Volume 33, Number 13 · August 14, 1986
Reign of Terror
By Shaul Bakhash
Terrorism: How the West Can Win
edited by Benjamin Netanyahu
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 254 pp., $18.95
Considered as a book, Terrorism: How the West Can Win is something of a mishmash. Thirty-eight brief essays (some only two or three pages long) by thirty-eight different contributors do not provide the ideal setting for a sustained argument on the problem of terrorism and ways of combating it. Nor do the individual essays, which vary greatly in quality, hang together very well. There is a makeshift character to the book, possibly owing to its origins. The book is based on a conference on terrorism held in 1984 at Washington's Jonathan Institute (named after Jonathan Netanyahu, the editor's brother and hero of the dramatic 1976 Israeli rescue mission at Entebbe). Essays on recent terrorist movements in Germany, Japan, and the United States, and in nineteenth-century Russia, stick out incongruously in a book that concentrates primarily on terrorism emanating from the Middle East. Some of the contributors do not always sustain the perspective on terrorism diligently developed by the editor, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Review, 2780 words
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