MIDDLE EAST BOOKS REVIEW

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The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the U.S.-Israel Relationship

By David Tal, Cambridge University Press, 2022, paperback, 416 pp. MEB $29.99

Reviewed by Walter L. Hixson

Diplomatic and military historian David Tal has produced a comprehensive international history of the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States. Organized chronologically by presidential ad ministrations, the book is well researched in primary sources derived from American, British and Israeli archives.

Tal makes a convincing argument that idealistic and cultural perceptions rather than geostrategic realism established and solidified the special relationship between Israel and the U.S. “Religion, values and history,” he argues, “set the course of the relations as well as their development and structure.” Emphasizing continuity and a “longue durée approach,” Tal effectively demonstrates “the sources, the development and the prevalence of the constants” that have long animated the special relationship.

Broadly based cultural ties, including empathy in the aftermath of the Nazi genocide, Christian Zionist fundamentalism and perceptions of Israel as a besieged David versus the Arab Goliath (though the reverse has been more nearly true) propelled the special relationship, which evolved into a strategic alliance. Americans, as Tal demonstrates throughout the book, “identified with the Jewish experience, and later Israel, making it part of their own story and sense of identity.”

The emphasis on cultural ties, though not the full story of the Israeli-American relationship by any means, is important and Tal is not wrong to focus on it. The late cultural historian Amy Kaplan wrote a tour de force book on the subject (Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance, 2018), which remains the best study on the role of culture within the special relationship.

Tal makes some effort to be evenhanded, but sometimes subtly and other times more directly, the book reflects a proIsraeli bias. As he recounts events, Tal pays scant attention to Arab and Palestinian perspectives on the bitter history of the socalled Middle East “conflict.”

In Tal’s discussion of the June 1967 war, to cite one example, he argues that “Israel had no choice but to act.” Israel in fact had a choice and, as in the previous war in 1956, it chose to launch an all-out attack. Israel’s Arab neighbors were hostile to the Zionist state, to be sure, but none were on the brink of attacking it in 1967.

Tal, like most scholars on this subject, downplays the significance of the Israel lobby. He fails to grasp the deep roots of the lobby and ignores the highly influential lobby newsletter, the Near East Report, which for decades advised every member of Congress on the position they should adopt on Middle East affairs. Tal ignores my work on the Israel lobby, which leaves little doubt that it has long been deeply ensconced and highly effectual, especially with Congress. Tal also ignores Kenneth Kolander’s tightly focused study of the lobby’s impact in Congress and pays scant attention to the classic work by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who were egregiously attacked for having the temerity to take up the subject. The decades-long work of the Washington Report in this area, as well as Stealth PACs: Lobbying Congress for Control of U.S. Middle East Policy, first published by the American Educational Trust in 1990, are also overlooked.

Tal argues that members of Congress are pro-Israel with or without the lobby, which is true to some degree. Yet, on crucial issues such as the mythical “peace process,” the illegal occupation, proliferating Jewish-only settlements and endless U.S. military assistance, the lobby has played a profoundly influential role. The Israel lobby has advocated for every dollar of the $146 billion and counting—far more than any other nation has received since World War II—that has enabled a small nation of some nine million people to become the colossus of the Middle East.

Tal also misses an opportunity to solidify his argument on the centrality of culture by not analyzing the relationship in the context of settler colonialism. Israel and the United States were both settler states that forged their national identities through the violent and persistent displacement of indigenous people. Tal could have explored the cultural parallels between the long and tumultuous history of race relations in the United States and Israel’s status as an apartheid state, as des ignated by numerous human rights groups.

Tal’s exhaustive study contributes to understanding the evolution and persistence of American pro-Israeli sentiment, but cul-

Contributing editor Walter L. Hixson is the author of Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor.

tural ties are only part of the story. Cultural affinity was bolstered over time by strategic calculations and mutual militarization, all of it policed on the American front by the powerful and willingly punitive Israel lobby. This powerful elixir forged what is indeed a very special, and from a human rights perspective, a deeply problematic relationship.

