimately concludes was incapable of signing peace with Israel) and the Israeli Prime Ministers. Both Netanyahu and Barak come in for considerable criticism for their negotiating style. Almost everyone Ross negotiated with gets some negative attention.
This is an enormous, intelligent, involved, detailed, exhaustive memoir of what happened. Several of the other reviews on Amazon make the mistake of reviewing Ross rather than his book. This is a memoir: the author is supposed to tell you what he thought, felt, believed, and acted upon, and how that came out. His views may not mesh with the reader's, but the point of this whole exercise isn't whether you agree with him, it's whether you think he adequately explained what happened and what he wants to tell you about it. I think that in the latter Ross has done an admirable job. The book recounts in considerable detail the nuts-and-bolts nature of negotiating, what you have to do to try and forge agreements, and so forth. It also, yes, involves some personal accounts of things at times, as the author recounts for you the strain involved in what he was doing. This *is* pertinent, in that eventually someone working this way would collapse, and it's also interesting in terms of just trying to imagine living for 2 weeks with only an hour or two of sleep every night. Imagine trying to have a clear head after that!
I enjoyed this book a great deal, and think I learned a lot from it. Its size probably puts it beyond much of the reading public, and I know it's incomplete in terms of points of view and events, but it's going to be indispensable in discerning what went wrong in the region during the latter part of the Clinton years.
Book Description
The first authorized inside account of one of the most daring—and successful—military operations in recent history
From the earliest days of his dictatorship, Saddam Hussein had vowed to destroy Israel. So when France sold Iraq a top-of-the-line nuclear reactor in 1975, the Israelis were justifiably concerned—especially when they discovered that Iraqi scientists had already formulated a secret program to extract weapons-grade plutonium from the reactor, a first critical step in creating an atomic bomb. The reactor formed the heart of a huge nuclear plant situated twelve miles from Baghdad, 1,100 kilometers from Tel Aviv. By 1981, the reactor was on the verge of becoming “hot,” and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin knew he would have to confront its deadly potential. He turned to Israeli Air Force commander General David Ivry to secretly plan a daring surgical strike on the reactor—a never-before-contemplated mission that would prove to be one of the most remarkable military operations of all time.
Written with the full and exclusive cooperation of the Israeli Air Force high command, General Ivry (ret.), and all of the eight mission pilots (including Ilan Ramon, who become Israel’s first astronaut and perished tragically in the shuttle Columbia disaster), Raid on the Sun tells the extraordinary story of how Israel plotted the unthinkable: defying its U.S. and European allies to eliminate Iraq’s nuclear threat. In the tradition of Black Hawk Down, journalist Rodger Claire re-creates a gripping tale of personal sacrifice and survival, of young pilots who trained in the United States on the then-new, radically sophisticated F-16 fighter bombers, then faced a nearly insurmountable challenge: how to fly the 1,000-plus-kilometer mission to Baghdad and back on one tank of fuel. He recounts Israeli intelligence’s incredible “black ops” to sabotage construction on the French reactor and eliminate Iraqi nuclear scientists, and he gives the reader a pilot’s-eye view of the action on June 7, 1981, when the planes roared off a runway on the Sinai Peninsula for the first successful destruction of a nuclear reactor in history.
Download Description
The first authorized inside account of one of the most daring—and successful—military operations in recent history
From the earliest days of his dictatorship, Saddam Hussein had vowed to destroy Israel. So when France sold Iraq a top-of-the-line nuclear reactor in 1975, the Israelis were justifiably concerned—especially when they discovered that Iraqi scientists had already formulated a secret program to extract weapons-grade plutonium from the reactor, a first critical step in creating an atomic bomb.
The reactor formed the heart of a huge nuclear plant situated twelve miles from Baghdad, 1,100 kilometers from Tel Aviv. By 1981, the reactor was on the verge of becoming "hot," and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin knew he would have to confront its deadly potential. He turned to Israeli Air Force commander General David Ivry to secretly plan a daring surgical strike on the reactor—a never-before-contemplated mission that would prove to be one of the most remarkable military operations of all time.
Written with the full and exclusive cooperation of the Israeli Air Force high command, General Ivry (ret.), and all of the eight mission pilots (including Ilan Ramon, who become Israel's first astronaut and perished tragically in the shuttle Columbia disaster), Raid on the Sun tells the extraordinary story of how Israel plotted the unthinkable: defying its U.S. and European allies to eliminate Iraq's nuclear threat.
In the tradition of Black Hawk Down, journalist Rodger Claire re-creates a gripping tale of personal sacrifice and survival, of young pilots who trained in the United States on the then-new, radically sophisticated F-16 fighter bombers, then faced a nearly insurmountable challenge: how to fly the 1,000-plus-kilometer mission to Baghdad and back on one tank of fuel. He recounts Israeli intelligence's incredible "black ops" to sabotage construction on the French reactor and eliminate Iraqi nuclear scientists, and he gives the reader a pilot's-eye view of the action on June 7, 1981, when the planes roared off a runway on the Sinai Peninsula for the first successful destruction of a nuclear reactor in history.
"Rodger Claire handles a complex story with ease and assurance. Infused with an understanding of the pilots and their historical mission, Raid on the Sun illustrates how what they achieved for Israel was as vital as that earlier flight of the Enola Gay to Hiroshima to end World War Two. Claire has created a patient, scrupulous story that still unfolds with the pace and verve of a thriller. Don't wait for the movie of the book. Buy it now."
GORDON THOMAS, AUTHOR OF
GIDEON'S SPIES: MOSSAD'S SECRET WARRIORS
"Raid on the Sun is an extraordinary look into the most secret, and perhaps the finest, air force on the planet. It is also a blistering indictment of the international arms industry that sells modern weapons to anyone with money. Raid on the Sun is required reading for everyone in the age of terror."
STEPHEN COONTS, AUTHOR OF FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER
"A stunning eye-opener, shocking you with the realization of the enormous service the Israeli Air Force rendered the free world with its 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein's nuclear facility. Claire went right to the source—the Israeli pilots who flew the mission—to tell in colorful detail the full story of this historic strike."
