Cursed Victory

Starred review from February 23, 2015
Bregman (Elusive Peace), a political scientist and IDF veteran, is now one of Israel’s most prominent refuseniks, well-known for his principled opposition to the occupation of Palestine. Here, he outlines the history of both military and diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East since 1948, arguing that Israeli obstinacy and caprice has repeatedly stymied the peace process. Bregman gives the Israelis the lion’s share of blame: the “wholesale shifting of people for colonial strategic ends was a prominent feature of the era that followed the 1967 war and the Israelis made no secret of their annoyance that their newly captured lands came complete with people already living there.” Bregman accuses the Israeli leadership of seeking armed conflict with the Palestinians, in which the Israelis enjoy overwhelming tactical superiority, rather than engaging in negotiations or collaborative efforts, where they feel off-balance. Describing the second intifada, he says the Israeli army’s heavy-handedness managed to gradually “transform the Palestinian uprising into an armed insurgency.” As the occupation enters its fifth decade, he also criticizes the Palestinians for being “too divided” and calls on the international community to put greater pressure on Israel. Bregman’s deep familiarity with the material and his stylistic clarity will appeal to readers seeking an overview of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Maps & illus.

April 15, 2015

Bregman, an Israeli native who served in the country's military during the 1982 Lebanon war, abandoned his homeland when he refused to serve as a reservist during the first intifada. Now a journalist and academic at the University of London's King College, Bregman (A History of Israel; Israel's Wars) has written several books about Israel and its neighbors. His latest is a scathing history of Israel and its occupied territories following the 1967 Six-Day war. The book is critical of Israel at nearly every juncture and skims over Palestinian offenses and agency from 1967-2007. Bregman had access to previously secret documents including former prime minister Ehud Barak's abortive negotiations with Syria over the Golan. His argument focuses on Israel's missteps and lost opportunities to resolve the long-standing conflict. Previously published in the UK in 2014, this American edition--which benefits from Bregman's remarkable access to high-level Israeli and American sources that enable him to quote from memos, letters, and telephone conversations--is likely to be a source of much debate and controversy. VERDICT Well-written and rich in details and first-hand testimony, this work will be an important addition to collections focusing on contemporary foreign affairs, the intelligence communities, and the Israeli Palestinian conflict.--Herbert E. Shapiro, Lifelong Learning Soc., Florida Atlantic Univ., Boca Raton

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2015
As the Israeli occupation digs in, an Israeli-English journalist and academic unforgivingly delineates its long, gruesome history.Since the book's first appearance in the U.K. last summer, war between the Palestinians and Israelis has again broken out in a brutal new chapter of this ongoing, inexorable conflict, as noted by Bregman (Department of War Studies/King's Coll. London; Warfare in the Middle East Since 1945, 2008, etc.), who served in the Israeli Army during its war in Lebanon in 1982. Israel's manipulative economic system and policies in the Israeli-occupied territories since the victory of the Six-Day War of 1967 gained vast tracts of land from Egypt, Jordan and Syria have allowed Israel, over four decades, to become a brutal occupier. Bregman claims that the time for making a deal with the Palestinians was ripe during the first decade of that occupation, when Moshe Dayan was still defense minister and his "invisible occupation" was fairly benign and tolerant-before the right-wing Likud Party rendered the occupation "irreversible." However, in short order, Palestinian land was seized by specious legal means, and messianic settlers were allowed to move into the biblical Hebron (West Bank) in 1968, which Dayan himself recognized later as a catastrophic precedent. Many of the finer points of the demarcations of territory are in dispute, but what remains is the perceived need by Israel to isolate these regions-e.g., after the barriers were erected between the Golan and the rest of Syria in 1975, the residents climbed to "Hills of Shouts" with megaphones to exchange news between families-severely control their economies, restrict movement and maintain surveillance on their citizens, leading to one angry and desperate outbreak after another by the oppressed. After numerous failed peace negotiations and two intifadas, Bregman asserts pessimistically that it may take "many generations before a true reconciliation takes hold." A plainspoken but urgent account that is deeply critical of Israel's policies.