Glory to God in the Lowest: Journeys to an Unholy Land

By Donald E. Wagner, Interlink, 2022, paperback, 288 pp. MEB $20

Reviewed by Rev. Alex Awad

Glory to God in the Lowest is the true story of a white Protestant pastor raised in a conservative Christian family who courageously jumped over multiple social and political hurdles to become a leader in the struggle for freedom and justice for Black Americans and Palestinians.

The reader travels along with Donald E. Wagner as he encounters incredible and influential people. Take, for example, Wagner’s walk at a demonstration in Washington, DC with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in March 1967; or his meeting with King Hussein in Amman, Jordan. On another occasion, he meets with top Lebanese leader Amine Gemayel, followed by a meeting with his brother, Bashir Gemayel.

Keep following, and Wagner will take you where most people never consider visiting. One such visit is to a hospital serving Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. There, Wagner and his team witness the arrival of body bags with the corpses of teenage girls who were on their annual school trip when their tour bus was bombed by Israeli warplanes. Wagner also takes the reader on a walking tour of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp near Beirut. This heart-wrenching encounter takes place a day after the Phalangist militias, in collaboration with the Israeli army, massacred over 3,000 Palestinian men, women and children in September 1982. No reader can go through the book without realizing the depth of the Palestinian tragedy, the breadth of Israeli and Phalangist cruelty and the magnitude of U.S. hypocrisy.

Glory to God in the Lowest is a must-read for students, teachers, activists and anyone who yearns to see peace and justice established in Israel/Palestine. Wagner’s summary of Christian Zionism is a helpful introduction for those who might be aware of the political situation but lack understanding of the menace of Christian Zionism. The author concludes that Islam, Judaism and Christianity are not the cause of the struggles, but that quite often shrewd politicians use religious affiliations to achieve political goals. The book also includes positive examples of Muslims, Jews and Christians working together to defuse tensions.

Like all books covering the history of the Middle East, Wagner’s writing will likely leave the reader somewhat deflated as to the possibility of peace in the region. After following the sacrifices of the author and thousands of activists and peacemakers around the world, one cannot help but see that the situation in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere is no better today than it was decades ago, when the author first discovered and began attempting to combat injustices.

Yet, the reader can also attain inspiration from Wagner’s persistence. He is not just a commentator on the political events and theological trends of the Near East; rather, he is a committed advocate who challenges injustice whenever he meets it. Day in and day out he organized, planned, strategized, studied and met key leaders all for the sake of seeing justice restored.

Rev. Alex Awad is a retired United Methodist missionary. During more than 25 years in Palestine, he served as pastor of East Jerusalem Baptist Church, dean of students at Bethlehem Bible College and director of the Shepherd Society. He is a member of the Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace.

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This is not a stuffy book on Middle East politics, nor is it a dry book on theology or eschatology. The book is loaded with anecdotes that will cause the reader to cry as they read one page—and then laugh as they read the next.

Glory to God in the Lowest does not attempt to provide a roadmap for solving the complexities of the political disputes of the region. However, it does provide the facts and the information that political leaders, negotiators and peacemakers need to know to be able to guide the region out of its darkness.

Among the Almond Trees: A Palestinian Memoir

By Hussein Barghouthi, translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, Seagull Books, 2022, hardcover, 154 pp. MEB $21

Reviewed by Rania Said

After 30 years in “voluntary exile,” the Palestinian poet Hussein Barghouthi returns to his homeland with his wife Petra and 4-year old son Āthar. This return was dictated by the author’s desire to reconnect with his beginnings, a desire made even more pressing by his deteriorating health. Sensing that the end is near after being diagnosed with lymphoma, Barghouthi relocates his family to a cottage surrounded by lush vegetation and wild animals, but also, and to the author’s deep chagrin, illegal Israeli settlements.

Writing about the ravages of cancer at the time of the Second Intifada, the poet is made keenly aware of his “superfluousness.” In the hospital in Ramallah, he realizes that he is not “a healthy person, nor a wounded youth, nor a martyr,” that in reality, he is simply “an ordinary sick person.” This realization leads him to rebel against this ordinariness by re-imagining life as a cycle of reincarnation, and family history as a string of fairy tales.

