by Shlomo Ben-Ami
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Product Description
Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami was a key figure in the Camp David negotiations and many other rounds of peace talks, public and secret, with Palestinian and Arab officials. Here he offers an unflinching account of the Arab-Israeli conflict, informed by his firsthand knowledge of the major characters and events.
Clear-eyed and unsparing, Ben-Ami traces the twists and turns of the Middle East conflict and gives us behind-the-scenes accounts of the meetings in Oslo, Madrid, and Camp David. The author paints particularly trenchant portraits of key figures from Ben-Gurion to Bill Clinton. He is highly critical of both Ariel Sharon and the late Yasser Arafat, seeing Arafat's rejection of Clinton's peace plan as a crime against the Palestinian people. The author is also critical of President Bush's Middle East policy, which he calls "a presumptuous grand strategy." Along the way, Ben-Ami highlights the many blunders on both sides, describing for instance how the great victory of the Six Day War launched many Israelis on a misbegotten "messianic" dream of controlling all the Biblical Jewish lands, which only served to make the Palestinian problem much worse. In contrast, it has only been when Israel has suffered setbacks that it has made moves towards peace. The best hope for the region, he concludes, is to create an international mandate in the Palestinian territories that would lead to the implementation of Clinton's two-state peace parameters.
Scars of War, Wounds of Peace is a major work of history--with by far the most fair and balanced critique of Israel ever to come from one of its key officials. This paperback edition features a new Epilogue by the author featuring an analysis of the most recent events in the Israeli-Arab situation, from the disappearance of Ariel Sharon from public life to the emergence of Hamas and Israel's recent war against Hizballah. It is an absolute must-read for everyone who wants to understand the dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Insightful, 2008-11-26
Great book that opens up your eyes to all sides of the conflict. Makes you see the good and bad from both angles.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A SUPERB ASSESSMENT, 2007-03-23
THIS IS AN EXTREMELY WELL-DONE BOOK, VERY WELL GROUNDED IN THE HISTORY OF ZIONISM AND ISRAEL. BEN-AMI COMES TO GRIPS WITH THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF BOTH THE JEWISH AND ARAB COMMUNITIES, THEIR MYOPIA AND FATAL FLAWS. IT IS VERY REALISTIC ON THE NATURE OF ISRAEL--ITS MESSIANISM, HYSTERIA, AND MILITARISM--AND THE VENAL CHARACTER OF ARAFAT AND THE P L O. THIS IS THE BEST BOOK ON THIS ISSUE I HAVE READ, AND I HAVE SEEN ISRAEL THOROUGHLY. IT IS VERY OBJECTIVE...AND VERY PESSIMISTIC.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Excerpt from the London Review of Books, By Tony Judt, 2006-09-22
Since its inception the state of Israel has fought a number of wars of choice (the only exception was the Yom Kippur War of 1973). To be sure, these have been presented to the world as wars of necessity or self-defence; but Israel's statesmen and generals have never been under any such illusion. Whether this approach has done Israel much good is debatable (for a clear-headed recent account that describes as a resounding failure his country's strategy of using wars of choice to `redraw' the map of its neighbourhood, see Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy by Shlomo Ben-Ami, a historian and former Israeli foreign minister).
6 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
 Ramblings By A Pseudo-Intellectual Naive Fool, 2006-07-20
Ehud Barak, who was willing to compromise, cater and appease the Arabs so much that he not only offered 96% of Judea-Samaria to Arafat at Camp David, but also chose to deliberately betray Israel's only true Arab Ally and Friend, the South Lebanese Army, knowingly chose Shlomo Ben-Ami to be his Foreign Minister in the talks with Arafat. He did so after David Levy balked at Barak's plans to return to the 1967 pre-Six Day War borders. Ben-Ami would be extremely willing, and like Barak willing to give up the Israeli store.
Enter Ben-Ami. Ben-Ami had always been on record advocating peace, to his credit, but the peace he always advocated reflected Barak's own thinking of one-sided concessions without nothing in return from an Arafat and his cronies who wanted nothing more than the destruction of Israel. The blinders fell off Ben-Ami at Camp David when after signing off to practically everything Arafat demanded and Barak offered, the Palestinians refused Barak's offer of joint sovereignty over Jerusalem as well as all of the territories both Barak and Ben-Ami were willing to turn over to them. They wanted COMPLETE CONTROL of the Old City. Even Ben-Ami, who hadn't heard this, was horrified, and ended up in a shouting match with one of Arafat's stooges. Arafat returned home, and promptly ordered the New Intifada to target Israeli women and children rather than seeking peace.
Despite this, or in spite of this, Ben-Ami still doesn't get it. He will blame his own leaders, Golda Meir and Menachem Begin for standing firm in the face of Arab terror and aggression. He openly admires James Baker, who with Madeleine Albright were the two most hostile Secretaries of State in American Diplomatic History (along with John Foster Dulles) when it came to Israel's security interests. He thinks peace is still possible, and that Arafat is an anomaly - to his credit he singles out the PLO head for the failure of peace negotiations.
Despite witnessing Palestinian duplicity and lies, Ben-Ami suggests that a primarily hostile world, America excluded, should impose a settlement on Israel.(It would be interesting to see how this appeaser sees who is behind the current carnage initiated by his negotiation partners today) But Ben-Ami remains clueless on what was behind the election of Hamas, or why the majority of Palestinians would be happy if Israel ceased to exist. An inept foreign minister, and a clueless ex-foreign minister in a peace camp that has been all but destroyed by missiles descending on Israeli cities, and the kidnapping and murder of Israeli soldiers.
Ben-Ami is praised by other reviewers, and the consensus is that he is a peace-loving intellectual. He might be peace-loving, but this is not a very-well written book, and he comes across naive and stupid, surprising for an someone who claims to be an Israeli realist. Don't bother.
Read Yossef Bodansky's "The High Cost of Peace" for a truer account of what happened at Camp David instead, and how inept and foolish the Israeli negotiators including this pseudo-intellectual "piece (of Israelis) now" minister Ben-Ami really were in the face of Arafat's true desire to destroy their country.
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
Complex Insights, 2006-05-20
I'd been wanting to find an informed, intelligent, even-handed history of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and I have.
This book is brilliant. Ben-Ami approaches the complexities and contradictions of the Middle East relationships with a fair, open mind and the insight that comes from both his educational background and his unique perspective as a peace negotiator. We find a history of a region that is, in a word, exasperating, and yet hope does not fall to despair. It is telling that while Ben-Ami shows great empathy for both the Jewish and Arab populace, he keeps a savvy eye on the sometimes self-serving motivations of their leaders.
Sadly, those who have already chosen sides and shut their minds will probably be able to cherrypick segments to bolster their own views, but they'll learn nothing. But for those readers who wish to attempt to grasp the area's passions and fears, on all sides, this is the book to read.
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