Customer Reviews:
RICK SHAQ GOLDSTEIN SAYS: "TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION!" "THIS COULD BE THE BLUE PRINT FOR IRAN!".......2007-06-16
I'm sure you've heard the phrase: "I COULDN'T PUT THIS BOOK DOWN, AND READ IT COVER TO COVER!" This book for me defined that, and if there really is a dictionary, (With famous phrases.) with the proverbial picture next to it, this book should be next to that phrase! This "TRUE" story, written over twenty years after the unbelievable Israeli bombing mission to destroy Iraq's nuclear facility, is too fantastic to believe. Why, was this in depth story never told before you may ask? Because Israel refused to talk about it, or release classified information. But now, this book was written with the "FULL" and exclusive cooperation, of the Israeli Air Force high command. I don't want to give away too much of the book, but it actually gives you information, way ahead of the actual mission also. Such as, Saddam Hussein's childhood and early years, that led and shaped him into the monster he became, as with the building of this nuclear reactor, and the vow to blow Israel off the face of the earth. It traces all the secret training in Israel, leading up to the historic raid. A titillating, page, early in the book, is an organization chart, of all the Israeli leaders in June 1981, and how they voted, pro or con, for the approval of the mission. This story makes James Bond look like The Hardy Boys. During the training of the pilots, Israel had to dismantle part of the jets, to lower the weight, so they would use less fuel, since the round trip mission from Israel to Iraq and back, had to be done with no refueling. Since I am not a pilot, but fly constantly. I almost felt like I was a passenger, along with the brave Israeli pilots, as they had to fly so close to the ground (100 FEET!) for 600 MILES over Saudi Arabia, to stay under the radar. The pilots had to contend with the rising heat from the desert, that adversely affected the jets. There were also things going on outside of Israel, that had to be done, while training was still taking place, to insure that the Iraqi nuclear reactor wouldn't go "live", before the Israeli plan was ready to go into action! These events were so unbelievable, that if you saw it in an Arnold Schwartzenagger, or Clint Eastwood movie, you wouldn't believe it! A beautiful blonde, pretending to be hit by a car, in front of a French Security gate, where the final pieces of the nuclear reactor were being manufactured. With this "blonde" diversion, Israeli agents got into the French manufacturing facility, to sabotage the piece, needed to finish the reactor. Thereby giving Israeli pilots, and masterminds, more time to prepare. The blowing up of an Italian apartment, owned by a supplier of parts to Iraq, as a warning not to supply the reactor. Of course, credit for the explosion was given to someone else. I could go on and on, but, that's why I said earlier, you can't put the book down. I want to tell you more, because it's unbelievable, but just go buy the book, and then I guarantee you, you'll want to tell someone else too. P.S. This could be a blue print for Iran. Wait and see?!
This book is a fast and entertaining read.......2007-03-19
If you are interested in military and middle east history, this may be a book for you. It has a good pace and is very easy reading. The pace of the book is not quite as fast as BlackHawk Down, but better than Bowden's other book, Killing Pablo. It almost has that 'reads like fiction' feel. I agree though, with one of the other posters comments that I read, and that is that there are alot of technical details that are not correct, (like "heat seeking Sparrow's") which does beg the question of whether or not he did not did not get all the facts right. But none the less, still a fun read and if even only half of it is right, its still an amazing story. I will highly recommend this book to my friends.
Incredible.......2007-02-24
Raid on the Sun describes the events leading up to to the 1981 raid on the Osirik reactor. It's a solid written, highly readable book. The book jacket nails it dead on by saying that this is something you'd see in a Hollywood thriller - a small country up against incredible odds both technologically and politically and overcoming them. I highly recommend it.
Reading some of the other reviews, I would like to point out that the comparisons to the current situation with Iran are perfunctory at best. Iran's nuclear facilities are deep underground, spread out in multiple locations over a large land mass, many cynically located under civilian areas such as schools. The Iranians learned many lessons from "the raid on the sun." There are three options on the table at this point from the Israeli perspective:
1. Wait and hope the U.S. bombs Iran. It's not looking like this is going to happen, as Bush probably needs Congress's authorization , and they most likely will not give it considering how Iraq is going. Furthermore, Bush has given authorization to Rice and the State Department to try to negotiate. Looks like Cheney and the neo-cons have lost power. Yet Israel will give it until the end of the year at least, according to leaked reports.
2. Attack Iran. Given how spread out the facilities are and Israel's capabilities, they have the ability to attack the three or four most important nuclear targets but not much more, which will delay the nuclear program for a number of years but not stop it. Iran will retaliate heavily, as well as its proxies Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas. The Tel Aviv skyscrapers will almost certainly be hit; there will be a huge fallout internationally; and Israel's economy will go to hell.
3. Do nothing, which is of course the worst decision, given Ahmadinejad's statements about Israel and the apocalyptic beliefs of Shiite Islam.
We'll have to wait and see, eh? By the way, I highly recommend that you check out the MIT paper, "Osirak Redux? Assessing Israeli capabilities to Destroy Iranian Nuclear Facilities" by Whitney Raas and Austin Long, which is where the estimates from #2 come from.
Exciting .......2006-11-04
This is a great read. I found my heart pounding as these great pilots defended their country against this great evil.
Incredible tale!.......2006-09-11
This is an incredible story of the June 7, 1981, operation that took out Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor and, as a result, probably alone kept him from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Astonishingly, the brave Israeli pilots took 8 F-16's in to enemy territory and all returned home safely. This book details the planning and exeuction of this operation from start to finish.
This is a very good read, especially given the happenings of recent years in that region. Despite the almost unanimous international criticism Israel received for this operation, we probably have those brave men and women of the IDF to thank today for the fact that the world has not yet experienced a nuclear holocaust at the hands of a mad tyrant.
Book Description
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to crescendo, bringing with it the worst violence in the Middle East in decades. Now Inside Israel helps make sense of the region’s longstanding travails, detailing the past, present, and future of a place that has been holy to Jews, Christians, and Arabs for thousands of years. Organized into three sections—the History, a Day in the Life, and the Peace Process—the collection includes nonfiction pieces by a distinguished roster of writers, historians, journalists, and scholars. David Grossman offers a portrait of Palestinians on the West Bank, Saul Bellow captures the “length and depth” of Jerusalem’s history while Robert Stone considers the capital’s future, and Hendrik Hertzberg analyzes the current conflict and how the U.S. needs to be involved in a peaceful solution. Other writings include contributions by David Remnick, Karen Armstrong, David Grossman, Saul Bellow, Robert Kaplan, Robert Stone, David Shipler, Deborah Sontag, Anthony Lewis, and many others. The state of this holy, contested land makes this is an essential book for everyone seeking new levels of understanding about the place whose fate, now more than ever, impacts the entire world.
