Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July/August 1999, pages 123-124

Book Reviews

Fifty Years of Israel

By Donald Neff, American Educational Trust, 1998, 374 pp. List: $18.95 AET: $16.

Reviewed by Dilip Hiro

Journalists often bemoan the ephemeral nature of their trade. Here today, gone tomorrow. Such is the fate of their output for daily newspapers, described by cynics as Daily Graves—of millions of words. Periodicals are different, though. Being small and easy to store, they confer a fairly long life on their contents. (The arrival of the Internet is making a difference but has still a long way to go.) Yet there is nothing like a book bearing a single name, the author’s.

Among journalists, a columnist has the best chance of graduating to book authorship by the simple device of getting his articles stitched together between covers. The problem is that not every column can stand the test of time. What appears at the first printing a lucid, thoughtful article, full of insights, often sounds stale after a few months. But, as always, there are exceptions—those columnists whose grasp of a subject is so thorough and who are so imbued with a historical perspective that their output does not date easily.

Donald Neff is one such.

What, in my view, has helped him achieve this enviable position is (a) his decision to specialize in one region of the world, the Middle East, and (b) his practice of writing for a fortnightly journal, the London-based Middle East International, and a monthly one, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. By so doing he has married his writing skills—honed at Time and the Washington Star—with scholarship.

This is a rare combination in the Anglo-Saxon world, where journalism and scholarship do not mix, and where book publishers maintain separate departments for trade and college books. There are no graduates, formal or informal, of a school of “scholarly journalism,” where a writer, possessing scholarly knowledge of his subject, writes simply like a journalist.

In Fifty Years of Israel, Donald Neff has assembled 54 articles he has published in the Washington Report over the past several years, in seven sections, entitled History, War, Israel Abroad, the United States etc. Actually, Neff has gone beyond assembling old articles. Wherever necessary, he has updated his pieces. The end-result is that one gains a multi-dimensional understanding of the phenomena of Israel and Zionism over the past half a century.

Like a seasoned journalist, Neff gives sources for the quotes and the statistics in each article. And as a scholar he provides a book list. By so doing he invests his articles with an uncommon authority.

I found three types of articles particularly appealing—(a) those illuminating the role Washington played in furthering the Zionist cause before and during World War I; (b) those capturing the ethos of the first decade of Israel and Washington’s policy toward it; and (c) those dealing with contemporary relations between the two states. The particular value of (b) and (c) is that one can measure the degree to which America has moved closer toward Israel.

By choosing a strictly chronological approach in each section, Neff has helped his readers. The two opening articles—on Justice Louis Brandeis’s role in advancing the Zionist agenda from 1912 onward, and the part played by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in the drafting of the 1917 Balfour Declaration—set the chronological tone perfectly, providing information and insight not easily available.

It was an eye-opener for me to read an account of a 12-country tour of the Middle East by U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and an excerpt of his speech on national radio and television on June 1, 1953: “Today the Arab peoples are afraid that the United States will back the new State of Israel in aggressive expansion. They are more fearful of Zionism than of Communism, and they fear the United States, lest we become the backer of expansionist Zionism. On the other hand, the Israelis fear that ultimately the Arabs may try to push them into the sea.”

Forty year later, almost to the day, Martin Indyk, the U.S. National Security Council’s Middle East adviser, inaugurated the policy of “dual containment” of Iran and Iraq, chiefly because these countries were seen by Israel as its foremost foes.

“‘Dual containment’ derives from an assessment that the current Iraqi and Iranian regimes are both hostile to American interests in the region,” Indyk said. “Accordingly, we do not accept the argument that we should pursue the old balance of power game, building up one to balance the other.”

I knew about Indyk’s speech in mid-May 1993. What I did not know was that Israel had been the instigator since February to shore up anti-Iranian sentiment in the U.S. administration, already vehemently anti-Iraq, and lay the groundwork for the formulation of the “dual containment” policy to be articulated by Indyk, a former official of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

As a Middle East specialist for the past 20 years, I have discovered that one way to sustain my level-headedness is to have a strong sense of irony.

Take Indyk’s May 1993 speech. “If we fail in our effort to modify Iranian behavior, five years from now Iran will be much more capable of posing a real threat to Israel, the Arab world, and Western interests in the Middle East,” he said.

Five years on, in June 1998, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright held out an olive branch to Tehran, and proposed working out a road map of reconciliation. Iran was then the chair of the 55-member Islamic Conference Organization, based in the Saudi city of Jeddah. Without the active backing of Saudi Arabia, Iran would not have gained that pre-eminent position in the Muslim world. So much for Iran “posing a real threat to...the Arab world.”

And when last did you hear the term “dual containment” from the lips of any U.S. official? The invalidity of this doctrine became so patent that now even its originators have stopped mouthing it.

There is still another aspect of this collection worth pondering. To be a successful columnist you must know your readers, their preferences and prejudices. When a journalist is writing for a newspaper with a large circulation the profile of the readership is anything but homogeneous. This results in a certain creative tension between the writer and his/her readers, and leads an astute columnist to summarize a contrary view and gently, or not so gently, demolish, it. This is a more effective way of winning converts, and more politically satisfying in the long run, than merely providing fodder, however well husbanded, to a small but fairly homogeneous readership, which is a hallmark of most journals—be they generalist like the New Republic and the Nation, or specialist like the Washington Report and the Middle East Quarterly.

Given this, a columnist is likely to get set in his/her ways when providing a monthly or fortnightly column. After all, in a turbulent region like the Middle East there is always so much happening—and with the mainstream reporting almost always tilted in a pro-U.S.-Israel fashion—that a diligent, objective columnist has his work cut out.

Viewed in that perspective, it is easy to see where Neff fits in. But since he accorded himself another chance to examine his pieces he would have noticed certain recurring patterns in his writing. One such is always describing the general stance that an American president, from Harry Truman onward, took on Israel.

What Neff says is true. But he never stops to enlighten the reader on why. Why did President Jimmy Carter initially show evenhandedness toward Palestinians and Israelis? Why was Ronald Reagan so unashamedly pro-Israel? Ditto for Bill Clinton?

A brief paragraph about Reagan’s background as a movie actor, and the pre-eminence of Jewish Americans in the writing, acting, directing and financing of Hollywood films, would have enlightened the reader—coupled with the fact that Reagan’s views on Israel became fixed in the early 1950s and never progressed.

Seeing Neff’s references to the daily Bible reading by President Wilson, and knowing the importance that Carter and Clinton, both ardent Baptists, attach to the Good Book, perhaps there is a learned article here on how Christian religiosity molded the views of American chief executives on Zionism and Israel.

Dilip Hiro is the author of many books on the Middle East, including Dictionary of the Middle East (St. Martin’s Press). His latest book is Sharing the Promised Land: A Tale of Israelis and Palestinians (Interlink).