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| Volume IX, December 2002, Number 4 |
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| Book Review Excerpts |
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Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, by Michael B. Oren. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xv + 327 pages, with notes, bibliography and index. $30.00, hardcover.
Michael Rubner
Professor, International Relations, James Madison College & Michigan State
Written by Michael Oren, who holds a doctorate from Princeton University in Middle East studies and serves as a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Shalem Center, Six Days of War was meant to fill an alleged gap in the vast body of literature already available on this topic. In Oren's own words, "Needed was the balanced study of the military and political facets of the war, the interplay between its international, regional and domestic dimensions, a book intended for scholars but also accessible to a wider readership." To avoid going over familiar ground, Oren relied on more recently accessible archival documents in the United States, Britain, Israel and Russia and conducted interviews with Egyptian, Jordanian, Israeli, Russian, French and American officials, some of whom had been actual participants in the dramatic events of what became known as the Six-day War. The overall result is a work of highly variable quality.
The book is divided into two roughly equal segments. In the first four chapters, Oren focuses in strict chronological order on key political and military developments that set the stage for Israel's preemptive airstrikes against Egyptian airfields on the morning of June 5. These include the IDF attack against the West Bank town of Samuin in mid-November 1966, which generated the first of many public accusations against Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser for hiding behind the UNEF (United Nations Emergency Force) skirt; the aerial dogfight on April 7, 1967, in which the Israeli Air Force shot down six Syrian MIGs, thereby further underscoring the impotence of the Egyptian-Syrian defense pact of November 1966; the threatening statements against Syria by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin during the second week in May, followed immediately thereafter by the false reports that the Soviets fed to Nasser about an imminent Israeli invasion of Syria; the dispatch of heavily armed Egyptian divisions into the Sinai and the ensuing withdrawal of the UNEF from Sharm El-Sheikh, the Israeli-Egyptian DMZ and the Gaza Strip; and Nasser's reimposition of a blockade on Israeli shipping in the Gulf of Aqaba on May 23.
The second part of the book consists of six chapters, each containing exhaustive coverage of the military battles and political developments that occurred during the course of each of the six days of war. The immediate consequences of the war and its longer-term ramifications are discussed in a final chapter.
Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, by Amal Saad-Ghorayeb. London & Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2002. x + 191 pages, with 2 appendices, glossary, notes, bibliography and index. $69.95, hardcover; $22.50, paperback.
Robert Brenton Betts
Visiting professor of history; the University of Balamand, Al-Kura, Lebanon
In the West, the Hizbullah (Party of God) of Lebanon is among the most misunderstood and unjustly maligned organizations. It has been demonized and dismissed as a terrorist group whose only tenets are kidnapping and suicide bombing, when in fact it reflects a groundswell of response to tyranny, oppression and injustice. It is too much to hope that either President Bush or Attorney General Ashcroft will ever read this serious, academically sound and revelatory work, but anyone who wants to understand the whys and wherefores of Shia politics in Lebanon should make the effort. It is not easy reading, though for the most part the narrative is clear, with only minor errors in English. The problem for Western readers is that the Hizbullah message, while radical, even extreme, is based on a logic that makes a great deal of sense only after one understands the context of its argument.
Hizbullah as a political movement is relatively new, having grown out of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the politicization of the Shia population in the south of the country. They were victimized by the savage progress of the IDF towards Beirut, culminating in the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and the brutality of the subsequent occupation, which resulted in the destruction of scores of villages and the displacement of some 250,000 people. Even before the invasion, there had been a growing political awareness among the Shia, Lebanon's largest and poorest religious community, resulting in the Amal (Hope) movement founded by Imam Musa Sadr. Taking a more militant stance, the Shia who followed the Hizbullah call to arms vowed to rid their country of the Israeli occupiers and their SLA collaborators by force, a goal finally achieved two years ago, after nearly 20 years of Israeli military presence.
Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict, by Samir Khalaf. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 368 pages. $32.50, hardcover.
New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, edited by Roger Owen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. 341 pages. $19.95, paperback.
