Peace in Tatters: Israel, Palestine and the Middle East

Peace in Tatters: Israel, Palestine and the Middle East, by Yoram Meital. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006. 253 pp. $22.95. Meital has written a detailed and nuanced political history of how the hope for Israeli-Palestinian embodied in the Oslo agreements (1993) deteriorated into the Al-Aksa Intafada (2000) and the recognition that the peace process had failed by 2004, replaced by a policy of unilateral disengagement. The book focuses mainly on the period 2000-2004, beginning with Prime Minister Ehud Barak's attempt to push forward a comprehensive all-at-once blueprint for a peace. The account moves through the failed Camp David summit (Arafat, Barak, Clinton) in fall 2000 and its aftermath (the alAqsa Intifada, renewed terrorism, resignation to having no partner with whom to pursue peace), the impact on the region of the 9/11/01 al-Qaeda attacks on American targers and subsequent U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Arab League proposal that was immediately quashed by an escalation of attacks on civilians, expanded U.S. and quartet involvement in pushing for steps toward (late 2002), culminating in U.S. President Bush'sroadmap unveiled in 2003, along with expanded track (unofficial) talks between groups of Palestinians and Israelis, the most prominent of which was the Geneva Initiative headed by Sari Nusseibeh and Ami Ayalon (2003). The book ends with consideration of two major unilateral steps by Israel, the building of the separation barrier (wall, fence) which was taking shape during 2004, and the plan for withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and a small area of the West Bank which also became policy during 2004. The year (and the book's analysis) ended with the death of Yasser Arafat, Palestine Authority Chairman and PLO leader, in November. The last entry in Meital's chronology of key events (Appendix 1) is the election of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) to replace Arafat in January 2005. The book's greatest virtue is its attempt to describe political developments from both Palestinian and points of view. He addresses each side's dominant narratives on many of the major political developments in the tenyear period, devoting parallel discussions to the views inside Israel and inside Palestine. While a word count would reveal that more attention is paid to the situation than to the Palestinian, the book is unique in that an scholar, trained in Middle East studies, tries to understand and explain the actions of both parties to the conflict. Moreover, he strives to overcome a problem of analysis identified right at the beginning of the book: Israeli and Palestinian leaders both attributed great weight to domestic political constraints yet found it very difficult to appreciate the constraints on the other side (p. …