Non­fic­tion

Nego­ti­at­ing Arab-Israeli Peace: Pat­terns, Prob­lems, and Pos­si­bil­i­ties, 2nd Edition

Lau­ra Zit­train Eisen­berg and Neil Caplan
  • Review
By – August 30, 2011
This expand­ed edi­tion of the his­to­ry of the Arab-Israeli peace nego­ti­a­tions is updat­ed to ear­ly 2009. In addi­tion to updat­ing the book and reor­ga­niz­ing the chap­ters to focus sep­a­rate­ly on efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli and Israeli– Pales­tin­ian con­flicts, the major dif­fer­ence is the post­ing of over 100 pri­ma­ry source doc­u­ments and links to online sources in a spe­cial web­site (http://​naip​-doc​u​ments​.blogspot​.com). The book is divid­ed into three parts (The Arab– Israeli peace process: begin­nings; The Arab– Israeli peace process: Madrid and after, and The Israeli-Pales­tin­ian peace process: Oslo 1993 and beyond) fol­lowed by a con­clu­sion and an epi­logue. It is struc­tured sim­i­lar­ly to the first edi­tion, with each suc­cess­ful or failed nego­ti­a­tion exam­ined as fol­low­ing: pre­vi­ous nego­ti­at­ing expe­ri­ence; pur­pose and motives; tim­ing; sta­tus of the nego­tia­tors; third par­ty con­sid­er­a­tions; pro­posed terms of agree­ment; psy­cho­log­i­cal fac­tors; and the post-treaty era. The book is clear­ly and objec­tive­ly writ­ten, enlivened with many car­toons of Arab, Israeli, and West­ern ori­gins.

The strength of this book is its clear, sys­tem­at­ic, and well-anno­tat­ed analy­sis, point­ing out which process­es and frame­works were help­ful and which harm­ful, cou­pled with the easy access to valu­able pri­ma­ry sources. Bib­li­og­ra­phy, exten­sive time­line, index, maps, notes.
Rachel Simon, a librar­i­an at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, does research on Jews in the mod­ern Mid­dle East and North Africa, with spe­cial ref­er­ence to Libya, Ottoman Empire, women, and education.

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