In this re-enchanted world, his 4-year old son morphs into a Tiresian figure whose fantastical language imbues the author with the desire to be reincarnated as “a childprophet” in order to see the world anew. Fragments of family history coalesce into a tale of flying vipers, extinct animals, blessed orchards and one magical mountain in the Ramallah countryside. These flights of the imagination, as well as the lush intertextual references to Arabic, Spanish, Turkish and English poetry, make this memoir a veritable literary delight.

By unearthing the fairytales that his mother told him in his youth and adding his own mythologization of the countryside, Barghouthi challenges the settler colonial imaginary of Palestine. He asks “What does a settler from Russia or Estonia, who arrived perhaps no longer than a year ago, see when he opens his window and gazes at these mountains where I am now standing?” He then replies, “He will certainty not see the snake that flies and trills, hear its cry…He will not touch history even if he were a soothsayer; not my history anyway, even if he were a god.” The reinscription of the magical into history constitutes a strong affective claim on the land; a claim that the author believes to be more powerful than that of the divine, perhaps because it is in harmony with the fauna and the flora of Palestine.

Among the Almond Trees differs from the more political illness narratives that have marked the genre in Anglophone literature, namely Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980) and Edward Said’s Out of Place (1999). Both of these narratives are characterized by a desire to historicize the self as first and foremost a political subject and to galvanize their audience around a cause, be it social justice, medical justice or national liberation. In other words, both of them can be read as manifestos of resistance. The politics of Among the Almond Trees on the other hand is more married to the local and the domestic, and therefore subtler. The memoir’s political power lies in its celebration of and contribution to the poetics of the Palestinian countryside.

Ibrahim Muhawi’s masterful translation of this highly complex memoir is a muchneeded step in the further dissemination of Arabic autobiographical writing at the global stage. The care with which the translator approached this text can be seen in the extensive “Translator’s Introduction” and in the “Translator’s Notes” at the end of the book. Not only does this paratext offer a solid contextualization of the memoir in its literary tradition, but it also opens a window into Muhawi’s creative process. I particularly appreciated when Muhawi pointed out the passages that he found most challenging, and when he shared with us the resources that helped him finalize his decision. These gestures serve as a reminder to the reader of the mediated nature of the narrative and of the intense intellectual labor that goes into translation as a craft.

The translator’s decision to use diacritics in Āthar’s name throughout the narrative and to transliterate certain Arabic words such as “ghreriya” is laudable. Translation into a dominant language such as English sometimes runs the risk of completely domesticating the original text in an effort to make it more palatable for the target audience. By keeping these traces of the Arabic text in his translation, Muhawi seeks to pique his reader’s curiosity and to engage them in a deeper dialogue with the memoir and its language. It is for this reason that I think that he should have also transliterated the Levantine word “nawari” instead of translating it as “gypsy.” While the word does carry a classist connotation in Levantine Arabic, it is not intended as a racial slur in Barghouthi’s narrative. The translator did provide an endnote on the word and the his-

Rania Said is a postdoctoral teaching fellow at UMass Boston. She has a Ph.D. in compar‐ative literature from Binghamton University and an agrégation in English from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Tunis. Her research centers on autobiographical writing and the city in Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) literature.

tory of the community in Palestine, so it makes more sense that he would use “nawari” instead of a word that is considered an offensive term in the English language.

Additionally, while I truly appreciate the need to clarify certain words for the reader, I would have preferred that any grammatical or stylistic explanations remain in the endnotes. For example, I found the brackets in the following sentence a bit distracting: “He was asleep in my lap under the stars, moving his fingers and saying, ‘I told you [feminine plural] don’t play by yourselves in the streets.’” The information in the brackets is interesting to know, but unfortunately it does interrupt the flow of the text.

