Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | M | Middle East Policy

The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.

Article Excerpt
The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace, by Aaron David Miller. Bantam Books, 2008. 407 pages. $26.00, hardcover.

During the past four decades, the United States has been seriously involved in diplomatic efforts to help resolve the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. In this timely volume, Aaron David Miller sets out to explain why America occasionally succeeded and more frequently failed in its attempts to bring about an Arab-Israeli peace. Miller is especially qualified to review, analyze, and evaluate the diverse approaches of recent administrations to Middle East peacemaking. He served as an adviser on Arab-Israeli issues to six secretaries of state over a 20-year period and was a member of a State Department negotiating team under the last three presidents. To supplement his personal observations, Miller interviewed 165 officials, including former American presidents, secretaries of state and national-security advisers, as well as several Israeli, Palestinian and Arab politicians and diplomats.

In the first part of the book, "America's Promise Challenged," Miller examines several obstacles to successful Middle East diplomacy emanating from both Arab and Israeli politics as well as the American domestic political arena. He attributes the huge gap between America's status as a superpower and its very rare success on the ground to the determination of Israelis and Palestinians to reject American peace proposals whenever they are perceived to pose threats to their survival as political entities.

Miller identifies four different types of responses and strategies that Israelis and Arabs have used when they were not interested in American ideas and initiatives. In some instances, the parties responded with an explicit and unqualified "No." Israel rejected outright the Rogers peace initiative in December 1969 and President Reagan's proposals in September 1982. Likewise, Arafat ultimately rejected President Clinton's proposals at Camp David in July 2000. More frequently, one or both sides avoid a clear-cut negative response in order to buy time or bargain for better terms. Miller notes that, while Arafat did not want to come to the Camp David summit in 2000, he was reluctant to say "No" to Clinton's invitation. Thus, "eager to get the best possible terms he could, Arafat did what Arafat did best--he prevaricated, warning us of the cost of a failed summit but never issuing an outright refusal to attend."

From time to time, one or both parties deliberately drag it out until the American initiative dies. In early 1989, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir proposed a four-point initiative calling inter alia for Palestinian elections in the West Bank...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!