Customer Reviews:
An interesting book.......2005-03-25
This is a collection of fourteen essays and excerpts from books about the Arab-Israeli conflict. There are a number of different opinions presented, and that's good. But I think too many ideas are overlooked.
David Shipler starts with an overview of the conflict. Next is Karen Armstrong. She appears to sneeringly dismiss any claims by others to Muslim land, but is all sweetness when she begs all reasonable people to share their non-Muslim land with the Muslims. And she discusses the power of "myth" here. But this misses the point. It is absurd to think that the five million Jews of Israel would happily agree, in the name of equality, to be oppressed by the Arabs! And even more absurd to claim that the only reason the Jews haven't been reasonable enough to surrender is the power of some myth. Human rights are no myth.
Paul Johnson supplies a very reasonable discussion of the history of the establishment of the State of Israel. Next is Meron Benvenisti, who has the same problem as Armstrong: what is Arab is Arab, what's Jewish is negotiable. After that, David Grossman does an excellent job of documenting Arab hatred of Israel. But he's somewhat biased. He shows that the Jews wanted the Land. Now the Arabs want it. What symmetry! He ignores the fact that there is a big difference. The Arabs have millions of square kilometers. The Jews are willing to let the Arabs keep it all. Meanwhile, I'd say that Arabs who insist on grabbing all the Jewish land are being just a little bit greedy.
We then see an excellent and thoughtful article by David Horovitz on what living in Israel has been like. And a silly article by Deborah Sontag. Sontag's article includes some interviews of Arabs. Out of context, it would be pure propaganda. In this book, the other articles provide a little balance.
Adina Hoffman has an interesting article in which she shows the difficulty of tracing house ownership. This article made me even more convinced that the rights to a house should never be "returned" to those who never actually owned it. Do we really want those who claim to be heirs (or descendants, or friends) of Jews or Arabs who had their land swiped in Libya, Poland, and Israel to be given houses they never owned, never improved, and never paid property taxes on? Hoffman does not come up with this question herself, but I sure did.
Saul Bellow doesn't want Israel to fight. Well, that is fine. It's not that bad an idea; those who fight can get hurt. What he wants people to do when they get attacked, however, is not clear. Nor is it clear how he'll stop people from fighting back. Israel is not the only nation in the world that will ever have to decide whether to defend itself or not.
P. J. O'Rourke makes a couple of good points. He says that reality is not a zero-sum game. That is, people make something of what they have. Both sides can prosper. On the other hand, politics is zero-sum. That is, the argument is made that what is good for one side is necessarily bad for the other.
Uri Savir tells of trying to negotiate. But over what? I think there's always someone you can find who will want to lay claim to what is yours. But unless you get to negotiate over what is theirs too, I think "negotiations" are going to be counterproductive. The land-poor Israelis will feel cheated because it is their land that will be stolen. The Arabs will feel cheated because even though the principle has been established that they are entitled to steal Jewish land, they won't get all of it. So I was unimpressed with Savir.
Anthony Lewis has an interesting article in which he doubts that a new Arab state will benefit anyone. I have to agree with that assessment. The fact that we disagree politically does not change that.
Ed Said says that the Arab and Jewish narratives are incompatible. He implies that the Jews are wrong but will not change their minds. But I think the whole idea of narratives is silly. If we want to get our history right, no one is stopping us. There is one truth, not many truths. And he pretends to be realistic and moderate when he proposes to let evil Israel exist, as long as it ceases to be a refuge for Jews (he demands to get rid of the Law of Return). Isn't that the least the grateful Jews can do if the Arabs agree not to crush them? Well, no, it isn't. There are over 5 million Jews in Israel. And if we are to have peace, they will need to have rights too.
The book finishes with an article by Robert Stone, who makes the obvious statement that the Arabs won't leave unless forced to do so. That's a truly stupid note to end on. After all, the Arabs have millions of square kilometers to live on. The Middle Eastern Jews are restricted to Israel. If any side is going to be bought out of the Levant in peacetime, it will be the Arabs.
There are some interesting excerpts and articles in this book, but there's much better material out there.
Book Description
On January 27, 2002, Wafa Idris blew herself up in a shopping mall in Jerusalem, killing one Israeli and injuring dozens of others. Credited with being the first female martyr (shahida) of the Palestinian cause, Idris changed the face of terrorism forever. Based on first-hand interviews with the families of four women who died in suicide attacks and through discussions with more than half a dozen other women who tried and failed to die for Palestine, Army of Roses is an investigation into what motivated them to sacrifice themselves in the name of Allah. Journalist Barbara Victor reveals the personal motivations and social and political pressures that gave birth to the shahida phenomenon. All the women were marginalized within Palestinian society: accused of promiscuity, an 'abnormal' desire to remain unmarried and continue their education, or because a male relative had been accused of collaborating with the Israelis. Weaving together personal testimony and interviews with both Palestinian and Israeli religious leaders and politicians, Victor brings to life the problems plaguing the Middle East.
Customer Reviews:
Partial truths and distorted images of women .......2006-05-04
In Army of Roses, Barbara Victor's predetermined hypothesis is that the motivating factor for Palestinian women becoming suicide bombers is related to the "second-class status of women in that part of the world". That is, women decide to blow themselves up not because they are living under the frustrating conditions of occupation, as their male counterparts are, not even because they are misguided by religious and/or nationalistic drives, and certainly not because they are politicized and deeply engaged in the struggle for statehood. Women become suicide bombers (or shahida), according to the author, in order to escape the unbearable religious and traditional constraints imposed on them by the Islamic rules, patriarchal society and individual male family members; they do so to escape personal family problems and/or to uphold men's honor. Victor also argues that women fall much more easily into the prey of the manipulative male leaders (of course she never elaborates on the stories of male suicide bombers).
In the beginning of the book, Victor states that by focusing on the life stories of shahidas (as well as relying on interviews with survivors, officials, etc. on both side of the Green Line), she wants to find answers as why and how these women choose the path they do. However, since the author seems to already have answers to her questions, what she ends up doing with her collected data is to selectively highlight instances of personal problems and present them as the ultimate motivating factors. Victor's depiction of women's lives is unskillful in that the life stories in themselves betray her argument.
