THIS IS AN EXTREMELY WELL-DONE BOOK, VERY WELL GROUNDED IN THE HISTORY OF ZIONISM AND ISRAEL. BEN-AMI COMES TO GRIPS WITH THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF BOTH THE JEWISH AND ARAB COMMUNITIES, THEIR MYOPIA AND FATAL FLAWS. IT IS VERY REALISTIC ON THE NATURE OF ISRAEL--ITS MESSIANISM, HYSTERIA, AND MILITARISM--AND THE VENAL CHARACTER OF ARAFAT AND THE P L O. THIS IS THE BEST BOOK ON THIS ISSUE I HAVE READ, AND I HAVE SEEN ISRAEL THOROUGHLY. IT IS VERY OBJECTIVE...AND VERY PESSIMISTIC.

THIS IS AN EXTREMELY WELL-DONE BOOK, VERY WELL GROUNDED IN THE HISTORY OF ZIONISM AND ISRAEL. BEN-AMI COMES TO GRIPS WITH THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF BOTH THE JEWISH AND ARAB COMMUNITIES, THEIR MYOPIA AND FATAL FLAWS. IT IS VERY REALISTIC ON THE NATURE OF ISRAEL--ITS MESSIANISM, HYSTERIA, AND MILITARISM--AND THE VENAL CHARACTER OF ARAFAT AND THE P L O. THIS IS THE BEST BOOK ON THIS ISSUE I HAVE READ, AND I HAVE SEEN ISRAEL THOROUGHLY. IT IS VERY OBJECTIVE...AND VERY PESSIMISTIC.

Since its inception the state of Israel has fought a number of wars of choice (the only exception was the Yom Kippur War of 1973). To be sure, these have been presented to the world as wars of necessity or self-defence; but Israel's statesmen and generals have never been under any such illusion. Whether this approach has done Israel much good is debatable (for a clear-headed recent account that describes as a resounding failure his country's strategy of using wars of choice to `redraw' the map of its neighbourhood, see Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy by Shlomo Ben-Ami, a historian and former Israeli foreign minister).

Ehud Barak, who was willing to compromise, cater and appease the Arabs so much that he not only offered 96% of Judea-Samaria to Arafat at Camp David, but also chose to deliberately betray Israel's only true Arab Ally and Friend, the South Lebanese Army, knowingly chose Shlomo Ben-Ami to be his Foreign Minister in the talks with Arafat. He did so after David Levy balked at Barak's plans to return to the 1967 pre-Six Day War borders. Ben-Ami would be extremely willing, and like Barak willing to give up the Israeli store.

Enter Ben-Ami. Ben-Ami had always been on record advocating peace, to his credit, but the peace he always advocated reflected Barak's own thinking of one-sided concessions without nothing in return from an Arafat and his cronies who wanted nothing more than the destruction of Israel. The blinders fell off Ben-Ami at Camp David when after signing off to practically everything Arafat demanded and Barak offered, the Palestinians refused Barak's offer of joint sovereignty over Jerusalem as well as all of the territories both Barak and Ben-Ami were willing to turn over to them. They wanted COMPLETE CONTROL of the Old City. Even Ben-Ami, who hadn't heard this, was horrified, and ended up in a shouting match with one of Arafat's stooges. Arafat returned home, and promptly ordered the New Intifada to target Israeli women and children rather than seeking peace.

Despite this, or in spite of this, Ben-Ami still doesn't get it. He will blame his own leaders, Golda Meir and Menachem Begin for standing firm in the face of Arab terror and aggression. He openly admires James Baker, who with Madeleine Albright were the two most hostile Secretaries of State in American Diplomatic History (along with John Foster Dulles) when it came to Israel's security interests. He thinks peace is still possible, and that Arafat is an anomaly - to his credit he singles out the PLO head for the failure of peace negotiations.

Despite witnessing Palestinian duplicity and lies, Ben-Ami suggests that a primarily hostile world, America excluded, should impose a settlement on Israel.(It would be interesting to see how this appeaser sees who is behind the current carnage initiated by his negotiation partners today) But Ben-Ami remains clueless on what was behind the election of Hamas, or why the majority of Palestinians would be happy if Israel ceased to exist. An inept foreign minister, and a clueless ex-foreign minister in a peace camp that has been all but destroyed by missiles descending on Israeli cities, and the kidnapping and murder of Israeli soldiers.

Ben-Ami is praised by other reviewers, and the consensus is that he is a peace-loving intellectual. He might be peace-loving, but this is not a very-well written book, and he comes across naive and stupid, surprising for an someone who claims to be an Israeli realist. Don't bother.

