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| Volume IX, March 2002, Number 1 |
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| Book Review Excerpts |
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Central Asian Security: The New International Context, by Roy Allison and Lena Jonson, eds. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001. 279 pages, with index. $22.95, paperback.
David Nalle
U.S. Foreign Service officer (ret.)
"Weak states make bad neighbors, . . ." might serve as the topic sentence for this collection of perspectives on the viability of Central Asia as a "regional security complex." Martha Olcott, noting that all the Central Asian states are still weak, completes her thought: "Over time the stronger states of the region will have less and less interest in cooperating with the weaker ones, and the whole notion of Central Asia as a distinct region may come into question" (p. 44).
"Regional security complex" is the concept the book's editors have chosen to help them deal with a group of states that are "locked into common security concerns and are linked to each other in such a way that the actions of one state to advance its security are likely to have consequences also for other parts of the complex" (p. 5). They add that they see the concept as valid whether or not the actors involved recognize it as such. The essays in this collection were composed prior to September 11, 2001, and the dramatic changes in the Afghan situation, but that country fits right into the concept of the regional-security complex -- and may indeed have a positive contribution to make one day now that the Taliban blight seems to have been eradicated.
America's Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood, by Lawrence Davidson. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. 222 pages, notes to 252, bibliography to 257, index to 264. $55.00, hardcover.
Kathleen Christison
Author, Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy and The Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story
Davidson is a pioneer in researching the early history of U.S. policy making on the Palestine problem, and America's Palestine is a seminal work, describing how public and policy-maker perceptions were formed in the immediate post-World War I era, as well as how these initial perceptions became bedrock, influencing countless later generations of policy makers, down to the present. His research demonstrates clearly not only the process by which the mindsets of policy makers are molded, but also the way in which public mindsets are shaped and how these in turn ultimately influence policy making. The book describes how Palestine, uniquely among all foreign-policy issues, became America's Palestine through the efforts of a strong Zionist proselytizing effort.
Davidson examines in detail U.S. press coverage of the Palestine issue from 1918 through Israel's creation in 1948, as well as presidential papers, congressional records and State Department documents. On this basis, he takes the reader through a well-documented progression from nineteenth-century Protestant missionary evangelizing, which sought to "redeem" the Holy Land from pernicious Islam, to U.S. political evangelizing, which promoted the notion that it was the "manifest destiny" of the United States to bring civilization to benighted colonial peoples, and ultimately to the amalgamation of these ideas into a zeal for the Zionist enterprise. Zionism appealed to some basic American religious and political instincts, promoting the settlement of Western Jews in a land seen as rightfully theirs and portraying these Jews as the instrument for bringing modernity to a Holy Land rendered backward and alien by centuries of Arab and Muslim domination.
Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine 1918-1948, by A. J. Sherman. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2001. 264 pages. $17.95, paperback.
Lawrence Davidson
Department of History, West Chester University
A. J. Sherman, an associate fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford, tells us about the lives and reflections of the British civil servants, military officers, policemen, school teachers and other English living in Palestine during the mandate. He does so by expertly organizing and contextualizing quotes taken from letters and other personal papers. These give insight into the British experience from the heady days following 1918 until the near despair of the years leading up to 1948. Thus the British bear witness in this book as well as reveal their imperial point of view. Theirs was a comfortable conviction that the success of its arms entitled Britain to a pivotal role as arbiter of the Middle East, and the concomitant notion that "Britain had obligations to all its peoples, . . . a long tradition of executive responsibility towards the colored races" (p. 14).
According to Sherman's witnesses, British imperialism was altruistic, as symbolized by railway lines, water works, a postal system, private Western-style education for the elites, as well as the importation of European culture and exclusive clubs with tennis courts. Almost all the many people he quotes cite one or another of these civilizing aspects of British rule. Also, according to Sherman, most of the British in Palestine were more sympathetic to the Arabs than the Jews. This is an interesting point which contradicts the judgment of Tom Segev who, in his One Palestine Complete, suggests that the British working in Palestine really favored the Zionists. Perhaps it was a matter of taste. On the one hand, the Jews had the music and other Western cultural traits that the British could recognize as "real culture." As Sherman puts it, "for the British officers, the musical life of Palestine was a revelation. The large number of refugees from Germany and Austria had brought with them the taste and standards of Berlin, Vienna and other cities of Central Europe: both as performers and audiences for the frequent concerts of the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra" (pp. 166-167).
The Transformation of Palestinian Politics -- From Revolution to State-Building, by Barry Rubin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 277 pages with notes, glossary and bibliography. $31.50, paperback.
