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COPYRIGHT 2007 Professors World Peace Academy
PEACE PROCESS: AMERICAN DIPLOMACY AND THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT SINCE 1967 (3RD ED.)
William B. Quandt
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005
535 pages with notes, bibliography, index, online appendices; paper $19.95
Earlier editions of William Quandt's Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967 received considerable praise for being an unparalleled, thorough and honest account of American diplomacy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict since the 1967 war. What makes this third edition even more valuable is not only a new chapter on President George W. Bush's first term, but revised chapters on the Clinton presidency (drawn from new biographies by Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Dennis Ross) and revisions throughout relying on newly released State Department documents. Quandt is a Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia and Visiting Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University. He twice served in the White House as a National Security Council staff member for the Middle East, and was deeply involved in the first Camp David negotiations that produced the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.
Reviewing Quandt's book now has significance in several respects: 2007 marks forty years since the June 1967 war (and the resulting Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza), a number with considerable traditional meaning in the Levant that has occasioned some observers to reassess the decisions made four decades earlier; second, the publication in August of The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (1) by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt has extended the controversy begun by their original articles last year; and third, a brief but significant U.S.-sponsored Middle East peace conference took place in Annapolis in late November, the Bush administration's first major diplomatic initiative toward the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Peace Process is not a comprehensive book about the Arab-Israeli conflict. It focuses almost exclusively on U.S. policy. To understand the sweep of events since 1967 in any given period, it is necessary to refer to other works-especially useful are those based on new research or first person accounts (2)--covering the policies of Israel, its Arab neighbors, or other actors. Peace Process is heavily chronological, perhaps a drawback, yet it is rich in detail, and analysis is mostly saved for the final pages in each chapter. This review focuses on the new materials in Quandt's book, as well as the implications for the present-day context.
The Clinton Presidency
Quandt concludes that the legacy of Bill Clinton's presidency in the Middle East is mixed, a unique...
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