Selected Book Reviews

[Mediocrates]

Israeli-Jordanian Dialogue, 1948-1953: Cooperation, Conspiracy, or Collusion? By Yoav Gelber. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004. 357 pp. $69.50.

Almost six decades after the U.N. partition of Palestine, ascription of blame for Palestinian refugees still resonates in Israeli academic discourse. Following the lead of Avi Shlaim, an Oxford University historian and "new historian," post-Zionists have exculpated the Palestinians for heeding Arab calls to leave. Shlaim argued in a 1988 book that King Abdullah I of Transjordan and Jewish leaders colluded to force the partition of Palestine and, therefore, bear responsibility for the refugee crisis that followed.

In Israeli-Jordanian Dialogue, 1948-1953, Haifa University professor Gelber decisively refutes Shlaim's thesis by showing that the Israelis and King Abdullah did not aim to conspire against the Palestinians. He argues, rather, that, for the Israelis and Abdullah—who had deep-seated mutual interests and a long-standing bond—partition turned out to be the most viable solution to a thorny problem.

Relying on documents from Israeli and British archives (the latter of which include records of broadcast statements from Arab leaders), Gelber details the Zionist-Jordanian dialogue from the waning days of the British mandate through the 1948 war, to the Israeli raid on Qibya in 1953, which marked the end of the Israeli-Jordanian bond and Jordan's reunion with the Arab coalition. Gelber explains the nuances of the diplomacy among representatives from Israel, the United States, Britain, the United Nations, Transjordan, and other Arab states. His analysis spans both the political and military issues that shaped the Israeli-Jordanian dialogue.
The coverage of Transjordan's 1948 invasion of Israel sets the scene for subsequent examination of the tenuous occupation of the West Bank and the collapse of the Palestinian government in Gaza, which Gelber suggests had to do more with military than political developments. Several chapters examine the diplomatic efforts behind the first nonaggression pact and other attempts at peace from the end of the war through 1953.

Gelber highlights King Abdullah's struggle in balancing his necessary relations with Israel with those he had with the broader Arab world, hostile to the Jewish state's independence, while at the same time posturing himself as a representative of the Palestinians following the Egyptian subordination of Gaza.

Israeli-Jordanian Dialogue, 1948-1953 sheds light not only on an important historical episode, but it has historiographic significance as well. Too often, professors subsume scholarship to their own political agendas. It has become fashionable among many historians to substitute theory for research or omit evidence that undercuts their thesis. Careful historical research such as Gelber's grounds the debate about the early years of the Palestinian refugee crisis.

Suzanne Gershowitz

Economic Relations between Egypt and the Gulf Oil States, 1967-2000: Petro-Wealth and Patterns of Influence. By Gil Feiler. Brighton, England: Sussex Academic Press, 2003. 407 pp. $69.95.

At the Khartoum summit in August 1967, when the Arab League rejected negotiations with Israel, three oil-rich states—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Libya—guaranteed to provide Egypt with US$260 million annually in aid "until the results of Israeli aggression have been eliminated." Feiler tells the story of what happened next, assembling a coherent tale from scattered and not always consistent sources. He shows that Egypt and the Arab oil states did have an intense economic interaction. In the eighteen years from 1967 until the price of oil crashed in 1985, the oil-rich states provided Egypt $14 billion in aid, $5 billion in investment (most of it politically motivated), and $22 billion in workers' remittances through official channels. At its peak in 1975-77, the aid alone averaged more than 15 percent of Egypt's national output.

Yet aid, investment, and remittances did not put Egypt on the path to sustained growth in the 1970s; to the contrary, Egypt's economy remained in desperate straits, and its dependence on aid only grew deeper. Feiler documents Egyptian disappointment with aid and its bitterness over bearing what it considered an undue burden in the conflict against Israel—factors which played no small part in Sadat's decision to seek a peace treaty with Israel. These factors also led Egypt to turn to the West economically. Indeed, as the slow turn began in the late 1980s, Egyptian economic performance began to improve. The accelerating turn after the 1991 Kuwait war, rather than the Arab aid in wake of Egypt's role in that conflict, accounted for the country's strong economic showing in the 1990s.

Feiler also shows that for all the talk about Arab solidarity and a joint stand against Israel, the economic flows appear to have been much more motivated by the particular national interests of each oil-rich country. For instance, Saudi aid was aimed by the strongly anticommunist kingdom to reduce Soviet influence in Egypt. Over time, the flow of funds to Egypt came more and more from remittances by Egyptian workers, whose low-cost labor was so useful to the oil-rich states, which at the time, were desperately short of workers ready and able to work in modern enterprises.

A minor quibble: Arab oil donors to Egypt included both the conservative monarchies of the Gulf and two radical states, Iraq and Libya—the latter of which is not in the Gulf at all. Feiler's analysis would have benefited from more fully integrating into his story the two radical donors, which he only sometimes includes.

