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| Volume X, Summer 2003, Number 2 |
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| Book Review Excerpts |
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War Without End: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Struggle for a
Promised Land, by Anton La Guardia. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press, 2002. 408 pages, with bibliography and index. $25.95, hardcover.
Philip C. Wilcox, Jr.
President, Foundation for Middle East Peace
No issue in current international politics has stirred more partisan fervor than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and writing on this subject tends to reflect this. There are, to be sure, balanced analyses, but in search of even-handedness, they are often cautious to a fault. War Without End, by Anton La Guardia, who spent seven years in Jerusalem as a reporter for The Daily Telegraph, is a happy exception. It is fair, compassionate and understanding toward both Israelis and Palestinians. But it is also full of unvarnished judgments that spare neither side. Above all, it is a brilliant work of reporting. Indeed, I know of no other one-volume work on this conflict that is so informative, rich in insights and readable. First published in London in 2001, the newer American edition traces the history of the conflict from the birth of Zionism in the late nineteenth century to the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the Al Aqsa intifada up to May 2002.
La Guardia, who was born in Rome, has a rare gift for compact, expressive writing. He seems to have been everywhere and seen everything in Israel and Palestine, and his observations and conversations are doubly informed by wide readings of historic and current materials. War Without End is packed with information and analysis that offer both a comprehensive guide for non-expert readers and new material and insights for old hands. Every page is seasoned with fascinating anecdotes and quotations and crisp metaphors. La Guardia has a keen eye for off-beat facts that illustrate and enliven his story.
War Without End covers the historic milestones of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and portrays the politics, culture, religion and society of the Israelis and Palestinians in all their variety. La Guardia sets the stage with the tragedy of the Jews, the Holocaust, their redemption and the creation of Israel in 1948, and the resulting catastrophe for the Palestinians and the "appalling price" they have paid for the sins of European antisemites. While the "Jewish Question" may have been solved by the creation of Israel, the "Question of Palestine" remains "an open sore."
The Iraqi Economy under Saddam Hussein: Development or Decline, by Muhammed-Ali Zainy. London: Al-Rafid Publishing Company, 2003. 419 pages. $20.00, paperback (in Arabic).
Abbas S. Mehdi
Professor of sociology, St. Cloud State University
The new edition of Muhammed-Ali Zainy's The Iraqi Economy under Saddam Hussein: Development or Decline is composed of two sections. The first identifies factors that led to the economic development of the North Atlantic Basin (essentially Western Europe and North America) and distinguishes between economic growth and economic development. Zainy asserts that while economic growth simply reflects gross domestic product and per capita income, economic development is a far more complex notion, taking into account human-resource development, structural changes in the economy, alterations to production methods, and a variety of other social and political factors.
Dr. Zainy selects several indicators of economic development to assess Iraq's economy as it stood in the mid-1970s. He examines per capita GDP, the extent of dependence on exports of primary production (crude oil in Iraq's case), size of the labor force in the agricultural sector, expected age at birth, infant-mortality rate, literacy rate (the latter three representing the physical quality of life), population growth rate, and per capita energy consumption. Comparing these indicators with those of OPEC member nations and several developed countries, Zainy concludes that Iraq was clearly not on the road to positive economic development.
The Druze Between Palestine and Israel, 1947-49, by Leila Parsons. London: Macmillan Press, 2000. xvii and 144 pages; notes and index to p. 180. $75.00, hardcover.
Robert Brenton Betts
Visiting professor of history, University of Balamand, al-Kura, Lebanon
The Druze community in Israel is unique among the Palestinian Arab population for its wholehearted cooperation with the Jewish state, to the extent that it voluntarily subjects its male population to universal military conscription in the IDF. Some Bedouin Arabs also serve, along with a few Christians and the tiny non-Arab Muslim Circassian community, but the Druze alone serve as an Arabic-speaking unit. In return they have reaped all the very tangible benefits that come from military service (like bank mortgages) but have also earned the enmity of the majority Arab Muslim population. And, because they are frequently assigned to border police units, they have suffered disproportionate casualties from the beginning of this service to the Jewish state.
Dr. Parsons has provided a fine background study on how this seemingly improbable relationship developed before, and especially during, the breakdown of the British Mandate in Palestine and the ensuing Arab-Israeli wars. Her underlying thesis, stressed throughout and used to conclude her study, is that "the key to their [Druze] political behaviour lay not in . . . [any] . . . religious tenet, but in pragmatic political calculations" (p. 144). Any attempts by other authors writing on the Druze to consider the possibility that earlier ties between them and the Jews might have predisposed them to a friendly relationship are summarily dismissed as "grasping for straws" (p. 4), "odd" (p. 144), and in the case of my own book, The Druze (Yale University Press, 1988), "certainly ahistorical" (p. 14).
