Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Michael Oren's book is both scholarly and very entertaining. That's usually a difficult combination to achieve, but one made easier for him by the dearth of previous books comprehensively covering U.S. relations with the Middle East since 1776. So there are plenty of "wow's", "really's" and "heh, I never imagined that's" in this book. They make it a lot of fun. But, though they are entertaining, this is also a very serious book. The "gee-whiz" aspect merely reveals how little most of us knew about an American engagement with the Middle East which began well before the epoch when American oil drillers struck it rich in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s. Those previous 150 years of history are well worth knowing. And they inform today, to include the fact that the current evangelical Christian romance with Israel dates not from the last 20 years or so, but has been a waxing and waning phenomenon for 150 years depending on the strength of religious revivalism in America. That insight alone, which takes up a considerable part of the book, makes it well worth reading. The last fifth of the book is disappointing, but Mr. Oren is an honest man and in his preface practically tells you that it will be and that he really did not want to write it: it is the history of the Middle East from about 1950 on. He doesn't feel he has adequate (declassified government document) sources. It has a sort of breathless, once-over- lightly perfunctory approach suggesting he just wanted to get through it as quickly as possible. It also unhappily gives vent to two failures of objectivity on his part as an Israeli author who otherwise plays the history of Israeli/Arab conflicts remarkably straight: 1) his unqualified claim that the Israeli air attack on the U.S. naval ship "Liberty" during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war was an accident (this remains controversial and there is considerable evidence to the contrary); and 2) his breezy and illogical attempt to dismiss the espionage activities perpetrated against the United States by the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. These are truly irritating lapses, but in the larger scale of things they are minor flaws which leave the author's objectivity still pretty much intact. Mr. Oren, as he announced in an NPR interview recently, is a proud Israeli special forces reservist of 30 years' standing. That makes all the more extraordinary his generally even-handed account of Arab/Israeli history, including, for example, how certain key Jewish leaders in the early 20th century advocated a bi-national Arab/Jewish state rather than a Zionist one because they foresaw the conflict the latter would bring. So, this is about as honest and non-polemical a book as one can expect about a very emotional subject these days; it is fascinating in the historical perspective it provides on U.S. engagement with and major influence on the development of the modern Middle East; and, except for the post-1948 hundred or so pages, it is a very entertaining read. I highly recommend it.