February 15, 2014
Can peace ever come to the Middle East? Not with the implacable parties involved, one wing of which informs this unyielding polemic. Jerusalem Post senior contributing editor Glick, who is based in Jerusalem, announces early on that the Palestinian demand that Jewish settlers leave Israeli-occupied territories is inherently "anti-Semitic." Why? Apparently because any opposition to any act by any Israeli constitutes anti-Semitism. Moreover, the two-state solution that the United States has long explored and more recently endorsed, a solution now being brokered by Secretary of State John Kerry, "requires Israel, America's closest Middle East ally, to transform itself from a powerful nation, capable of defending itself from infiltration and invasion, into a strategic basket case that survives at the pleasure of its enemies." Glick's arguments about the illegitimacy of the Palestinian government and the desire of all right-thinking Palestinians to live in Israeli-style (if not Israeli) democracy have a sometimes-familiar ring, reminiscent of the belief of U.S. hawks in Vietnam that inside every Vietnamese was an American screaming to get out. Whatever the case, it doesn't take the author long to play the Hitler card ("The main factor that motivated the Arabs to support the Nazis was not British actions in the Mandate. It was Jew hatred"), nor to insist that the American government has been mesmerized by the Palestinian cobra into "fundamental misunderstandings of the Palestinian reality," leading to the apparently misbegotten view that the Palestinians might just deserve national self-determination. But give them the vote, she warns, and they'll do just what Arabs do: choose Islamist candidates and their "totalitarian ideology." Even if Glick's were indisputably the right course of action, the constant aggressiveness is off-putting. The choir won't mind the preaching, but the arguments here aren't likely to sway many other readers.
COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.