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The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace | 
 enlarge | Author: Aaron David Miller
Publisher: Bantam
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 39773
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.5
ISBN: 0553804901
Dewey Decimal Number: 956.05
EAN: 9780553804904
ASIN: 0553804901
Publication Date: March 25, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
For nearly twenty years, Aaron David Miller has played a central role in U.S. efforts to broker Arab-Israeli peace. His position as an advisor to presidents, secretaries of state, and national security advisors has given him a unique perspective on a problem that American leaders have wrestled with for more than half a century. Why has the world’s greatest superpower failed to broker, or impose, a solution in the Middle East? If a solution is possible, what would it take? And why after so many years of struggle and failure, with the entire region even more unsettled than ever, should Americans even care? Is Israel/Palestine really the “much too promised land”?
As a historian, analyst, and negotiator, perhaps no one is more qualified to answer these questions than Aaron David Miller. Without partisanship or finger-pointing, Miller lucidly and honestly records what went right, what went wrong, and how we got where we are today. Here is an insider’s view of the peace process from a place at the negotiating table, filled with unforgettable stories and colorful behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Here, too, are new interviews with all the key players, including Presidents Carter, Ford, Bush forty-one, all nine U.S. secretaries of state, as well Arab and Israeli leaders, who disclose the inner thoughts and strategies that motivated them. The result is a book that shatters all preconceived notions to tackle the complicated issues of culture, religion, domestic politics, and national security that have defined—and often derailed—a half century of diplomacy.
Honest, critical, and certain to be controversial, this insightful first-person account offers a brilliant new analysis of the problem of Arab-Israeli peace and how, against all odds, it still might be solved.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 Essential reading for anyone interested in Arab-Israeli issues July 19, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Aaron Miller brings a truly unique insight into one of the world's most intractable yet fascinating conflicts: the search for Arab-Israeli peace. Not only does he provide a first-hand account of U.S. involvement in the region going back 20 years, he does so in an engaging, objective and often entertaining way. The book is part history lesson, part autobiography and part novel, written in such a way as to make it both accessible to newcomers and essential reading for scholars, diplomats and the myriad people engaged in the search for peace.
First-person account of peace-making July 16, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Part memoir, part history, part journalism, this book by a veteran Arab-Israeli peace negotiator should appeal to Mideast junkies who still believe in the "peace process."
A disclaimer: I covered many of these same events as State Dept. correspondent for Reuters from 1989-94. I was present at some of the events Miller describes; I traveled with Secretaries Baker and Christopher. I even interviewed Miller himself on background a number of times. (He seemed to enjoy chatting to reporters on background but he rarely revealed anything interesting or useful). For more about me and my latest book The Nazi Hunter: A Novelgo to www.alanelsner.com.
This book is an uncertain mix of different genres. The personal memoir I found the most interesting. I wish there were more of these vignettes. I'm interested in the various characters Miller dealt with -- Rabin, Peres, Arafat, King Hussein, Presidents Mubarak and Assad. I'm interested in what went on behind the closed doors because I already know what emerged on the public record (I covered a lot of it). Unfortunately, Miller remains overly coy and discreet. He was never one to give much away and he apparently hasn't changed.
The history segment, in which Miller analyzes the successful Middle East negotiations conducted by Kissinger and President Carter, one can basically read about elsewhere.
The journalism -- he interviewed many of the key players, is somewhat interesting. But most of these actors have a deep interest in presenting events to their best advantage and Miller doesn't really challenge them.
His chapter of the power of the American-Jewish lobby and the fundamentalist Christian-Zionist lobby contained little new.
I picked up a couple of points I disagreed with: Miller claims the Madrid Peace Conference came as a big shock to the press. Not so. The only surprise was the venue. We'd all assumed the conference would be in Lausanne and had already booked hotel rooms.
Miller's account of Baker's trip to see the Kurdish refugees created after the first Gulf War conveniently leaves out the fact that these million plus refugees had fled their homes after the United States allowed Saddam Hussein to crush their revolt -- which they launched at the urging of President Bush. Miller notes that Baker, who had traveled thousands of miles by plane, helicopter and jeep, to see these refugees, stayed less than 10 minutes once he arrived.
