A Fire in Zion: The Israeli-Palestinian Search for Peace - Hardcover

Perry, Mark

9780688121716: A Fire in Zion: The Israeli-Palestinian Search for Peace

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688121713 ISBN 13: 9780688121716

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1994

A noted American journalist with unprecedented access to the major American, Israeli, and Palestinian players recounts the dramatic Middle East peace process, from 1988 until today.
The historic handshake on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, marked the most significant step toward resolving the bloody, forty-year war between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. The ceremonial reconciliation between a solemn Yasser Arafat and a reluctant Yitzhak Rabin was the result of a long and arduous process that had its roots in years of tentative contacts between the two sides.
From Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to Madrid and Oslo, A Fire in Zion tells the startling story of the Israeli-Palestinian search for peace - and the searing and often tragic events that led to the peace agreement. In A Fire in Zion, Washington-based journalist Mark Perry captures for the first time the complete history of the Israeli-Palestinian accord. Spanning the period from December 1987 to the signing of the final accord on the White House lawn, the author sketches vivid portraits of the most important political and diplomatic figures of our time and the people who made peace possible: PLO chief Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, former Secretary of State James Baker, and a host of others. In each case the author was given extraordinary access to the decision-makers who brought the two antagonists to the peace table.
A Fire in Zion begins where From Beirut to Jerusalem left off - revealing in timely, riveting detail how the Middle East conflict is now slowly being resolved. The author provides an incisive commentary on the divisions between American and Israeli Jews, the conflict inside the PLO, the struggle for peace inside the Israeli government, and the often vicious fights in both the Bush and Clinton administrations over just what a Middle East peace should look like.
A Fire in Zion is much more than a dramatic recounting of international intrigue; it is also a saga of two very different peoples, and two dreams. Here are the often unheard voices of individual Palestinian and Israeli men, women, and children, who, in their desperate search for peace, find themselves caught in a deadly and seemingly endless conflict.
This book takes the reader on a journey from Jericho in the occupied territories to Jericho, New York, from the fetid refugee camps of the Gaza Strip to the stony steps of Bethlehem, from PLO headquarters in Tunis to the halls of the Knesset.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

An objective, well-researched historical backdrop to the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, by a Washington-based reporter. Perry (Eclipse: The Last Days of the CIA, 1992, etc.) offers insights into the events that led up to the dramatic accord signed on the White House lawn. In the wake of the Six-Day War in 1967, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank became ``occupied Palestinians'' and, the author implies, the world's favorite victims. In the initial chapter of this solid account, the reader is taken inside Gaza's Jabaliya refugee camp, ``a hotbed of radicalism, the flagship of the Palestinian revolution and a symbol of resistance to the Israeli occupation.'' Both the Israelis and the Palestinians subsequently made a number of strategic errors that, ironically, made the pursuit of peace almost inevitable. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, of Israel's Likud party, aroused the ire of the Bush administration with his intransigence, helping to assure Labor's victory in 1992. Labor Prime Minister Rabin's expulsion of hundreds of Islamic fundamentalists inadvertently drove the PLO and the extremist Hamas closer together. On the other side of the table, Arafat's poor judgment in backing Iraq during the Persian Gulf War cost the PLO millions of dollars in aid, making it desperate to grasp any deal. In addition, writes Perry, ``by choosing not to fight against Iraq, Israel implicitly made itself an ally of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and even Syria. The Gulf War made Israel a part of the Middle East as no other event had in its forty-year history.'' All these factors (and many more), coupled with the fall of the Soviet Union, are noted by Perry as crucial in pushing Israel and its neighbors to the peace table. The ideas are not original but are neatly collected and discussed here. An engrossing look behind one of the decade's most dramatic moments. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Based on interviews with PLO chief Yassir Arafat, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and other key participants in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, Perry's study is a major entry in the literature of modern diplomacy, tracking the slow process of reconciliation from the beginning of the Palestinian intifada in 1987 to the signing of the "Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements" last year. His report on the back-channel Oslo meetings between PLO economist Abu Alaa and Israeli representative Yair Hirschfeld, a Haifa University history professor, is skillfully counterpointed by an account of Rabin's wrangles with Jewish-American lobbying groups who objected to any compromise on the Palestinian question and an inside look at the 1993 internal challenge to Arafat's leadership of the PLO. A talented historian with a narrative gift, Perry ( Eclipse: The Last Days of the CIA ) describes the confluence of events over a six-year period that climaxed in the compromise agreement sealed with Rabin and Arafat's widely publicized handshake on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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