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| Volume VIII, March 2001, Number 1 |
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| Book Review Excerpts |
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Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age, by R. Stephen Humphreys. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xxii + 297 pages, with notes and index. $29.95, hardcover.
Guilain P. Denoeux
Associate professor of government, Colby College
This book aims to offer a general survey of Middle Eastern society and politics as the region enters the twenty-first century. Intended for the general reader, it consists of ten chapters that explore separate though interrelated topics. Chapter One examines the consequences of population growth and economic stagnation, arguably the two main forces shaping politics in the region. While the material covered here will be familiar to experts, it is laid out in a clear and concise manner. Unfortunately, the author fails to pay any real attention to the various attempts at economic restructuring that have taken place across the area in the past two decades. The reader could easily infer that the dominant economic strategy in the region remains import substitution and that little effort has taken place to reduce trade barriers, stimulate private investment and promote exports. Yet such attempts have radically transformed the economies of, for instance, Turkey and Tunisia. Nor is there any mention of the structural-adjustment programs adopted by numerous Middle Eastern countries, despite these programs' considerable social, political and economic impact. A book of this sort should have drawn on specific, country-based examples to illustrate the problems and dangers of market-oriented reforms and how they relate to pressures for democratization.
In the end, however, this book’s many shortcomings should not detract from its strengths. In an easily accessible style, Between Memory and Desire summarizes some of the knowledge accumulated by a prominent scholar of Islamic history over more than 30 years of teaching and research on the Middle East. Though it breaks no new ground, it can help the general reader approach the region in ways that are free from many of the misconceptions and stereotypes about it that are unfortunately all too prevalent in American society.
Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, by Meron Benvenisti, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 366 pages, with notes, index, 2 maps and 23 plates. $35.00, hardcover.
Jerusalem in History, edited by K. J. Asali, with an introduction by Rashid Khalidi. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2000. xxi + 303 pages, with index, notes and bibliography. Numerous maps and diagrams. $18.95, paperback.
Robert Brenton Betts
Visiting professor, University of Balamand, Lebanon
Both these books are well-conceived and finely executed studies -- albeit from differing vantage points -- that afford the reader penetrating insight into Jerusalem and the Holy Land at the hopeful beginning of a new millennium. Meron Benvenisti is a distinguished Israeli journalist and former deputy major of Jerusalem whose father, David, was instrumental in drafting the definitive Hebrew map of the infant state of Israel in 1949 and who wrote the first textbook, Our Land, for children of the new nation about their recently conquered territories. Both were of course strongly biased publications intending to wipe away traces of centuries of Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman occupation since the destruction of Jewish Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Thousands of historic names disappeared overnight as did hundreds of actual small towns and villages, abandoned by their tens of thousands of Palestinian inhabitants, usually as the result of forced evacuation by the Israeli army. Many more thousands of refugees were driven from larger towns and cities, many of whose names were also changed.
The author tells of this artificial transformation of a sacred landscape in stark, sometimes emotionally charged prose. In many ways it compliments Walid Khalidi's exhaustive but dispassionate account of every Palestinian settlement destroyed during and in the immediate aftermath of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-49 (All That Remains, 1992 -- see my review in Middle East Policy, Vol. III, No. 2, 1994). Whereas Khalidi passes no judgment but rather allows the facts to tell the sad, often horrific story of the Palestinian exodus, Benvenisti gives an uncensored account of some of the worst Israeli excesses and atrocities almost as if he is exorcising some inner demon that has been troubling him over the decades since he learned the truth that generations of Zionists have tried to cover up. Thirty-one cases are considered in detail. Their locations are shown on Map 2. The massacre at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem is one of the best-known of these. Others, like Safsaf near Safad, where 50-70 men were killed and 4 young women raped (p. 153), are less so. It was these instances of the violation of Muslim women's honor that drove many Muslim villagers to flee. When forced to chose between land and honor, "honor won out over attachment to the land" (p. 247).
The late Kamal Asali's book, a collection of nine essays by leading Arab and European historians covering the history of Jerusalem over five centuries (3000 BC to the present), sets out, like Benvenisti's, to put the record straight. In this case, however, there is no shady past to expose, but the need to publish an accessible account of Jerusalem's history from the Arab perspective, given, as Rashid Khalidi in his introduction wryly puts it, "the extreme rarity of balanced general historical works on Jerusalem available in English" (p. xxii). The particular target of Khalidi's remarks is the presumption of Israel's "Jerusalem 3000" millennium celebrations, which very calculatedly dated the beginnings of the city with the Davidian conquest 1000 years before the birth of his descendant Christ. In fact, the city was 2000 years old when the Jews wrested the ancient hill town from the native Jebusites, many of whose customs and traditions David's son Solomon adopted. Out of the religious amalgam of this union developed the Judaism that gave birth to Christianity (see Essay II: "Jerusalem from 1000-63 BC," by George E. Mendenhall).