Bill S. Mikhail
Adjunct professor, University of Maryland
The history and development of political communities in the Middle East is the subject of these two recent books: Samir Khalaf's Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon and the collection of essays published by the center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University about land property. Both give a different perspective on the past and future of the Arabs and the various environments they live in. Adopting different definitions of the settings and situations surrounding political communities in the Arab world, each is a serious attempt to understand the relationship between state and society in the Arab Middle East.
Samir Khalaf is a professor of sociology and the chair of the Center for Behavioral Research at the American University in Beirut. He discusses the progress of Lebanon as a nation-state through the evolution of its different ethnic and religious communities. The author believes that Lebanon's existence is precarious due to the interplay and influence of both internal and external factors. However, he puts more emphasis on the dilemma of "protracted and displaced hostility" and "re-awakened communal solidarities."
On the other hand, New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East grapples with the question of how modern Arab communities and societies were formed as land ownership was debated and land distributed. The book begins with the attempt by the Ottoman Empire to devolve authority through the empowerment of the ruling classes of the Arab world. Many chapters involve discussions of communities organized geographically around spaces allotted to them as a result of ordinances from central authorities, immigration and population movement, and settlements.
Iran, Iraq, and the Arab Gulf States, edited by Joseph A. Kechichian. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 471 pages. $69.95, hardcover.
Suzanne Maloney
Middle East advisor; ExxonMobil Exploration Co.
Iran, Iraq, and the Arab Gulf States is a first-rate compendium of analytical snapshots that is both blessed and cursed by inadvertent timeliness. Edited by Joseph A. Kechichian, a fellow at the University of California at Los Angeles and a well-established scholar of the region, the book offers a far-reaching profile of the relatively small sliver of geography from whence so many of America's security challenges emanate. Written and edited long before the tragic events of September 11, the U.S. war on terrorism and Washington's declaration of both Iraq and Iran as charter members of an "axis of evil," this book also offers a window on our strategic concerns just before the world -- or, rather, our place in it -- changed.
The book is the outgrowth of a conference held at UCLA's Gustav von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies in May 2000, convened to gauge the temperature of this vital region and to consider its future direction in the next millennium. In the brief preface to the volume, Kechichian outlines a truly ambitious mission:
what are the political, military, religious, and socioeconomic trends for Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen? Will internal, regional, and international tensions threaten existing regimes, or will the latter survive growing pressure points? Will Gulf states' incredible endurance capabilities be altered? Will the next decade witness fundamental changes that could destabilize the Persian Gulf, or will new institutions equip each state with the wherewithal to function and grow more effectively? (p. xxii)
To address these issues, Kechichian marshals an impressive array of 26 scholars from the United States, Europe and the Middle East, who offer mostly thoughtful and thought-provoking analyses on the internal, regional and geostrategic challenges facing the states in question.
Unholy Wars, by John Cooley. London, Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, Third Edition, 2002. 268 pages, with footnotes, appendices and index. $19.95, paperback.
Philip C. Wilcox, Jr.
President, Foundation for Middle East Peace
In the flood of analysis about the origins of the September 11 attack and previous terrorist assaults on the United States, American support for the Mujaheddin against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan is often cited as a contributor to the spread of Islamist terror and the birth of al Qaeda. This is the theme of veteran journalist and Middle East expert John Cooley's history of radical Islamist movements from Algeria to the Philippines and veterans of the 1978-88 Afghanistan war who joined their ranks. First published in 1999, the third and present edition of Unholy Wars has been updated and contains an Epilogue written after September 11, 2001. Edward Said's preface praises Cooley for documenting how the Afghan war bred new cadres of Islamist militants and for explaining the impact of "U.S. manipulation, support, and then abandonment" of the Mujaheddin.
Cooley traces American support for Islamist movements to the early days of the Cold War, when Washington viewed Islam as an ally against communist expansion into the Muslim world. The high point of this strategic relationship, which Cooley describes in fascinating detail, was the massive American effort to support the Mujaheddin war against the Soviets. Working closely with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Washington provided weapons, money and training to the Afghan militants, and encouraged foreign Muslims to join their cause. But when the Soviets were defeated, Cooley argues, things went "disastrously wrong" as foreign veterans of the Afghan battles and training camps would later became shock troops in a new terrorist holy war against the United States and their own governments. Indeed, Cooley asserts that there is a "direct chain of related events" linking American support for the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan to the tragedy of September 11.
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