Overall, I highly recommend this translation both for lovers of world literature and for academics looking to enrich their syllabi with more life writing from the Global South. I am also looking forward to the translation of al- Ḍaw ʾ al- ʾAzraq, the first volume of Barghouthi’s autobiographical project, which is set to appear in December 2022, also with Seagull, in a translation by Fady Joudah.

Journey of the Midnight Sun

By Shazia Afzal, Illustrated by Aliya Ghare, Orca Book Publishers, 2022, 32 pp. MEB $19.95

Reviewed by Candice Bodnaruk

In her debut book, Journey of the Midnight Sun, author and educator Shazia Afzal takes children on an inspiring journey to bring a mosque to a remote community in northern Canada. Throughout the gripping story, children learn the importance of working together, diversity and inclusion. Young readers can also delight in the colorful, whimsical illustrations as they follow the adventurous story of a mosque “that had to travel from the bottom of a huge country to the top.”

Beginning its narrative in 2010, the book presents a real life dilemma: the Muslim

The Olive Branch from Palestine: The Palestinian Declaration of Independence and the Path Out of the Current Impasse by Jerome M. Segal, University of California Press, 2022, hardcover, 316 pp. MEB $30.

Jerome Segal provides a new narrative of the Palestinian effort to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and offers a bold plan for ending this struggle today, his proposal focuses on Palestinian agency and the power of Palestinians to bring about the two-state solution, even in the absence of a fully committed Israeli partner. The Olive Branch from Palestine is divided into two parts. Part 1 provides an analytical and historical study of the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, a remarkable act of unilateral peacemaking through which the PLO accepted the legitimacy of the 1947 Partition Resolution and thereby redefined Palestinian nationalism. Part 2 proposes a new strategy in which, outside of negotiations, the Palestinians would advance, in full detail, the end-of-claims/end-ofconflict peace plan they are prepared to sign, one that powerfully addresses the Palestinian refugee question and is supported by the refugees themselves yet does not undermine Israel as a Jewish-majority state.

Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders & Intellectuals Speak Out by Ramzy Baroud and Ilan Pappé, Clarity Press, 2022, paperback, 462 pp. MEB

$28. This curated collection by Ramzy Baroud and Ilan Pappé aims to challenge several strata of the current Palestine discourse that have led to the present dead end: the American pro-Israel political discourse, the Israeli colonial discourse, the Arab discourse of purported normalization and the defunct discourse of the Palestinian factions. None promote justice, none have brought resolution, and none bode well for any of the parties involved. In this new book, an alternative Palestinian view of liberation and decolonization is provided by engaged Palestinian leaders and intellectuals—archaeologists, artists, authors, community leaders, educators, filmmakers, historians, human rights activists, journalists, lawyers, spiritual leaders, political prisoners, and the like—those who have been actively involved in generating an ongoing Palestinian discourse on liberation, taking into account the parameters of their struggle as it now stands.

Persians: The Age of the Great Kings by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Basic Books, 2022, hardcover, 448

pp. MEB $35. In Persians: The Age of the Great Kings, historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones tells the epic story of the Achaemenid Persian kings and the world they ruled. Stretching from Libya to the steppes of Asia and from Ethiopia to Pakistan, the largest empire of antiquity reigned supreme for centuries until the conquests of Alexander of Macedon brought the empire to a swift and unexpected end in the late 330s BCE. Drawing on Iranian inscriptions, cuneiform tablets, art and archaeology, he shows how the Achaemenid Persian Empire was the world’s first super power—one built, despite its imperial ambition, on co operation and tolerance. This is the definitive history of the Achaemenid dynasty and its legacies in modern-day Iran, a book that completely reshapes our understanding of the ancient world.

of the foundation, told the Washington Report. He said he hopes to “make Muslim history” by helping build remote mosques throughout Canada.

Guisti explained that there are a lot of challenges to building in the far north, including working in communities without hardware stores and temperatures as cold as -72 degrees Fahrenheit. In some cases, supplies have to be sent by sea lift to the building sites. Hence, the reason for building the Inuvik mosque in Winnipeg.

