Volume 27, Number 10 · June 12, 1980
West Bank Blues
By Terence Smith
The Palestinian Covenant and Its Meaning
by Y. Harkabi
Vallentine, Mitchell (London) Biblio Distribution Centre (Totowa, New Jersey), 159 pp., $8.50 (paper)
The Question of Palestine
by Edward W. Said
Times Books, 265 pp., $12.50
My Home, My Prison
by Raymonda Hawa Tawil
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 320 pp., $12.95
Menachem Begin was in Washington recently, giving Jimmy Carter another lecture in his series on the semantics of the Middle East. The previous week Anwar el Sadat was in town, reinforcing, through Barbara Walters, his television image as the only statesman currently functioning in the world. The concern that brought the two leaders to Washington is the subject of these three books. It is the same concern that always has, is, and will be at the core of the Middle East dispute and will determine the future of the people who live there: Palestine and the Palestinians. The Sinai is essentially a sideshow; the stage on which, but not over which, wars have been fought. The Golan Heights has always had more topographical significance than political. Of all the Arab territories taken by Israel in 1967, the West Bank (Judea and Samaria to Mr. Begin) is at the heart of the Arab-Israeli dispute.
Review, 2598 words
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