All but one of the women we are introduced to in the book (either actual shahidas or those who had attempted to be so) are active participants in their society. Furthermore, they all have their share of occupation -related burdens and frustrations, as well as their share of being lured and mislead by the dominant political and religious discourse into taking such an extreme and tragic measure as suicide bombing. Yet, it is striking how the author searches, almost desperately, for a reason "behind the surface" which would explain these women's choices. Inevitably, it is revealed that one woman was childless and disgracefully divorced, another woman, inspired to study, was under pressure to marry, yet another woman was molested as a teen and so on and so forth. It is this personal dimension of women's lives that is given weight as a reason for wanting to become shahida. The most telling example of such partial depiction is the case of Ayat Al-Akhras.
Ayat, the last child of a large and economically well-off family was happily engaged with a young man and inspired to become a journalist "to communicate to the world the Palestinian cause" when she took her life as a suicide bomber at a young age. She is described by her friends and family members as "fiercely opinionated", "the most outspoken within the family", and one who always "dominated conversations". As a child, Ayat witnessed her brother being jailed twice for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Another brother was shot by Israeli bullets and her sister "suffered miscarriage when Israeli tanks rolled into the camp and prevented access to ambulance and hospital." Ayat, we are told, developed a hatred for Israelis from young age, and expressed it intellectually.
A while before she blew herself and two Israelis, Ayat was visiting a friend when the Israelis soldiers shot through the windows and killed a teenaged boy residentof the home while watching TV. The older brother who was present at the scene remembers: "Ayat got hysterical ... I picked up my brother, who was bleeding badly, and ran with him in my arms towards the nearest hospital. Ayat ran with me, sobbing and screaming ... My brother died in my arms, and Ayat collapsed."
In the author's mind neither the harsh past life experience of Ayat nor the circumstances under which her personality developed the way it did, nor the trauma she experienced shortly before her final action seem to provide any motivation whatsoever - albeit unjustifiably- for her to become a suicide bomber. Instead, Victor is convinced that Ayat blew herself up so that the honor of being a shahida would restore her father's reputation who was the target of a growing accusation and hostility by the Palestinian community for allegedly collaborating with the Israelis. She sacrificed herself, we are told, for the sake of her father and her family. In a bizarre attempt to provide proof that Ayat did indeed take her life for the sake of her family's honor, Victor refers to Ayat's last testimony, customarily video-taped by all suicide bombers right before their death. Victor maintains: "As a woman and a daughter, she wanted to be the one to save her father and prove that she was stronger than her brothers. It was telling in her final video that she alluded to the importance of the powerful Arab nations when they did not come to the aid of the Palestinians". It is amazing how a plain political statement could be domesticized and personalized through the lens of Orientalism!
One wonders if Palestinian women in general are so oppressed and victimized and so easily manipulated by their male family members, why don't we see women suicide bombers in rates at lease equal to men?
A Poor Effort: Shallow, Sexist, Orientalist.......2004-12-22
Barbara Victor's work as a journalist has taken her through the Middle East since the early Eighties. The backdrop of her experiences there forms the seed of this book (sensationally titled Les Femmes Kamikazes in its European printing). Victor also directed an accompanying documentary film-also called Les Femmes Kamikazes-that parallels her book. The bases of her research are interviews conducted with the families of four shahidas, the Arabic word for female suicide bombers. She also interviews a host of Israeli "terrorism experts", (a problematic tactic, as their expertise exclusively supports Zionist ideology) as well as journalists, members of the Israeli secret police and psychologists on both sides of the Green Line. Prefaced with a foreword by Christopher Dickey, Newsweek's Paris bureau chief and Middle East editor, the 20 short chapters of her book tell the stories of the shahidas, and other women who have taken an active role in the uprising.
A novelist and non-fiction author, Barbara Victor has made women her topic in the past, with subjects as diverse as Madonna and Hanan Asrawi. It is hard not see that the extremes represented by those subjects haunt this work-perhaps not the benefit of her argument. For example Victor's preoccupation with the physical appearance of her subjects has an odd relationship with the feminist principles that her book purports to espouse. Wafa Idris, the first female Palestinian suicide bomber in history is described as having "perfect makeup" and "beautifully manicured nails" to match the "smart, western-style coat" she wore on her final trip to the mall. Victor reports that, according to the sales clerk who survived the blast, Idris was trying to free her knapsack from the doorway of a store while watching herself reapply makeup in a compact when it suddenly exploded. Darine Aisha, the second shahida in history is described as having had "a captivating smile" while Ayat Al-Akhras-the third-wore makeup and "smart, western clothes." Victor uses the language of western fashion and style to suggest something of the interior lives of the women she profiles, a rhetorically dubious and politically retrograde tactic. There may indeed be something worth exploring in the ways these women choose to present themselves but Victor isn't interested in the larger implications of these choices. For example "Zina" (a pseudonym) wore a halter-top and tight pants to aid a male suicide bomber in completing his mission and initially eluded capture by miming an exaggerated cell phone conversation to convince patrolling Israeli soldiers she was an American tourist. This suggests that rather than an unconscious longing for western freedoms represented by makeup and clothing that Palestinian women are acutely aware of the way that western styles render them invisible, often as a precursor to the final disappearance of their martyrdom.
Victor refuses to acknowledge the political agency of their choices, portraying the shahidas instead as young women with "personal problems" who were exploited by male relatives into sacrificing themselves. Victor cites the now-familiar boogeyman of fundamentalist Islam as the prime motivator in this phenomenon. Ironically this narrative often runs counter to the testimony that she collects from the surviving families and friends of the martyred women. Wafa Idris' mother, Mabrook contends that her daughter was motivated "more by nationalistic fervor than religion." Indeed Idris was known for having an "independent mind and a profound feeling of resentment toward the occupation." In another example, Darine Aisha, a "brilliant" student of English literature at Al-Najah University, became a shahida after being sexually humiliated by Israeli border guards. The guards taunted her, tore off her headscarf and forced her to kiss and embrace her male cousin in front of a crowd of Palestinians waiting to cross into Israel. She tried to defend herself but acquiesced so that the guards would allow a nearby woman with a dying infant in need of medical attention to pass. A deeply religious woman she was also, according to her friends "a feminist in the true sense of the word", once having won an essay contest by writing "I am a Muslim woman who believes her body belongs to her alone, which means how I look should not play a role in who I am or what response I evoke from people who meet me. Wearing the hijab gives me freedom, because my physical appearance is not an issue." This statement shouldn't be interpreted as a universal defense of the veil but rather proof that the woman who wore it knew what she was doing with her life...and her death.