Patrick Clawson

Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out. Edited by Ibn Warraq. New York: Prometheus Books, 2003. 471 pp. $28.

In Leaving Islam, Ibn Warraq has assembled a compelling list of writings from individuals of Muslim birth who renounced their faith. It serves as a companion of sorts to his own personal statement, Why I Am Not a Muslim, and opens a window into a usually hushed topic, revealing internal Muslim debates concerning history, faith, and culture.
The problem of dissent within Islam has been a troubling issue from the earliest moments of Muslim history. Although the Qur'an famously declares at 2:256 that "There is no compulsion in religion," apostasy (meaning, adopting another belief or non-belief) is a capital offence. Hence, Muslims' fear that dissent might be viewed as apostasy serves as an insidious weapon for political leaders. Often in collaboration with religious scholars, leaders use this tool to silence free thinkers and spread a blanket of totalitarian control over Muslim communities.

Despite the crucial importance of apostasy, it has not seriously been documented or investigated. Ibn Warraq's breakthrough collection of essays offers a compelling and vivid insight into the minds of those individuals who have struggled with the faith tradition into which they were born, eventually departing from the belief of their parents and ancestors to become free of what they considered as oppressive or demeaning to living as rational and independent individuals.

The phenomenon of Muslims leaving Islam is about as old as Islam itself. Ibn Warraq handily summarizes some of the most notable cases from the early centuries of Islam, such as those eminent freethinkers Ar-Rawandi (c. 820-830) and Ar-Razi (865-925), or skeptical poets such as Omar Khayyam (c. 1048-1131) and Hafiz (c. 1320-89), or Sufi (mystic) practitioners among whom the most notable victims of orthodoxy were Mansur ibn Hallaj (executed in 922) and As-Suhrawardi (executed in 1191).

But the testimonies Ibn Warraq collects of contemporary individuals from across the Muslim world make for particularly fascinating reading. They offer insight into the biography and psychology of Muslims contending with a faith that they find irreconcilable with the requirements of modernity. The voices are those of men and women from Bangladesh and Pakistan, India and Iran, Tunisia and Turkey, Malaysia and Morocco. They are intelligent, aware of their past and tormented by present realities of obscurantism, dogmatism, and intolerance within Muslim societies.

Ibn Warraq is a courageous writer on Islam and a passionate defender of reason who continues to struggle on behalf of reason with a culture that seems to be at odds with reason. In this respect, his work, as in the preparation of this edited volume, is an indispensable tool for Muslims themselves so they can wage their struggle for enlightenment and reform of their faith tradition.

And here, therefore, lies the conundrum for those, be they Muslim or non-Muslim, who are concerned about the world of Islam and its relationship with others: the act of leaving Islam, however courageous on an individual basis, amounts to abandoning the reformist struggle needed within Islam.

Salim Mansur
University of Western Ontario

[Mediocrates]

Operation Solomon: The Daring Rescue of the Ethiopian Jews. By Stephen Spector. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 320 pp. $28.

It took the government of Israel nearly three decades to take significant steps to bring the Jews of Ethiopia to Israel, but when it did finally make a commitment to do so in the late 1970s, it carried out daring and dramatic operations. The story of Operation Solomon—how Israel evacuated more than 14,000 Jews in less than thirty-six hours—is the subject of Spector's fascinating and well-documented history.

Following the first large-scale rescue in 1984, Israel learned that the Ethiopian Jewish population was far larger than previously thought. Their predicament became increasingly dire as Ethiopia dissolved into civil war. By 1990-91, thousands of Jews were identified by American activists who provided them humanitarian assistance and called on Israel to allow them all to come to Israel.

The Ethiopian government, however, saw its Jews as bargaining chips and did not want to let them go without extracting a price from Israel. Initially, it sought weapons but ultimately settled for a large payment of cash.
The U.S. government played a key role. Diplomats, Senator Rudy Boschwitz, and President George H.W. Bush all weighed in to secure Ethiopian permission to allow the Jews to leave. Spector does not give Bush the credit he deserves, presenting him as merely signing off on the requests of others rather than himself strongly supporting the rescue. This is an example of the one weakness of the book, which is that it is missing the historical context of the story, in this case, Bush's direct involvement, when vice president, in negotiations with Sudan for the earlier rescue of the Ethiopian Jews.

Spector has interviewed many of the key players and done a good job of sorting out the relative influence of Israeli, Ethiopian, and American officials, activists, and Jewish organizational leaders. It is a marvelous story, and there is enough credit to go around, but Spector also reveals the underside, especially some of the petty jealousies, particularly among the Israelis, that hindered the rescue.

Mitchell G. Bard
American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise

The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege. By Kenneth Levin. Manchester, N.H.: Smith and Kraus, 2005. 571 pp. $35.

