Volume 51, Number 12 · July 15, 2004
War Without End
By Amos Elon
How Israel Lost: The Four Questions
by Richard Ben Cramer
Simon and Schuster, 307 pp., $24.00
Waging Peace: Israel and the Arabs, 1948–2003
by Itamar Rabinovich
Princeton University Press, 326 pp., $16.95 (paper)
A sensible solution for the Israel– Palestine conflict has been known for years: Israeli withdrawal from enough of the territory occupied in 1967 to allow a workable, contiguous Palestinian state to be established. Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat won't hear of it. Peace initiatives on this basis such as the recent 'Geneva Accord' between liberal Israeli and Palestinian peace activists have been greeted by Sharon as acts of 'treason' and by Arafat with icy silence. Sharon, for whom the very idea of Palestinian independence on the western side of the Jordan River has been anathema for years, is now ready to allow a Palestinian state to be established only in Gaza and a few small, disjointed enclaves on the West Bank surrounded by Israeli settlements and military installations. Sharon has been damaged politically by the reluctance of his own party to approve a planned 'disengagement' from Gaza but he has been heartened by strong support from the United States—George Bush called him a man of peace. In a letter to Bush this May, Sharon promised only to 'limit,' not stop, the growth of settlements on the West Bank. Before he made any concessions, he said, all terror would have to stop.
Review, 4853 words
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