Victor positions the testimony of the Palestinians who knew the shahidas against the assertions of Israeli "experts" who consistently blame "fanatical" religious practices and the second class status of women in Palestinian society for their actions as opposed to the host of issues raised by living under Israeli occupation. For example, Mira Tzoreff, an Israeli academic says "(Palestinians) are living in a not very democratic surrounding...This is a reactive national culture, a collective atmosphere. We are talking about post-modern versus nationalistic, and that makes all the difference. People cannot stand alone or think for themselves...they must have a national explanation, and that is to see Israel and the United States as the ultimate enemy...." Statements like this one reveal the Orientalist character that mars Army of Roses as a work of serious scholarship, although it provides a revealing (if unintended) view of the misapprehensions underlying this conflict. The Israeli academic describes the Intifada as the longing for a "national explanation," while the Palestinians themselves describe it as the longing for a nation.
Again and again throughout her book the Palestinians point to the Israeli occupation as the main motivator in the phenomenon of suicide bombing (by either sex) and Victor continually returns to her original thesis: that Palestinian society uses fundamentalist Islam to shame troubled girls into killing themselves. In her introduction Victor recalls touring the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut in 1982 after the Lebanese Christian Militia and Israeli army massacred thousands of Palestinian occupants. She encountered a woman there who was the sole survivor of her family. The woman answered her questions "in surprisingly good English" telling her "You American women talk constantly of equality. Well, you can take a lesson from us Palestinian women. We die in equal numbers to the men." Perhaps if she had heard her differently Barbara Victor would have written another sort of book.
An interesting topic.......2004-11-17
When a bunch of ladies decide to become suicide bombers, I think it is proper to ask what's going on.
We're not seeing a spontaneous reaction. Most folks don't blow themselves up. Most ladies don't do it. And even if one suddenly decided to do so, most do not have access to the explosives.
This book explains some of the pressures these women were put under, and how they were led into such destructive tasks.
It's touching and heartbreaking.
The author shows us how six-year old girls in first grade are indoctrinated to the extent that they all are eager to be martyrs, so they can cause deaths of Jews and go to Paradise. As we learn, to prospective martyrs, Paradise is a place no Jews ever get to!
Still, there are some outstanding questions I'm sure we all have. First, is this tactic, um, working? Will it achieve something? Second, just what is the overall goal of those who send these ladies out on such missions, if any? Third, just where is the support and funding coming for the entire operation, including the propaganda and training? Fourth, what can be done to stop it?
To some extent, the tactic is "working." Suicide bombings are big news. I think antizionists have long realized that deaths play in their favor, whether they be deaths of Jews or Arabs. Suicide bombing gives one both, what could be better than that? And this book seems to confirm my suspicions in that regard. Meanwhile, whatever the overall goal may be, the result has been to afflict "an entire generation with a consuming desire to die."
As for the support and funding, well, it has come from Arafat and his coterie. Victor shows that they've force-fed hatred to an entire population. And they've obtained fiscal and political support from Arab nations as well as the European Union.
To her credit, Victor shows the analogy between the sacrifice of today's young Arabs and the sacrifices of the, um, Youth in the defence of Berlin in 1945.
But isn't there a goal? Freedom? Land? Maybe so! But even here, Victor allows us to be warned that this may not be achievable. After all, Israel is small. It may appear to some people that either the West Bank and Gaza or all of Israel is just the right size to accommodate a new Arab nation: all one has to do is dispose of all the Jews there. But that's not necessarily the case. What if it is simply too small? What if the Arabs that demand a new nation can't fit into just the West Bank and Gaza, or even into all of Israel? Or what if some space is to be left for the Jews? Victor quotes an Israeli general who recommends that some space in the Sinai may be needed to provide enough room.
Victor does make a few errors. One is her claim about UN resolution 242. She says the French version requires Israel to withdraw from "all territories," while the official and binding one says "the territories." But the truth is that the binding one says "territories," and has no "the." Neither version has an "all." This was a major issue in the debate over the resolution. It is no small error on Victor's part.
Victor describes the five pillars of Islam. She gets the last four right: charity, fasting (by day) during Ramadan, pilgrimage to Mecca, and ritual prayer five times a day. But the first one is "Shahadah." That means affirming the Lord (of Ibrahim) and the Prophet. Victor says it is "martyrdom, the declaration of faith." Again, this is no small error.
The author does make some interesting distinctions among various radical Islamist terrorist groups, telling which ones favor starting by eliminating Israel and which ones prefer to start by creating an Islamic terrorist state in the region.
While Victor does not do a good job in addressing the causes of the Arab fight against the Jews, she does have some ideas for solving it. And while I disagree with them, I think they are worth thinking about. She points out that the moderates on each side won't be able to make peace. For one thing, their stands are too far apart. For another, neither can be trusted, as neither speaks for those who are less moderate. She concludes that peace must be made between the extremists on both sides, thus, the positions of the extremists are the most important! Besides, Victor says, extremists have a tendency to say what they mean, quite openly. That may introduce an element of truth and trust.
I disagreed with quite a bit of what Victor wrote. But I still thought this book was worth reading.
A Mixed Bag.......2004-11-06
Although the author has conducted some valuable interviews, she appears to be entirely ignorant of the local language--Arabic--and the culture and tenets of Islam. To give just two examples, her transcription of a simple and common Arabic phrase, "God is Great," is "Allahu Akhbar," (which, if it means anything, means something like "God is best informed"), instead of the simpler "Allahu Akbar." No exotic gutteral sounds, not very tough to write down. But--like authors who transcribe "jihad" as "ji'had" in order to make it seem even more foreign and troubling than it is--Victor chooses consistently and in the smallest details to make Palestinians and Muslims appear as different from "us" as possible.