The true hero of this book for Miller is Jim Baker who I agree was a largely successful Secretary of State who used the favorable circumstances he was presented with to achieve some modest progress on the Middle East. (He and Bush can be criticized for other failures -- their lack of attention to the looming war in Yugoslavia and the failure to anticipate Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.)
Miller gives relatively low marks to Clinton who got too bogged down in the little details of the negotiations, leaned too far toward Israel and committed himself to an ill-prepared summit at Camp David that was always destined to fail.
Miller loves Rabin, has little time for Netanyahu and is scathing about Barak. He is harsh, but not sufficiently so, about Arafat.
After all the failures and frustrations, Miller is still a true believer. He still believes in the possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinians and lays out some conditions for that to happen. There may have been missed opportunities in the 1990s (although I personally doubt that either Assad or Arafat were ever ready to make peace with Israel) but it seems quixotic to hope for much today with Hamas ruling Gaza, the Iranian-backed Hizbollah controlling Lebanon and U.S. prestige so far eroded after eight years of Bush.
This book is recommended for those who already know a lot about the Middle East but would like to know a little more about what it was like to be in the middle of those negotiations.
But it falls a touch short in my view of what it could have been.
All You Need is Tough Love? July 13, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Let me start with the praise: "The Much Too Promised Land" is the best book I know about the Arab-Israeli peace process of the 1990s. As much as any book I read does, it offers a detailed account without drowning in details. As an American negotiator, Aaron Miller might have bogged down in the day to day of the negotiations (like Dennis Ross in The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace). Instead this well written book manages to convey something of the bigger picture, of the underlying causes of successful or unsuccessful peace negotiations.
The book's main thesis is that America is successful in brokering negotiations when it pressures both Israelis and Arabs - but especially the Israelis. The key concept is "tough love". Miller's contrasts the successful episodes of US intervention in the Israeli Arab process: Kissinger's negotiating disengagement between Israel and Syria and Egypt after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Carter's involvement in the Egyptian Israeli Peace, and George H. W. Bush's secretary of State, James Baker, gathering Israelis, Palestinians, and Arabs to the Madrid convention after the first Gulf War - with the failure of the Clinton administration in the Oslo process. The former, according to Miller, succeeded because America pressured both sides; the latter failed because America was unwilling to press them.
None of Miller's apparent successes offer genuine evidence for his thesis. It's hard to see why the 1973 redeployments are more significant than the ones after the 1948, 1956 or 2006 Israeli Arab Wars. If they have lasted longer, surely it is because of the Arabs and Israelis' interests, not Kissinger's genius. The Madrid convention in 1991 was a symbolic achievement, but served few practical goals. It's hard to avoid the impression that it was an exercise in futility and a waste of everyone's time and money.
Only the Egyptian Israeli accords were a genuine success, and even there it's unclear to what extent they were America's success. Sadat, definitely the greatest Arab leader of the 20th century and probably the greatest Middle Eastern leader since Ben Gurion, had made the breakthrough of going to Jerusalem without US prodding. I guess he would have found the way to make peace without America as well. Counterfactuals are of course highly speculative, whoever might have sponsored the peace, Carter was the one who had done it in practice, and he does deserve the credit. But he had labored under auspicious circumstances.
The biggest and best part of the book is dedicated to the failures of the Israeli Palestinian Oslo process during the Clinton years. I broadly agree with Miller's points that the Oslo accords were faulty designed - their step-by-step offered endless opportunities for opponents on both sides to wreck the process. But could America have salvaged the process by laying more pressure? I doubt it. Palestinians undermined the peace by terror attacks which the PLO did little or nothing to stop; Israel undermined it by expanding the Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. America had pressured the Palestinians plenty to deliver on security, to no avail. And no American administration has ever managed to pressure Israel effectively on the Settlements.
I agree with Miller that America bears some of the blame for the breakdown of the Peace process during the Barak years. Ehud Barak, newly elected as Israel's prime minister, and convinced that he knew everything there was to know about Israel, the Arabs, the Peace, and everything else, hubristically tried to end the one hundred years old Arab Israeli conflict in 2 years. That was probably impossible under any circumstances, and but was not helped by Barak's style of unilateral action. Cooler minds in America should have known better, and refused to play along.