Countdown to Statehood: Palestinian State Formation in the West Bank and Gaza, by Hillel Frisch. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. 221 pages with notes, bibliography and index. $19.95, paperback.
Omar M. Kader
President and CEO of a consulting firm providing training and technical assistance, primarily in the Middle East; member, National Advisory Committee, Middle East Policy Council
This well-researched book traces the development of Palestinian nationalism from the diaspora to autonomy in parts of Gaza and the West Bank. Other studies, such as Barry Rubin's Transformation of Palestinian Politics, David Schenker's Palestinian Democracy and Governance: An Appraisal of the Legislative Council and Rashid Khalidi's Palestinian Identity, provide valuable historical perspectives on the formation of the Palestinian national movement and the Palestinians' drive toward statehood. Hillel Frisch's work, while relying on historical data, is a political analysis of events with a specific set of propositions that he attempts to prove. It is not intended to be a historical reference but an explanation, through comparisons with Zionism, of how the Palestinians transformed two movements, one external and one internal, into a nascent state.
Frisch asserts that most studies on national liberation and revolution focus on institution building rather than state building. He makes a distinction between the institution building that sustained the Palestinian uprising and the institution building that is a direct contribution to state building. Frisch endeavors "to sketch the historical development of institutions within the Palestinian national movement in its diaspora and within the Palestinian community in the occupied territories, to highlight the relationship between the two, and to link all of this to the process of creating and sustaining a Palestinian state" (p. xi).
Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy: Containment After the Cold War, by Robert S. Litwak. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000. 290 pages. $18.95, paperback.
Stephen Zunes
Associate professor of politics and chair, Peace and Justice Studies Program, University of San Francisco
In what is probably the most comprehensive study of U.S. policy against so-called "rogue states," strategic analyst Robert Litwak has presented a solid and thoughtful critique of the doctrine and strategy of post-Cold War containment. First putting current policy within that context, he examines the origins and development of U.S. strategy, followed by an assessment of its effectiveness and possible alternatives. Of particular interest to readers of Middle East Policy, he presents U.S. policy towards Iran and Iraq as two of his three major case studies (the third being North Korea). Litwak's book reveals the reasons why such a major focus of U.S. foreign policy over the past decade has been such a major failure.
The Clinton administration's designation of rogue status on a given nation is based on three criteria: acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy, and attempts to destabilize or threaten neighboring countries. Litwak raises doubts as to whether "rogue states" are indeed a distinct category. For example, he acknowledges that Cuba remains on the list despite the fact that it fulfills none of the criteria currently. He also notes that certain obvious candidates are missing. He wonders, for example, why Sudan is on the list, while Pakistan is not. A more dubious contention is that Syria would be on the list were it not for Washington's desire for its collaboration in the peace process with Israel. He exaggerates Syria's threat to American interests and fails to note the qualitative differences between the Baath regimes in Baghdad and Damascus. Meanwhile, he largely ignores Israel's development of weapons of mass destruction, occupation of neighboring countries and violation of the norms of international law.
Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, by Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1999. 286 pages. Postscript to page 290. Notes to page 309. Index to page 322. $26.00, hardcover.
David Isenberg
National security analyst, Arms Control and Implementation Division at DynMeridian, a private consulting firm in Alexandria, VA; adjunct scholar, CATO Institute; research fellow, University of Pittsburgh Matthew B. Ridgway Center
The Cockburns are two relatively well-known Irish-born writers. Patrick has been a senior Middle East correspondent for the Financial Times and the London Independent since 1979, and Andrew is the author of several books on defense and international affairs. They are both veteran Middle East journalists. In their book they have done a masterful job of collecting and distilling an enormous amount of information and history into an eminently readable work.
While some of their conclusions are not new -- the 1991 post-Desert Storm uprising of southern Shiites and northern Kurds failed at least partly due to American ambivalence, and the economic sanctions have accomplished little -- the strength of the book lies in the details they have amassed. To name just a few, these include the attempted assassination of Saddam's eldest son Uday in December 1996, the intrigue in northern Iraq as the CIA tried to mobilize opposition using the Iraqi National Congress (INC) as an umbrella coordinating group, the infighting between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the betrayal of Saddam by his son-in-law Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel and his subsequent return to Iraq, where he was killed in a ritualistic feud.
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