A more troubling and stupid error occurs on p. 184, where she writes that the "five pillars of Islam" are "martyrdom, the declaration of faith. . .charity,. . .fasting for the month of Ramadan,. . . the pilgrimage to Mecca, and. . .ritual prayer." Even if Victor can't count, the reader should be able to enumerate six items here, the first of which, "martyrdom," is decidedly NOT one of the pillars of Islam. Aside from demonstrating the author's basic ignorance--and possibly simply her bad faith--it demonstrates that the book is poorly edited.
Again, many of the interviews are interesting and useful. But the author has a big ax to grind, and both her facts and interpretations need to be treated with caution.
Polarizing topic.......2004-08-28
Quite interesting how people who already have an axe to grind against everybody's favourite whipping boy - Israel - hate the book. The fact is that Palestinians of every age are constantly bombarded by anti-Semitic hate propaganda in every single media - TV, books, newspapers and videos - 24-7. This has been demonstrated time and time again and is irrefutable. To deny it or ignore it is the height of either ignorance or stupidity - you choose. It's no wonder that women as well as men and boys choose to kill themselves. They are glorified and encouraged to murder the so-called 'descendants of pigs and apes' by Palestinian political and religious leaders. All day - everyday. It's like Nazi Germany only much, much worse. (Hitler didn't have TV and music videos at his disposal.)
A reviewer from BC wrote, "....her simplistic analysis of 'what makes a suicide bomber' and her conspicuous silence on the overwhelming role of the barbaric Israeli occupation." This statement only illustrates how incredibly uninformed the reviewer is, and by extension how worthless her opinion of the book actually is. She probably has not a single clue as to how and why Israel actually came into posession of any of its territories in the first place. As for Israel's 'overwhelming role', well, the reviewer must be privy to some information that the rest of the world lacks. Either that, or she's just a typical, uninformed dingbat.
Having said that, there are probably as many individual reasons for suicide bombers as there are suicide bombers. It's not reasonable to believe that the author has found 'THE REASON' for the recent phenomenon of female Palestinians shredding themselves. However, to many readers, it isn't good enough unless somehow the evil Jews can be blamed.
BTW - Tamil females were doing it before the Palestinians latched onto the idea. Arafat and his cronies have made the horrific crimes of suicide and murder seem like something other than what it truly is : a barbaric act perpetrated by a society which has been brain-washed into losing its collective sense of right vs wrong. Although it's hard to blame Sharon for that, I'm sure many will try nonetheless.
Book Description
The radical Islamist movement Hamas shocked the world when it won a landslide election victory in January 2006 in the Palestinian occupied territories.
One of the few journalists not to be surprised by this outcome was Zaki Chehab who has developed an international reputation as a fearless reporter and was one of the first to interview members the Iraqi resistance in May 2003. Fluent in Arabic, he is a Palestinian refugee who grew up in UN refugee camps and has unique access to and understanding of Hamas.
Like Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon, Chehab shows how Hamas built a formidable social base in Palestine through its welfare programs. He also explains why, in the face of the endless complexities, disappointments and delays brought about by the signing of the Oslo Peace Accord, Hamas's strategy of armed struggle and terrorism offers the Palestinian people a seductive, simple and deadly alternative.
Customer Reviews:
Terrific book!.......2006-05-21
I admit that I have been one of those Americans who find the whole Israeli-Palestinian thing just too boring and I didn't want to know. I mean, the Jews I know are smart and funny and Israel has lots of Nobel Prize winners so why shouldn't they be able to do what they want in the land that God gave them...except I never really believed that last part.
Friedman interviewed settlers and much of the book is in their own words. If you want to know the history of the settlement movement and what the settlers themselves think about what they are doing and if you don't mind reading a really well-written book, this book is for you.
A Must Read For Every Freedom Loving American.......2005-03-10
American's must not take heed to calls for an uneven handed solution to the Palestinian and Israeli conflict.
This book gives an unbiased, real, scary, and detailed overview of settler intentions in 'sharing and co-inciding together' with their arab counterparts.
As this conflict between the two becomes a political tool for 'molding opinion', this insider takes the courage and strength to share a story of a 'fundamental'cause that will effect every nation in the planet and bring a majority of societies to the brink of war.
A MUST READ FOR EVERY FREEDOM LOVING AMERICAN
Finding fault without logic.......2003-10-22
Israels west bank settlements, for all the ire they cause, are an extension of the 5 thousand year Jewish existance in the holy land, an existance that waqs almost cut short in 1948.
For example take the most steadfast settlers of Kiryat Arba outside of Hebron. THe author rags on these people beyond beleif in an unbiased manner which smacks of his dislike and knee jerk reaction to the term 'settler'. But the very brave Jews who live in hebron today are merely extensions of the jewish community that has always existed in hebron. Unfortunatly this age old community was virtually whiped out in the Arab riots of 1929 and they have only recently returned, standing up to those that beleive they should be thrown into the sea.
THis book is a biased account of these Jewish pioneers who settled a wild land and made it productive. THis is the account of the extension of Zionism into the West Bank and Gaza. In 1948 the Jordanian army and its arab militias whiped out the Jews of the Etzion Bloc in the West Bank and closed the Old Jewish quarter of Jerusalum. Yet the author condemns the Jews who wished to return to their ancestral lands following the 67' war. THis book, one of the few on the subject deserves some merit because it does shed light on these people, unfortunatly its a biased light.
Lacks Objectivity!.......2003-01-19
This was an extremely one-sided book pertaining to a very complex issue. Don't even waste your time!
Average customer rating:
- A Sad Story ( History)
- Was Israel's Jerusalem policy really asinine?
- Their thesis doesn't hold
- The reality of Jerusalem for all you CNN watchers
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Separate and Unequal: The Inside Story of Israeli Rule in East Jerusalem
Amir S. Cheshin ,
Bill Hutman , and
Avi Melamed
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
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The Yellow Wind: With a New Afterword by the Author
ASIN: 0674801369 |
Book Description
This vivid behind-the-scenes account of Israeli rule in Jerusalem details for the first time the Jewish state's attempt to lay claim to all of Jerusalem, even when that meant implementing harsh policies toward the city's Arab population.
The authors, Jerusalemites from the spheres of politics, journalism, and the military, have themselves been players in the drama that has unfolded in east Jerusalem in recent years and appears now to be at a climax. They have also had access to a wide range of official documents that reveal the making and implementation of Israeli policy toward Jerusalem. Their book discloses the details of Israel's discriminatory policies toward Jerusalem Arabs and shows how Israeli leaders mishandled everything from security and housing to schools and sanitation services, to the detriment of not only the Palestinian residents but also Israel's own agenda. Separate and Unequal is a history of lost opportunities to unite the peoples of Jerusalem.