Beyond the harrowing practical logistics, Afzal said the book sends an important message about a community working together to accomplish something amazing. She commented that such a message is perhaps ironically easier for young children to accept than it is for adults to digest. “Older people have their own biases, so it’s hard for them to accept something like this where oh, everyone is getting together, we can do it together, but children just take the message and they live by it,” Afzal said.

The author also wanted to remind young readers it is a blessing to live in a country where people are free to practice their faith. For Afzal, the story of the “midnight sun mosque” is especially relevant now as some, especially on the right, are beginning to openly challenge the concept of a multicultural society.

“You have to be accepting of everyone, you have to be able to look beyond the physical differences, the differences of faith or belief and still be together to work together,” Afzal said. “This is a real story, something that actually happened” and shows the beauty of a community working together.

Children and their families alike will enjoy this story of cooperation and community. Journey of the Midnight Sun is recommended for ages 3-5, but the message here is for all children. ■

Candice Bodnaruk has been involved in Palestinian issues for the past 14 years through organizations such as the Canadian BDS Coalition and Peace Alliance Winnipeg. Her political action started with feminism and continued with the peace movement, first with the No War on Iraq Coalition in 2003 in Winnipeg.

An Unlasting Home: A Novel by Mai Al-Nakib, Mariner

Books, 2022, hardcover, 400 pp. MEB $27.99. Ranging from the 1920s to the near present, An Unlasting Home traces Kuwait’s rise from a pearl-diving backwater to its reign as a thriving cosmopolitan city to the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion. At once intimate and sweeping, personal and political, An Unlasting Home is an unforgettable epic and a spellbinding family saga. Beginning in 2013, the protagonist Sara is a philosophy professor at Kuwait University. Having returned to Kuwait from Berkeley in the wake of her mother’s sudden death 11 years earlier, her main companions are her grandmother’s talking parrot, Bebe Mitu; the family cook, Aasif; and Maria, her childhood ayah and the one person who has always been there for her. Sara’s relationship with Kuwait is complicated; it is a country she always thought she would leave, and a country she recognizes less and less, and yet a certain inertia keeps her there. But when teaching Nietzsche in her Intro to Philosophy course leads to an accusation of blasphemy, which carries with it the threat of execution, Sara realizes she must reconcile her feelings and her place in the world once and for all.

Palestine: Matters of Truth and Justice by Azmi Bishara, Hurst, 2022, paperback, 360 pp. MEB $30.

In January 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump announced his “deal of the century.” Supposedly intended to “resolve” the Palestine-Israel conflict, it accepted Israeli occupation as a fait accompli. Drawing on extensive research and rich theoretical analysis, Azmi Bishara places this normalization of occupation in its historical context, examining Palestine as an unresolved case of settler colonialism, now evolved into an apartheid regime. This book compellingly argues that Palestine is not simply a dilemma awaiting creative policy solutions, but a problem requiring the application of justice. Attempts by regional governments to marginalize the Palestinian cause and normalize relations with Israel have emphasized this aspect of the struggle, and boosted Palestinian interactions with justice movements internationally. Bishara provides a sober perspective on the current political situation in Palestine, and a fresh outlook for its future.

Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule by Katherine Pangonis, Pegasus Books, 2022,

hard cover, 272 pp. MEB $28.95. In 1187 Saladin’s armies besieged the holy city of Jerusalem. He had pre viously annihilated Jerusalem’s army at the battle of Hattin, and behind the city’s high walls a last-ditch defense was being led by an unlikely trio—including Sibylla, Queen of Jerusalem. They could not resist Saladin, but, if they were lucky, they could negotiate terms that would save the lives of the city’s inhabitants. Queen Sibylla was the last of a line of formidable female rulers in the Crusader States of Outremer. Yet for all the many books written about the Crusades, one aspect is conspicuously absent: the stories of women. Queens and princesses tend to be presented as passive transmitters of land and royal blood. In reality, women ruled, conducted diplomatic negotiations, made military decisions, forged alliances, rebelled and undertook architectural projects.