PROPHETS WITHOUT HONOR

An exhaustive account of Palestinian-Israeli peace talks from the 2000 Camp David Summit to the present.

In his latest book, Ben-Ami, an Israeli historian and former diplomat, provides a nearly minute-by-minute chronicle of the failed 2000 summit and the many halting attempts at peace that sprang up in its wake. “This book should be read as an obituary to the two-state solution,” he writes, arguing that “it is about time that all stakeholders shift their attention to other possible scenarios.” Oscillating between the broad sweep of history and the fine-grained details of international negotiation, the book assumes a great deal of historical and political knowledge as well as a keen interest in the particulars of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The author digs deep into the varying definitions of sovereignty, territorial swaps in the West Bank, and the often conflicting interpretations of the Palestinian right of return. Aside from his depiction of Yasser Arafat—“an alley cat, proficient in the art of political survival, a man with a tactical cunning that frequently defeated his grand national vision”—Ben-Ami is almost always diplomatic in his assessment of his Palestinian counterparts, and he is often critical of right-wing Israeli politicians and policies. He calls Israeli discourse on Jerusalem “a pile of accepted lies” and argues that “the real existential threat facing Israel is not nuclear Iran; rather, it is to be found in the morally corrosive effects of the oppressive occupation of the Palestinian people.” Even so, the author is unable to escape the score-settling and mythologizing that doomed the Camp David Summit itself. In the final sections—which detail the two-state solution’s collapse as well as possible futures and corollaries—Ben-Ami arrives at the erudite and expansive synthesis readers are seeking. However, these pages feel rushed in comparison to the painstaking detail of the first half.

A meticulously detailed examination of the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks that doesn’t fully live up to its potential.