A central focus of the book is Teddy Kollek, the city's outspoken mayor for nearly three decades, whose failures have gone largely unreported until now. But Kollek is only one character in a cast that includes prime ministers, generals, terrorists, European and American leaders, Arab shopkeepers, Israeli policemen, and Palestinian schoolchildren. The story the authors tell is as dramatic and poignant as the mosaic of religious and ethnic groups that call Jerusalem home. And coming at a time of renewed crisis, it offers a startling perspective on past mistakes that can point the way toward more equitable treatment of all Jerusalemites.
Customer Reviews:
A Sad Story ( History).......2003-03-07
I know Amir Cheshin well, as a friend and a colleague, He and I mostly don't see eye to eye in our political view. But Cheshin is a true Jerusalemite to the core, and above all from a family that made justice their goal in life. He is above all an honest and loyal man and he was there in 1967 as a soldier, after as spokesman for the Army, and then an adviser to the Mayor, so he speaks first hand about the subject, and you gather that is telling the true. As I said he is a loyal man so I tend to believe his true, even if it's not the true that I would like to hear, I know Amir would never have been disloyal to Teddy Kollek.
Yes we did miss the boat when it came to Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria as well, I case could be made for the dog that run away from it's original owner over and over, only to be returned to it's original owner only to run away again over and over, one would finally ask why...? May be because its original owner was mistreating the dog to begin with, as Chosen People we owe it to be different, specially in social issues.
The book makes you think above all. It makes you wonder what did we do in Lebanon war, should that energy not have being used to built a better Jerusalem and etc... I just got back from visiting Israel, after a 15 years absence, what have we done not only to Jerusalem, but also to the whole country??? Let remember why we exist as nation, ...to be the people of the Book and the Law (Torah). As Isaiah said... " Zion shall be redeemed by justice... by righteousness. (Isaiah 1:27) "
Amir I don't agree with you from time to time, but I'm proud to be your friend and to see that Israel got true hero as you're, above all not scared to speak the true, even if the true hurts.
Was Israel's Jerusalem policy really asinine?.......2001-06-27
By Jack E. Friedman
(June 21) - This book, published in 1999 and just released in paperback, is an account of Israel's relations with the Arabs of eastern Jerusalem since the 1967 war. To Order...
Drawing on a rich cache of documents, including "secret" memos and minutes of Jerusalem municipality deliberations and personal recollections, the authors (two of them former mayoral advisers on Arab affairs) argue that Israel's administration of the Arab sectors has been a colossal failure. They charge policy-makers on both the municipal and national levels with bureaucratic ineptitude, deliberate discrimination against the Arabs in providing housing and public services, expropriation of Arab land and missed opportunities to forge understanding with local Arab leaders.
The authors grudgingly acknowledge "several small projects" implemented during the long tenure of Mayor Teddy Kollek, noting that he was "quick to point [these] out to critics who say Israel has done nothing to improve conditions for Arab residents." They credit Kollek with better intentions than most who had a hand in shaping policy, but even he is not excluded from the accusation that Israel has, by and large, been guilty of duplicity.
"To the world, Israel presented itself as an enlightened ruler of a troubled city. In reality, while pursuing what for the Jewish state was the logical goal of fortifying its claims to Jerusalem, the city's non-Jewish residents suffered greatly."
The book maintains that Israel's policies have been driven by "two basic principles" adopted shortly after the Six Day War. "The first was to rapidly increase the Jewish population of east Jerusalem. The second was to hinder the growth of the Arab population and to force Arab residents to make their homes elsewhere."
As one example among many, it includes a table from a 1993 municipality report, "Potential Housing Construction in Jerusalem." The table, the authors insist, delimits "the maximum number of units the Israeli administration had determined could be built in each Arab neighborhood without precipitating a change in the ratio of Arabs to Jews in the city population."
THE INDICTMENT of Israel, while impassioned, is seriously unbalanced. The work plays down or ignores the improvements in public services and quality of life that have taken place in Arab villages that are now part of Jerusalem. Inadequate as this progress may have been, it is in sharp contrast to the neglect these sites suffered under the previous administration of Jordan.
The book also fails to spell out the unique historical and religious imperatives that link Israel to the Old City and its environs beyond the pre-1967 Green Line. Nor does it take note of the wanton destruction and seizures of Jewish property and sacred sites in the years before the city's reunification. For example, it reports that the plan to build Neveh Ya'acov in northern Jerusalem called for the expropriation of 3,200 dunams, mostly belonging to Arab residents, but does not mention the Jewish community of that name that existed there before being overrun in 1948.
Running through the litany of Israel's offenses is the assertion that better ties with local Arab leaders across the 1967 boundaries and more equitable treatment of their communities would have enhanced Israel's bargaining position in the post-Oslo negotiations on the city's future. Logical as this sounds, the thesis is difficult to sustain. As the authors themselves amply demonstate, the PLO rode herd on the local leadership and injected its nationalist agenda into virtually every attempt to promote dialogue and cooperation on the local level. In other words, what mattered was how these local initiatives would contribute to the PLO's unwavering objective to reverse the results of 1967.
The study ends before the election of prime minister Ehud Barak, and well before the Palestine Authority's bloody response to the Barak government's unprecedented offer of almost all of the West Bank and large chunks of eastern Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount. Perhaps this sobering outcome would have tempered the book's optimistic conclusion that doing more in earlier years might have reinforced Palestinian readiness to accept Israeli sovereignty in the city. At least one hopes so.
The reviewer, professor emeritus of the City University of New York, is former national chairman of the American Professors for Peace in the Middle East.
