There Could Have Been Peace

Description

Kimche, the veteran Middle East correspondent for the BBC and the London Evening Standard, was also privy to various private papers and secret minutes concerning Mideastern power politics during and after World War I, and again after the Six Day War. The result is an exciting and important book. It is also carelessly written and sometimes confusing. The most straightforward facts and interpretations begin with the 1915 War Councils and correspondence thereafter about the problem of dismantling the Turkish Empire, to which Palestine belonged. Enthralled by the exchanges' freedom from ""humbug and doubletalk,"" Kimche shows -- and this is his main theme -- how Arab-Zionist relations were always determined by the policies and politics of Western empires. While World War I lasted, the British toyed with the grand scheme of Kimche's hero, General Gilbert Clayton, whose Cairo bureau he compares with the CIA. Clayton hoped to make Palestine a strong binational ""buffer state"" through Zionist money and well-controlled Arab nationalism. Both Weizmann, the English Zionist, and the Hashemite Prince Hussein were eager to become British clients. But with military victory, the discovery of oil, and the end of Balfour's need for American Jewish loans, the Zionists became dispensable to Whitehall and the Arabs something of a nuisance. The details of Weizmann's previously known puppetry for the British make remarkable reading in themselves. Leaping over the Arab turmoil of the '30's and the Suez crisis of 1956, Kimche then gives a unique view of the origins of the June War. The internal Israeli ""malaise"" of 1966 made the war ""more a salvation than a crisis."" The book winds up with new currents of empire -- ""Greater Israel's"" prosperity and the effects of Soviet-American detente on the region. Each chapter requires a chapter length review: a frustrating, engrossing, mandatory work.