Barry Rubin's study of the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian politics between 1993 and 1999 is a well-documented, objective and generally sympathetic account of the Palestinians' transition during this period from revolution toward statehood. Rubin was deputy director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in Israel when his book was published in 1999. He acknowledges his support for a Palestinian state in the preface, and his analysis reflects the mainstream consensus during that time among Israelis and Americans that there was halting, difficult, but real progress toward peace and a two-state solution.
Like other analysts, Rubin, in hindsight, was too optimistic, in view of the later collapse of the peace process and the descent into undeclared war between the new government of Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. Nevertheless, Rubin's book, which draws on Hebrew, English and Arabic sources, has many strengths. It carefully describes the huge and unprecedented challenges faced by the new Palestinian Authority in 1993 as it struggled to negotiate a peace with Israel, while starting from scratch to build institutions for governing a future state whose boundaries and powers were still undefined. Rubin also describes the complexities of Palestinian politics, the Palestinian leadership and the opposition, and relations with the Arab world. He portrays Arafat's dilemma in trying to accommodate the need for control to demands for democracy, human rights and the rule of law. And he describes the PA's approach to the huge political and diplomatic challenges it faced, including Arafat's shifting tactics for dealing with terrorism by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, an issue at the center of the debate over the breakdown of the Oslo process and the current deep impasse.
No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam, by Geneive Abdo. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 223 pages. $25.00, hardcover.
Bill Mikhail
Ph.D. candidate, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
This is a study of the modern history of Islamic movements in Egypt. The author is an American journalist who lived in Egypt from the mid to late 1990s to learn about Egyptian politics and the signs of Islamic revival there. She observed many signs that Egyptians are returning to their Islamic roots. The book's thesis stresses how peaceful and everyday Islam is transforming Egypt. She hails "Popular Islam," as "a grassroots movement emerging from the streets," to change "the social structure of Egyptian society from the bottom up, creating an Islamic order." Her views represent a serious challenge to American scholars and policy makers who equate Islamic politics with terrorism and extremism. Egypt's Islamic experience is a serious development in Sunni Islam, an example of an attempt to establish a harmony between fundamentalism and modernity. There are Islamists who oppose the state's policies, and others who work inside the regime to found a religious society through institutional avenues.
The first two chapters are a journey through the suburb of Imbaba, an area sandwiched between Cairo and Giza. This poverty-stricken and overcrowded neighborhood has been the arena for many violent clashes between the Islamists and the Egyptian police. The author provides a portrayal of the rise of members of the Islamic Group to a position of power that enabled them to control every aspect of life. It is entertaining to read about these religious leaders installing themselves as guardians of public morality and acting as ultimate interpreters of the law. They established their own jurisdictions governing the one million inhabitants of Imbaba.
The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians and the Turn of a New Millennium, by Charles M. Sennott. New York: Public Affairs, 2001. 479 pages. $30.00, hardcover.
George Emile Irani
Professor, Royal Roads University (Victoria, Canada)
Years ago while I was researching a book on the role of the Vatican in the Middle East,1 the late Lebanese scholar and jurist Edmond Rabbath told me that the Arab Christians were in the process of becoming "fossilized" communities. This prophetic statement has today become a factual description of Christian communities in the Levant. Charles Sennott, who was the Middle East bureau chief of The Boston Globe from 1997 to 2001, details his "journalistic pilgrimage along the path of Jesus's life that took [him] to the Holy Land -- Nazareth, Bethlehem, Beit Sahour, Jerusalem -- Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon." As an American "secularized" Catholic, Sennott discovers and relates the predicament facing Arab Christians squeezed between a powerful Jewish state on one side, which since 1967 has occupied and settled the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, and an assertive Islamic revivalist movement on the other. Another important factor is dramatized by the difficult economic conditions made impossible by constant uncertainty and warfare throughout the region.
The first challenge facing the Christian presence in the land where Christ was born, lived and died is emigration. In 1914, the Christian population in the Ottoman Empire constituted 24 percent of what is considered today Israel-Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Today, the Christian presence in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem has dwindled dramatically to less than 2 percent of the total population. In the West Bank and Gaza, the number of Christians in 1995 was estimated at no more than 32,000 out of a total of nearly 3 million. According to the author, in 1995 there were about 133,000 Palestinian Christians in Israel and the Palestinian territories, compared to an estimated 145,000 under the British mandate.
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| 1 See The Papacy and the Middle East: The Role of the Holy See in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1962-1984 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986).
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