Globalization, Gender, and Religion: The Politics of Women's Rights in Catholic and Muslim Contexts, edited by Jane H. Bayes and Nayereh Tohidi. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 265 pages, plus index. $21.95, paperback.
Women and Globalization in the Arab Middle East: Gender, Economy, and Society, edited by Eleanor Abdella Doumato and Marsha Pripstein Posusney. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003. 278 pages, plus index. $59.95, hardcover.
Mahmood Monshipouri
Chair and professor of political science, Quinnipiac University
A growing body of literature views cultural politics -- a process of conflict over cultural norms and symbols -- as inseparable from sexual politics -- women's struggle for power and authority at domestic, community, national and international levels.1 Some scholars regard transnational advocacy networks as highly instrumental in empowering women all across the world.2 Others argue that the real fault line between the West and Islam concerns gender equality and sexual liberalization. Muslims and their Western counterparts overwhelming favor democracy, yet they are worlds apart when it comes to attitudes toward divorce, abortion, gender equality and gay rights. These divergent values, which represent a "sexual clash of civilizations" of some sort, constitute the real conflict between Muslim societies and the West.3
One theme emerging from the books under review concerns the importance of including gender analysis in the study of culture, economy and politics. The struggle between forces/agents of change and resistance to it has intensified in a globalizing context that ironically helps facilitate the formation of alliances across confessional and religious beliefs. Contrary to the Huntington's "clash of civilizations" paradigm, the heterogeneity of cultural and religious beliefs has not precluded the emergence of cross-national alliances that challenge the course of modernity. The gender-based divisions in the world conferences on women's issues attest to this reality. Bayes and Tohidi's book is based on the conviction that while the European intrusion into Muslim societies has had negative consequences, the overall impact of modernity on Muslim women has been largely positive (p. 41).
The 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing was the site of competing trends between a new transnational, cross-cultural conservative and religious alliance against equal rights for women on the one hand, and the growing globalization of women and gender politics on the other. Some Muslim reformists argue that Muslims do not need mediators between them and God. Shia Islam's clerical hierarchy is not Islamic. Rather, it is a model taken from the Catholic Church. The similarities among religious convictions in this new transnational conservative alliance are striking, however. During the 1990s, Pope John Paul II reflected on the status of women in Catholic societies: "Men and women are basically different from one another and occupy complementary places in the world" (p. 23). In the sharia (Islamic law), men and women are not regarded as equal. Likewise, the Quran says that "women shall have rights according to what is equitable" (p. 27). Bayes and Tohidi argue, however, that the societal and structural conditions, such as cross-time, cross-class and cross-cultural variability or diversity in the status of Catholic and Muslim women demonstrate that religion is not the only or even the primary variable in determining women's rights or in shaping gender relations (p. 27).
As participants in the Beijing conference, Bayes and Tohidi were particularly intrigued by the question of "how religious Catholic and Muslim women who believe in women's equal rights were coping with the contradictions between their own beliefs in women's equal rights and the official positions of their religious authorities" (p. 2). More specifically, they set out to explore the strategies that women have adopted with regard to this contradiction in a variety of contexts. The book proceeds from the assumption that "while feminism and the women's movement [have] become more global than ever before, sisterhood is not global, nor is it local. Women's solidarity has to be negotiated within each specific context" (p. 14). This volume's contributors provide a broad theoretical treatment of the ways women redefine religion and negotiate modernity in a variety of contexts: the United States, Ireland, Spain, Latin America, Turkey, Iran, Bangladesh and Egypt. The book focuses on three different approaches: resistance, revision and reform.
In Women and Globalization in the Arab Middle East: Gender, Economy, and Society, Doumato and Posusney examine the mixed blessings of globalization by focusing on its impact on gender, jobs and activism. The book's basic conviction is that it is necessary -- even critical -- to understand women's roles in enhancing the welfare of their families. Absent such recognition, women's rights and status will not be protected from the negative consequences of economic reforms associated with structural adjustment programs (SAPs). Regarding cultural contexts and their impact on gender issues, Doumato and Posusney point to competing aspects of the evolution of gender ideologies. They argue that the development of Islamic feminism is emblematic of "a discursive, forward-looking movement generated by women to rationalize their activism and employment outside the home -- not as a product of changing economic opportunities or emulation of Western cultural models, but as the product of a true, indigenous Islamic heritage" (p. 9). Some contributors to this volume, such as Jennifer Olmsted, see the rise of Islamism in the region in part as a backlash against SAPs and globalization.
1 Roy Andersen, Robert F. Seibert and Jon G. Wagner, Politics and Change in the Middle East: Sources of Conflict and Accommodation, Sixth Edition (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2001), p. 173.
2 Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998).
3 Inglehart and Norris, "The True Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Policy, March/April 2003, pp. 62-70.
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