An impressively crafted, deeply personal history of Middle Eastern diplomacy.
Grinstein and Afilalo, experts on international law and diplomacy, combine memoir and scholarship in this survey of Israeli–Palestinian tensions.
Few issues are as harrowing on the international stage in 2024 as the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Against the backdrop of the ongoing Israeli invasion of Gaza in response to Hamas’ attacks on the Gaza–Israeli border, the authors recall past moments of hope represented by the multi-year negotiations initiated by the Clinton administration’s Oslo Accords. As the youngest delegate at the 2000 Camp David Summit, then 30-year-old Grinstein served as secretary for the Israeli delegation and assistant chief negotiator. Blending memoir with geopolitical analysis, Grinstein offers readers a fly-on-the-wall perspective from someone with access to the tense high-level diplomatic conversations. His memories include a moment of panic when he had to give Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak the Heimlich maneuver after he choked on a snack in Camp David’s Dogwood Cabin. Grinstein also offers an insider’s analysis of the competing domestic and international pressures confronting Barak, who, at the time, “needed something to run on” in the upcoming elections. Co-author Afilalo, a professor of international law and trade at Rutgers University, provides important historical analysis and commentary that contextualizes the Oslo Accords, backed by a wealth of scholarly footnotes.
The book is divided thematically into four sections. Sections one and two center on Grinstein’s personal history and experiences as an Israeli delegate tasked with negotiating a Framework Agreement on Permanent Status with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. Section three focuses on the U.S.’s role in the peace process, and on the tenuous nature of peace negotiations. The book’s final section uses the Oslo Accords as the basis for reflections on potential avenues for future peace negotiations between the two sides. This definitive history of the accords contains ample appendix material to assist readers in navigating the complexities of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the myriad interest groups and individual people involved. The book also includes an essay by Grinstein in which he offers “Lessons for Aspiring History Makers”; he encourages aspirants to follow his example by becoming experts and making themselves “indispensable to the greats.” (At times the book feels a bit self-indulgent, with its inclusion of photographs of Grinstein with Bill Clinton, Barak, and other world leaders in the White House and elsewhere.) In addition to its rich, full-color photographs, the book includes an assortment of maps, images, and reproductions of primary source documents. While the authors are diplomatic in their presentations of Palestinian positions, their views are filtered through a distinctly Israeli perspective. The phrase “apartheid state,” for instance, appears only three times in more than 350 pages, and only within quotation marks that question the accuracy of the phrase. The authors take a more nuanced approach toward Israel, treating Barak as a “tragic figure” and criticizing the actions of current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for distancing his administration “from world Jewry” and escalating a situation that “threatens the future of Israel.” Engaging and well written, this work will also double as an effective primer on Israeli–Palestinian relations for those unfamiliar with the region’s complexities.
An impressively crafted, deeply personal history of Middle Eastern diplomacy.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9798860652705
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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