Customer Reviews

Refugees into Citizens: Palestinians and the End of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Council of Foreign Relations)

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First a disclaimer -- Professor Arzt was a professor of mine so anything I say about this book should be read in that context.

She looks at the history of the refugee crisis, from the begining of the Irsaeli Arab wars to the post-Oslo period. I found the histroical sections straigth forward and informative. While pro-Israeli, she does not sugar coat the past.

Professor Arzt called for an end to the Palestinian crisis by the radical step of making Palestinians citizens of their own state (on the West Bank and Gaza), but also citizens of the states where they reside. She would allow a limited number of older Palestinians to return to Israel, but also move many of the Palestinian refugees out of Lebanon. All Palestinians would be given a passport of the Palestinian state. Those who live in other states (Israel, other Arab states or elsewhere) would also be make a citizen of that state. Emminently reasonable, which is why her proposal was attacked by both sides for strongly. Unfortunately, I fear the solution is no longer viable following 9/11, Iraq, the Intifada and the Israeli-Hezbullah war.

Another book about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict written in the grand American tradition of equivocation. Perhaps this would be a good book for someone so brainwashed by American pro-Israeli media that he or she could not stomache any large portion of the truth. Worse still, it tries to present itself as an even-handed account. But it leaves the larger issues entirely untouched, in order to preserve a false symmetry of guilt between the two sides. For every politically sensitive and contentious issue (such as the cause of the 1948 exodux), the author's response is something along the lines of-- well, people disagree about this issue too much to resolve it here. She forgets that disagreement does not imply a lack of one singular truth, nor does contention and political sensitivity absolve a researcher of her responsibility to try to discern that truth. But I suppose I can expect no more from a tradition of political writing that protrays as equivalent two sides of greatly different power and culpability, at best out of an asthetic desire for symmetry, and at worse, out of a a desire to use protestations of objectivity to obfuscate controversial humanitarian outrages.