Read Yossef Bodansky's "The High Cost of Peace" for a truer account of what happened at Camp David instead, and how inept and foolish the Israeli negotiators including this pseudo-intellectual "piece (of Israelis) now" minister Ben-Ami really were in the face of Arafat's true desire to destroy their country.

I'd been wanting to find an informed, intelligent, even-handed history of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and I have.

This book is brilliant. Ben-Ami approaches the complexities and contradictions of the Middle East relationships with a fair, open mind and the insight that comes from both his educational background and his unique perspective as a peace negotiator. We find a history of a region that is, in a word, exasperating, and yet hope does not fall to despair. It is telling that while Ben-Ami shows great empathy for both the Jewish and Arab populace, he keeps a savvy eye on the sometimes self-serving motivations of their leaders.

Sadly, those who have already chosen sides and shut their minds will probably be able to cherrypick segments to bolster their own views, but they'll learn nothing. But for those readers who wish to attempt to grasp the area's passions and fears, on all sides, this is the book to read.

This book is the product of Shlomo Ben-Ami's life time of studying the Arab-Israeli conflict both as an historian and a diplomat. The result is truly a masterpiece, perhaps the best single volume on a conflict that has produced a library full of books. This volume holds nothing back and is rigorous in its analysis of all the players in the tragedy of the conflict. No side is spared a critical review. Perhaps the best chapter is on the Camp David summit in 2000 and why it failed. Here the reader benefits from the insights of one of the key negotiators as Shlomo Ben-Ami served as Israel's Foreign Minister during the talks. His analysis of the Israeli, Palestinian and American players at the summit and in the talks that followed until the election of Prime Minister Sharon in 2001 is probably the best available to date.

This is not yet another book by starry-eyed leftist historian deploring the negative aspects of Zionism and the follies committed in its name in the last hundred years. Shlomo Ben-Ami is a solid historian and former foreign minister of Israel. He worked directly in the recent failed attempts under the Clinton Administration's umbrella to achieve a Palestinian-Israeli settlement. He is no self-hating Israeli and certainly no right-wing fanatic.

The Israeli state was founded, and the Jewish settlements in Palestine in the previous three quarters of a century, by a subtle combination of violence, hard work, idealism and diplomacy. The Jews of Europe indeed had no choice but to use every and any method available to save a remnant in Palestine. And they did so. Their achievement was amazing and it did create a new Jew, the Israeli, free from diapora paranoia and isolation. Whatever methods they used can be justified -- even the most atrocious -- as the choice between living and dying. But once established Israel came to rely on military power alone. It rightly feared and mistrusted the Palestinian Arabs but it never really tried to understand their positions, which were in many cases the mirror images of those of the Zionists.

Both the Palestinians and the Israelis have allowed themselves to be led by leaders who can only resort to war and who will never try anything more than cosmetic to find peace. Palestinian leaders like Arafat never really tried to reign in terrorism, and Israeli leaders have never really given up the use of settlements to impose their own borders on the Palestinians.

In America we are conditioned to see the Israelis as flexible and the Palestinians and Arabs as rigid, but no Israeli politician showed the flexibility and wisdom of Anwar Sadat who challenged the Israelis with a real peace initiative that the right-wing extemist, Menachem Begin, felt forced to accept. People like Golda Meir, a heroine for Americans, was a rigid, disastrous leader who abandoned Ben-Gurion's relative flexibility for a diasporic mentality of paranoia and fear. aShe was folowed by even worse leaders: Shamir and Netanyahu.

Ben-Ami has no real solutions except that both sides have to make real concessions: the Palestinians have to control terroristic violence and accept Israel as a permanent neighbor. Their obsession with the past makes this difficult. The Israelis have to abandon settlements in the West Bank, but their new-found paranoia makes them less the New Jew than the Old Jew of Europe, suspicious and inward-looking, hostile and aggressive.

This book is difficult to read because of its detail and the unfamiliarity among Americans with the intracacies of Israeli wars, politics, and peace initiatives. But it contains all that a thoughtful and conscientious reader needs.

At this writing there is little likelihood that Israeli policy will prove to be wise or that the Palestinian surrender to Hamas will be beneficial. And the Bush Administration's capitulation to the worst elements in Israel, the rightists, and to the worst elements in America, the neo-conservative supporters of Israeli rightists and the Christian evangelicals does not promise any progress. Nor does, as Ben-Ami shows, the war in Iraq, which provides Israel with a temporary advantage and a long-term threat: the unification of the Arab world against Israel and the West. Sadat effectively changed the battle from one of Arabs vs. Jews to one of Palestinians vs. Israelis. Bush is changing it all back again to Muslims vs. Crusaders and their Zionist puppies.