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| Volume X, Fall 2003, Number 3 |
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| Book Review Excerpts |
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From Arab Nationalism to OPEC: Eisenhower, King Saud, and the Making of U.S.-Saudi Relations, Nathan J. Citino. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. 245 pages, including abbreviations, maps, notes, bibliography and index. $39.95, hardcover.
Ruling Shaikhs and Her Majesty's Government 1960-1969, Miriam Joyce. Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003. 157 pages, including maps and index. $62.50, hardcover.
Brooks Wrampelmeier
U.S. Foreign Service Officer (ret.); served in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE
Between the two world wars, British imperial interests were paramount in the Persian Gulf. Through its influence with the rising power of the Saudi ruler Abd al-Aziz and by its treaties with rulers of the peripheral Gulf Arab states, Great Britain maintained a relative degree of peace and stability in the region just as British and American companies began to obtain concessions to exploit the area's enormous oil reserves. Following World War II, however, the guardianship of Western economic and strategic interests in the region began to shift from Britain to the United States. The pace of this transition began to increase in the 1960s and culminated in 1971, when the British withdrew from their historic commitments in the Gulf. The extent to which the United States had assumed responsibility for the security of Western interests in the Gulf was dramatically illustrated in 1990-91, when American forces, with important but subordinate British military assistance, intervened to defeat the Iraqi threat to the independence of its Gulf Arab neighbors.
Together, the two books under review examine the period -- 1950 to 1969 -- which saw the waning of British primacy in the Persian Gulf. The first, Nathan J. Citino's From Arab Nationalism to OPEC, is a sophisticated analysis showing how policies of the Eisenhower administration to preserve access to Saudi oil had profound consequences both for the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia and for Great Britain as an imperial power in the region. Miriam Joyce's Ruling Shaikhs and Her Majesty's Government 1960-1969 takes the story into the next decade by describing how the relationships between Gulf rulers and the British government were beginning to change in the years leading up to the 1971 British withdrawal and the emergence of the Gulf emirates as independent states.
Diplomatic historian Nathan J. Citino states in the introduction that his intention in this impressively researched and carefully documented history is "to provide the sort of historical framework still needed for understanding Anglo-American collaboration and conflict throughout the Middle East" during this period. He argues that to do so one must first understand the European context that shaped postwar U.S. and British policies in the Middle East. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the United States, through the Marshall Plan and its role in NATO, focused its energies on European reconstruction and on defense against perceived Soviet threats. In the Middle East, the United States continued to count on the British empire to provide stability and assure Western access to oil. The United States, Citino explains, recognized that a top British priority was to maintain control of its access to "sterling oil" (i.e., oil for which payments were made in sterling rather than U.S. dollars) if Great Britain were to participate in the postwar multilateral economy and to play an effective role in the defense of Europe.
Miriam Joyce's history of British-Gulf ruler relationships in the 1960s is, according to a jacket blurb by a former British ambassador in the Gulf, "an evocative, fair, sympathetic and well researched account of the final years of the British physical presence in the Gulf." This is hardly surprising as the author relies almost exclusively on the correspondence between British officials in the Gulf and the Foreign Office in London, supplemented by occasional U.S. diplomatic reports. Her method has been to summarize this correspondence. As a consequence, the reader obtains a first-hand sense of the variety of issues, ranging from the important to the pedestrian, that concerned the British political resident in Bahrain and his political agents in the various Gulf Arab states.
Leap of Faith, Queen Noor. New York: Hyperion, 2003. 480 pages. $25.95, hardcover.
Ann Zwicker Kerr
Author of Come With Me From Lebanon.
The Arab world and Jordan, in particular, are fortunate to have an interpreter of their history and culture in the person of Queen Noor al-Hussein, the beautiful, Princeton-educated, American-born Lisa Halaby, who married King Hussein of Jordan in 1978. Her recently published memoir, Leap of Faith, is a testimony to her love and admiration for her late husband, but, more important for Americans, it is an excellent summary of the political history of that region during the last half century. Interspersed between tales of royal romance and hobnobbing with other royals and heads of state is the timeline of history spanned by King Hussein's lifetime. What better means of conveying this sad and complex history to an underinformed American public?