In this massively researched, lucidly written, and cogently argued narrative, Levin tells the appalling story of what has been called the greatest self-inflicted wound of political history: Israel's embrace of Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Oslo accords of September 1993 and its dogged adherence to its obligations under them even as its "peace partner" was blatantly flouting its own.

The book has two parts. The first recounts Jewish political failure in the Diaspora, where Jews lived with a constant burden of peril; Levin presents this as the background for the self-deluding rationales that engendered Oslo. The second part traces the same perils in the history of Israel itself. Levin shows how a tiny nation, living under constant siege by neighbors who reject its very existence, was induced by its intellectual classes to believe that its own misdeeds had incited Arab hatred and violence, and that what required reform was not Arab dictatorship and Islamist Jew-hatred but the reform of (other) Jews. Reversing cause and effect, Israeli leaders blinded themselves to the obvious fact that it was Arab hatred and aggression that repeatedly led to Israeli occupation, not occupation that caused Arab hatred and violence.

Although Levin argues strongly that Israeli leaders like Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and the ineffable Shimon Peres hallucinated moderation in a murderous enemy, his book is not a polemic that excludes all opposing points of view; on the contrary, we get the fullest possible account—and "in their own words"—of those Israelis (and their American-Jewish supporters) who deluded themselves into believing that Oslo would bring a new heaven and a new earth. When the accords were signed in 1993, Minister of Education Shulamit Aloni announced that "no more parents will go weeping after the coffins of their sons," and Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz said confidently that "death shall be no more." And all this because Arafat had—not for the first time—promised to renounce terror and recognize Israel's "right to exist," that used Buick he had already flogged several times over. By autumn 2000, and as a direct (and in Levin's view entirely predictable) result of Israel's endless unreciprocated concessions to Arafat's demands, the country was faced with intifada II, "the Oslo war," in which all Israel became a battlefield and getting on a bus or going to a cafe or a disco meant risking your life.

One of Levin's most relentlessly pursued themes is the influence of Israel's cultural elites on the governments of Rabin and Barak. In Israel (as in America) many intellectuals seem to subscribe to the motto, "the other country, right or wrong." But if American leftist intellectuals are confined to universities and a few other institutions, in Israel they have come close to taking over the government. Israelis thus learned the hard way what Churchill said of England's leading appeaser: "Mr. Chamberlain was faced with a choice between surrender and war; he chose surrender, and he got war."

Edward Alexander
University of Washington

The Shahids: Islam and Suicide Attacks. By Shaul Shay. New Brunswick, N.J. and London: Transaction Publishers, 2004. 246 pp. $39.95.

Since the early 1980s, the world has witnessed many instances of the grotesque instrument of suicide bombings, spreading death, destruction, and fear. It is, therefore, essential to understand the terrorist organizations that adopt this method of waging war. Shay's study on shahids (Islamic martyrs) is a timely investigation into this subject that should be widely read.

As Shay notes, suicide terror is not a new phenomenon, nor is it entirely located within the extremist culture of political Islam. Two of the most prominent individual victims of suicide bombings were Rajiv Gandhi, a former prime minister of India, killed in 1991 by a Tamil female bomber during a political rally in the midst of an election campaign, and similarly, Sri Lankan president Primadasa, assassinated in 1993.

Shay's book includes a useful historical survey of Islamic suicide bombings taking the readers all the way back to the eleventh century Hassan as-Sabah in his famous fortress, "Alamut," on the shores of the Caspian Sea. Sabah organized the secret order of the Hashshashin (Assassins), and his followers, for a while, terrorized centers of political authority across the Middle East in the midst of the Crusades. The Shahids also includes a compilation of recent suicide bombings for anyone wanting to review the record since 9-11. Although Israel has been the most often hit target of suicide bombers, most victims of suicide bombings these days are Iraqi Shi‘ites.

The Tamil Tigers, waging war against Sri Lankan authorities to establish an independent Tamil entity on the island, were primarily responsible for being the first to employ suicide bombings as their weapon of terror. Other terrorist organizations such as the Workers' Party of Kurdistan (PKK) in Turkey, the Chechen rebels in Chechnya and Russia, and jihadi groups based in Pakistan responsible for terrorist strikes inside Jammu and Kashmir within India, adopted the Tamil innovation of suicide bombings to sow fear in the mistaken belief that their respective causes can succeed as a result.

Shay has filled an essential gap in our understanding of suicide bombings as a modern political phenomenon and, moreover, armed with religious justifications when it comes to Muslim terrorism. His book begs the question, however, in what manner will Muslims repudiate both the politics of jihadi terrorism and the use of Islam to justify a crime that no religion worth its name can legitimate or defend. But that is a book only to be written when Muslims will have recovered their faith tradition from the perversions it has been subjected to by men in religious garbs such as Ayatollah Khomeini or the blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.

Salim Mansur