Crossing the Jordan: Israel's Hard Road to Peace by Samuel SegevReview by: L. Carl BrownForeign Affairs, Vol. 77, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 1998), p. 164Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20049103 .

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Recent Books

conflating Iran's Tobacco Revolt of the

early 1890s and the Constitutional Revolu

tion of the following decade) and debatable assertions ("If Christians are ill at ease

with power, Muslims recoil at profit"). Isn't Islam, in Charles Issawi's classic

mot, the only world religion founded by a successful businessman?

Crossing the Jordan: Israel's Hard Road

to Peace, by samuel segev. New

York: St. Martin's Press, 1998,

420 pp. $29.95. Veteran Israeli journalist Segev

concen

trates on the post-1991 phase of Israeli

Arab negotiations but also ranges back in

time. His sources are largely notes from

interviews over the past two decades with

many Israeli officials, several Arabs, and

other non-Israelis, a good sampling of

the personal memoirs of political figures, and much material from the Israeli and

Arab press. With an emphasis on political

personalities and rivalries, all set within a

dogged reconstruction of who did what

when, the book is less concerned with the

meaning of it all. Yitzhak Rabin comes

off best. Peres is duplicitous if not worse.

Israel's Oslo negotiator, Savir, has limited

military experience and doesn't quite

grasp either Israel's security needs or Arab

political culture. George Bush and James Baker were bad, Shamir not so bad. Israeli

doves are naive and at times almost tools

of Egypt and the plo. Good words for Palestine's Abu Mazen, not so for Yasir

Arafat. The book will be most useful to

specialists attempting their own detailed

reconstruction of developments. Segev's

separate chapters on Israeli relations with

King Hassan of Morocco, King Hussein

of Jordan, and Saddam Hussein of Iraq offer solid documentation for which any scholar must be grateful, even if not in

agreement with the interpretive pitch.

Newsletter of the Economic Research Forum

for the Arab Countries, Iran and Turkey. Cairo: May 1998, 28 pp.

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[164] FOREIGN AFFAIRS Volume77No.s

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