The reader becomes familiar with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the long series of Arab-Israeli wars that continue to the present, the struggle of the Palestinians to gain their independence from Israel and the inter-Arab problems that accompanied these crises. We see this history from a Jordanian perspective of course, as in the case of the 1978 peace accords at Camp David following the dramatic peace gesture of Egyptian President Sadat's trip to Jerusalem. King Hussein objected to a bilateral settlement between Egypt and Israel that left the Palestinian problem hanging with "no commitment for Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories to pre-1967 borders . . . and no mention of Arab or Muslim rights over occupied Arab East Jerusalem." Many Middle East scholars at the time agreed with the king, though Sadat's gesture won public support around the world. Queen Noor writes of the pall her husband's objections to the Camp David accords cast on their friendship with Suzanne and Husni Mubarak of Egypt and her efforts over time to try to heal the rift. Ever mindful of the Palestinian majority in his country and Jordan's lack of economic resources and precarious geographical position between Israel and Iraq, the king faced a perpetual balancing act in trying to find solutions to domestic, regional and international problems. His capacity for managing to do so was remarkable, and he has no greater fan than the queen. She writes in almost too-glowing terms of his good will and wise political stands and of her role as his helpmeet.
Second Class: Discrimination against Palestinian Arab Children in Israel's Schools, Human Rights Watch, 2001. x + 187 pages. $18.50, paperback.
Overlooking Nazareth: The Ethnography of Exclusion in Galilee, Dan Rabinowitz. Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiv + 222 pages. $26.88.
Robert Brenton Betts
Visiting professor of history, University of Balamand, Tripoli, Lebanon
The most startling fact in Second Class, a very understated exposé of the relegation of Israeli citizens of Christian and Muslim Arab descent to an inferior public education system, is the fact that they comprise 25 percent of the school-age population in Israel (as opposed to 18 percent of the population as a whole). It doesn't take a great deal of mathematical skill to work out what this means for the future of Israel in a decade or two. What is equally startling is that this substantial population, "nearly one in four of Israel's 1.6 million schoolchildren, are educated in a public school system wholly separate from the majority . . . . Their schools are a world apart in quality from the public schools serving Israel's majority Jewish population" (p. 1). Not only inferior facilities, but "discrimination at every level of the education system winnows out a progressively larger proportion of Palestinian Arab children as they progress through the school system -- or channels those who persevere away from the opportunities for higher education" (p. 3). Issues of funding, teacher allocation and average number of students per class are carefully considered and well-documented by statistics. All point to an end result of educational disadvantage for non-Jewish students.
Overlooking Nazareth is the story, sadly repeated all over Israel, of a Jewish settlement erected on stolen Arab land, not in the occupied West Bank, but within the pre-1967 boundaries of the state of Israel. In 1957 the land was seized to build Natzerat Illit -- Upper Nazareth -- a strategically placed town literally overlooking Nazareth, the largest urban concentration of Palestinian Arabs in the Jewish state at the time, then about equally divided between Christians and Muslims. In the first of the two parts of this study (#105 in the Cambridge series in social and cultural anthropology), fetchingly entitled "Bigoted Liberals," the author takes "a journey with the Haj," or to be precise, a tour of the Jewish town with an old Palestinian man who remembers the land when it was owned and farmed by various members of the Nazareth community. All the old landmarks have disappeared. "The new town of Natzerat Illit now hides the natural shapes and landmarks beneath residential compounds, commercial centres, industry. The past existence of Palestinians can hardly be inferred by anybody unfamiliar with the recent history of the terrain" (p. 3). The Palestinian residents of Nazareth refer to the town by the Hebrew term "shikun" or "housing estate," refusing to accord it any legitimate political existence.
Peace Fire: Fragments from the Israel-Palestine Story, Ethan Casey and Paul Hilder, eds. Free Association Books, 2002. 357 Pages. $19.95, hardcover.
Deepa Kandaswamy
Free-lance writer, political analyst
While Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak were holding peace talks at Camp David with the world press waiting with bated breath outside, a completely different scenario was unfolding in Israel and the occupied territories. Did the "peace process" really stand a chance? How did the second intifada (Palestinian uprising) start? How did it change from stone throwing to suicide bombing? Was Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount politically motivated, and if so, how? What is life like for normal people in this abnormal land which is in a perpetual state of war? These questions and more are answered in the remarkable book, Peace Fire: Fragments from the Israel-Palestine Story.