But it's hard to fault the Americans for encouraging an enthusiastic Israeli leader willing to go further towards peace than any past Israeli primer. If an Israeli PM was willing to take giants risks for peace, it would have been very difficult for an American administration to stop and say "not so fast". The primary responsibility for the faulty process during the Barak years lies at Barak's door.
After a brief chapter condemning the inactivity of George W. Bush's administration while the Palestinian Israeli scene continued to deteriorate (but could they realistically have made much of a difference?), Miller calls for a renewed American involvement in the peace process, based on the principle of tough love.
But perhaps the lesson we should learn from the travesty of the 1990s Peace process is that genuine, long term peace between Israelis and Arabs in not yet in the offering. Following the violent Al Aqsa Intifada, neither Israelis nor Arabs seem particularly inclined towards great "painful" concessions.
Perhaps a new American administration should focus not on making peace, but on preventing war. Four Israeli premiers failed to make a peace with Syria in the 1990s, but a low violence cold war has lasted for thirty five years. Why not take the Israeli-Syrian status quo as the model for Arab/Israeli solutions. Maybe America's slogan should be not "tough love" but "think small".
 Reads like a biography, absent a clear thesis and not well organized July 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The book is about peace efforts between Israel and Palestinians/Arabs, as brokered by the United States. Aaron David Miller begins the book by briefly describing his life and career. He describes various personalities that influenced him as well as the people he worked for and with. This part of the book spans somewhere between 50 and 100 pages and is actually pretty boring since it doesn't touch on scholarship at all.
He then goes on to describe the Jewish pro-Israel lobby, such as AIPAC. He provides his own opinion and analysis on the extent of influence of the lobby on our foreign policy. His analysis clearly lacks any sort of scholarship or even hard evidence and is therefore rendered useless and unnecessary in the book.
The middle (2nd) part of the book contains descriptions and history of 3 major players in Israeli-Arab peace efforts: Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and James Baker. He focuses on these 3 personalities because they were the ones who went against Israel, relative to other American leaders and negotiators and forced Israel to make concessions. This part of the book is interesting as it provides insight into these 3 powerful leaders and their reasoning. Also this section is filled with more historical content pertaining to negotiation efforts, strategies and basic analysis. However, it's worth keeping in mind that analysis is very subjective and not scholarly. However, for relatively casual observers of the peace process, it's plenty of information and is quite intriguing.
Finally, the last (3rd) part of the book is about Clinton's and G. W. Bush's years as it pertains to peace efforts between Israel and Palestinians. Again, this part of the book makes more references to negotiations, strategies, tactics, shortcomings and results.
While the book lacks a clear thesis, broad analysis, and academic scholarship, it does provide some basic information about peace efforts brokered by the US. The book is also somewhat disorganized as it sporadically jumps from topic to topic without clearly and thoroughly addressing the issues. If there is some thesis, it is that if America wants to truly contribute to peace efforts between Israel and Palestinians/Arabs, it cannot take its eye off the ball and must be prepared to address it thoroughly, not when there is a crisis, like a terrorist attack. The author clearly believes that it's in America's best interest to address peace efforts, because it enhances America's image in the Middle East which would in his view decrease terrorism and recruiting of new terrorists by the like of Al Queda. That also happens to be his central criticism of America's efforts in the peace process.
Overall, the book is easy to read and understand, but is somewhat disorganized within chapters and lacks scholarly analysis, and a strong thesis. Also, keep in mind that peace efforts are described from a very subjective and individual point of view, not from an academic perspective.
A much too personal book June 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I bought the audio cd version of this book, which I heard on a 500 mile drive. The book is a combination of history and insight, with the author's perspective. It was much more personal than detached. He is positive about both Democratic and Republican President for whom he has worked, but not afraid to discuss their shortcomings. He was there, on the front lines, as a negotiator.
I enjoyed the books, and would recommend it, but would have bought an abridged edition had it been available.
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