Their thesis doesn't hold.......2001-06-24
The authors claim that Israeli administration of the eastern half of Jerusalem has been a failure, and that it has been the the Israeli government's policy to not only stifle the growth of Jerusalem's Arab population, but to also drive out as many of Jerusalem's Arabs as possible. There is ample evidence to show their thesis wrong. Not to say that they are lying, but simply that the things they missed and or left out totally alter the picture. For example, in an article reviewing this book in the Jerusalem Post the following is written,
"Nor does [the book] take note of the wanton destruction and seizures of Jewish property and sacred sites in the years before the city's reunification. For example, [the book] reports that the plan to build Neveh Ya'acov in northern Jerusalem called for the expropriation of 3,200 dunams, mostly belonging to Arab residents, but does not mention the Jewish community of that name that existed there before being overrun in 1948." *1
The authors ignore the fact that Israeli expropriations were in many cases the reclaiming of lands that were Jewishly owned prior to their being confiscated / taken over after being conquered by the Arabs in 1948. It should also be noted that, as in all modern countries, owners of expropriated land are compensated at market value.
While the Israeli government has surely not encouraged Arab population growth, the hard numbers show that they have done virtually nothing to discourage it also. Some examples:
"Arabs have received substantial numbers of permits. In the 1974-1995 period, for example, Jerusalem's Arab community received building permits for more square meters of residential construction than did the demographically similar (in terms of total numbers and family size) Jewish ultra-Orthodox community. Likewise, in 1998, 79% of Arab permit requests were granted as opposed to just 73% of Jewish requests. " *2
For even more specific data take a look at this:
"In 1967, there were 68,600 Arabs living in Jerusalem, whereas in 1995, there were 174,400, a rise of 154%. By contrast, the Jewish population rose by 111%, from 197,700 in 1967 to 417,000 in 1995. ... In 1967, the city's population consisted of 74.2% Jews and 25.8% Arabs. Currently, Jews comprise 70.5% of the population, a drop of 3.7%. ... When the city was under Jordanian control, the number of Arab residents substantially diminished. ... Over the past 30 years, the number of Arab-owned apartments in Jerusalem has risen significantly. In 1967, there were 12,200 Arab-owned apartments in eastern Jerusalem, whereas in 1995 there were 27,066 apartments, an increase of 15,000 or 122%. In the Jewish sector, there were 57,500 apartments in 1967 and 122,780 in 1995, an increase of 113.5%. " *3
And this only accounts for legal construction and legal residents. Since 1967 large numbers of Arabs who are not Israeli citizens have immigrated illegally to the city, and massive illegal construction has occured, to the tune of 20,000 (*4) illegally built structures.
The numbers are clear. This book's thesis simple doesn't hold.
1. Jerusalem Post: Was Israel's Jerusalem policy really asinine? By Jack E. Friedman
2. CAMERA: Truth Demolition in an Anti-Israel Road Show, by Andrea Levin
3. A FACTUAL LOOK AT: ARAB DEVELOPMENT IN JERUSALEM /97.03.18 (Communicated by Israeli Government Press Office)
4. Ha'aretz: Palestinians opt for illegal construction in Jerusalem, many empty buildings, By Nadav Shragai
The reality of Jerusalem for all you CNN watchers.......2000-08-09
Cheshin, Hutman, and Melamed provide a sobering view of the reality of Israel and its treatment of the Arabs. They describe, in detail, the inequality of municipal services between East and West Jerusalem, the seizure of Arab lands in East Jerusalem for the construction of Jewish neigborhoods, the housing limits placed in arab neigborhoods to prevent further development, and so on. The book clearly demonstrates Israel's racist policy toward Arabs. The fact that Arabs are treated as second class citizens in Jerusalem is made clear throughout the book, particularly in the anecdotes.
Book Description
Precious oil and export markets, wars in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf, peace talks at the White House, terrorist eruptions: more now than ever, Arab affairs are the West's affair. And yet as we find ourselves increasingly enmeshed in its politics and economics, the Middle East remains a mystery to most of us, a world of dimly understood connections and impenetrable complexities. The Arab world at last becomes accessible in this book. The only study to include developments since the Gulf War and the historic pact between Israel and the PLO, Inside the Arab World gives us a complete and detailed picture of the region as it is today, as well as a clear sense of how Arab affairs have evolved and where they may lead.
Despite its abundance of oil, the Arab world has failed to produce a single successful economy. Michael Field, a recognized expert and longtime reporter on the Arab states, ably explores the cultural, political, and geographic reasons for this failure. Ranging from Algeria to the Gulf states to Egypt and Syria, he considers the fragmentation of society, the people's tolerance of bad government, corruption, and the deadening economic effect of Arab socialism. But he also shows how the region--influenced partly by exposure to Western media, partly by reforms imposed by creditors--is changing now, taking its first cautious steps toward democracy, whose opportunities so far have been most firmly grasped by Islamic fundamentalists.
Timely, thorough, and highly readable, this book offers much-needed insight into the Arab world as its politics and policies increasingly engage our own.
Customer Reviews:
Inside the Arab World.......2001-07-25
"The Arab world has not been a happy or successful place in the last fifty years, and the misery and disenchantment of the people has recently become acute." So reads the first line of "Inside the Arab World"; most of the large volume that follows buttresses and amplifies this statement. Field, a journalist, reviews the history of Arabic-speaking countries since World War I, then provides a survey of current issues (economics, democracy, Arab-Israeli conflict, relations with the West). His information appears to rely in large part on his many trips to the Arab countries over a twenty-seven-year period.
The result is a well-informed and timely survey. Some of Field's hard-hitting opinions make a whole lot more sense than others. Yes, he's right that "[t]he Arab world has become a more sober and realistic place since the mid-1980s." No, he's completely wrong that "religion is not the cause of conflicts but provides a rallying point for conflicts that are basically economic or political." Of particular interest is the chapter on the Saudi economy, where Field argues that the manufacturing businesses have become commercially viable.
It is nearly impossible to tell the extent to which Field relies on other authors' writings for he provides hardly a single citation. That raises a question about the publisher: however skillfully done, why does a university press put out such a nonscholarly essay by a knowledgeable insider? Is there no distinction now between a trade publisher and a university press?
Middle East Quarterly, September 1995
Comparative review of incomparable uniquenesses.......1997-04-09
Michael FIELD has assembled an enclopedia of cultural, historical and political insights that assists the armchair diplomat in an honest and forthright manner. Without writting down to the new students of the Arab world and without surpassing the heights of professional inquirers, the author combines personal perspectives and intimate expressions from players in the nations to present a comprehensive new look at a durable and ancient challenge to the liberal democratic agenda.
The author rewards the reader with fresh and important facts while including obscure and little-seen points-of-view.
Sit back and take a ride on a tragic carpet.
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