From the bulldozing of houses full of people in Jenin by Israeli soldiers to suicide bombings during Passover in Netanya, from the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to the memorial vigil held by Palestinians for the victims of September 11, Peace Fire is a chronicle of over 100 essays by ordinary people that tell the story of how the vicious circle of grief-anger-violence has wreaked havoc for the past two years. The book is a testament to how the hatred of a few holds captive the hopes and lives of many. The essays take the reader through the daily "normal" lives of people where siege, bombs, snipers and the stench of death have become routine since the failure in the summer of 2000 of the summit at Camp David and the beginning of second intifada.
Egypt and American Foreign Assistance 1952-1956, Jon Alterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 268 pages. $55.00, hardcover.
Bill S. Mikhail
Adjunct professor, University of Maryland
Even though Egypt has been a recipient of a great deal of American economic and military assistance over the past 25 years, the history of this aspect of American diplomacy has been insufficiently studied. In an effort to begin to understand how and when the United States began an economic aid program with Egypt, Jon Alterman examines both the promises and the setbacks that hindered American-Egyptian economic cooperation after the Free Officers seized power in Egypt on July 23, 1952. The author adopts a historical framework, focusing on the first four years of the July Revolution and visiting critical historical points in Egypt's foreign policy, especially the Suez Crisis of 1956. The publication is timely as it coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the July Revolution and the traditional and revisionist literature being written about its leaders and events. Alterman first analyses Egypt's economic and political history. He then discusses the early economic policies introduced by the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) regarding land reform and reclamation, and wealth distribution and population policy, assessing their impact on the Egyptian state. The author then argues that the two parties failed to develop a strong partnership capable of accommodating difficult political and economic circumstances.
The book contains interesting details from the Life magazine portrayal of King Farouk's lavish lifestyle, the Egyptian Left's critique of President Truman's foreign policy, and the rise of the concept of technical assistance as a tool in American foreign policy. It portrays the Egyptians' sensitivity toward America's economic involvement in their country, indicated by the attempt to remove any symbol of American aid from equipment they used. It details Egypt's budgetary policies in the early years of the new military regime. It also cites many documents, particularly the archives of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry and the Egyptian embassy in Washington, DC.
Since the colonial era, Egypt has been a one-crop economy, dependent upon the production of a primary commodity -- cotton -- for sale to one principal trade partner -- Great Britain. Overcoming dependency was a high priority for Gamal Abdel Nasser. Yet, despite a promising start, his efforts proved ultimately unsuccessful. The July Revolution had to contend with difficult economic questions such as investment, the need for foreign capital and markets and the renewed dependency on technology and industrialization.
Iran's Rivalry with Saudi Arabia between the Gulf Wars, Henner Fürtig, with a Foreword by Anoushiravan Ehteshami. Reading, PA: Ithaca Press, 2002. xviii + 288 pages, including index. $49.59, hardcover.
Wolfgang G. Schwanitz
Associate, German Orient Institute, Hamburg
Revolutions are bittersweet moments in history that change a society mostly by bloodshed. As the word indicates, there is something like a rotation involved. But whether a movement opened up into a spiral of progress or regressed even further than the old regime is a judgment that can only be made from a historical distance. Since nobody likes to wait, there are two common understandings. If a revolt is successful, it is considered a revolution. If not, it was a putsch or coup d'état. If the revolutionaries gained power, they became conservatives or radicals: securing power is a far more delicate business than getting to it.
All this is true in Iran, about which Henner Fürtig rightly warns that the time is not yet ripe for a fair and balanced analysis. Thus, Fürtig, an Arabist historian educated at the Leipzig University, discusses mainly two topics: the bilateral relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in the dozen years after the Islamic revolution and the main areas of rivalry between the two countries.
The outcome is very topical. One who knows the Middle East will ask right away about the third party in that game of nations. But Iraq, the old Mesopotamian Bridge between Saudi Arabia and Iran, is not Fürtig's focal point. The country was exhausted after eight years of the first Gulf war against Iran. Moreover, Iraq had to withdraw from Kuwait and was not regarded as a major player after its defeat by the U.S.-led coalition in the second Gulf war.
However, the first Gulf war weakened Iran too. Its rivalry with Saudi Arabia would have been fairly unspectacular and certainly not a subject for such a book, if not for something unique that occurred in Iran during 1979: an Islamic revolution and the establishment of an Islamic Republic.
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