Review by Choice Review
The author's thesis is that since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war Arab states have pursued increasingly the politics of raison d'etat and have abandoned the politics of raison de la nation, the latter characterized by Pan-Arab discourse. The Arab states chose the Arab summit meeting as the main mechanism to facilitate the greater legitimatization of the individual Arab state; this in turn allowed for "normalization" of relations with Israel. Major Arab summit meetings in 1968, 1974, 1976, 1981, 1982, and 1987 gave priority to inter-Arab balance and reduced the prospects of "total" war with Israel. Other than Pan-Arabism, the major supra-Arab "cause" and nonstate actors were the Palestinians and the PLO. Sela demonstrates conclusively, however, that the Arab states, for different reasons and purposes, compelled the PLO to negotiate seriously with Israel after the 1991 Gulf war and at a time when it was at its weakest. This development emphasizes dramatically that the Arab states no longer considered the "Palestinian question" an "Arab cause." In effect, the "classic" Arab-Israeli conflict is over; the Arab state rules supreme. The author concludes that even the suprastate ideologies of the Islamist movements in the Middle East will not be able to challenge the supremacy of the Arab state. The saliency of the author's arguments is weakened by the absence of roles that Israel, the US, oil, and the Cold war played in the evolution of the Arab state system. A different perspective is found in Samih Farsoun and Christiana Zacharia's Palestine and the Palestinians (CH, Mar'98). Recommended only for major university libraries. R. W. Olson University of Kentucky
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
