The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict

The book is simply a collection of documents on the Arab-Israeli conflict, dating back to the British Mandate in Palestine. The editors included all the important papers such as the Balflour Declaration, the "White Paper," various UN declarations, and speeches made by both Arab and Israeli leaders. The latest documents it contains are those covering the Camp David meetings between President Clinton, barak, and Arafat near the end of Clinton's presidency. While it is not a history of the conflict (merely a collection of historical documents), it certainly can provide you with plenty of info on the subject.

Anyone who wants a truly honest vision of the Arab-Israeli conflict should consider this excellent 580-page Reader, last updated in 2001. It is divided into four sections each of which contains important writings from both sides (sometimes three or more) of the question and goes back more than a century.The first, for example, runs from 1882 through the end of the British Mandate and includes 69 pages of writings, from the Bilu Group Manifesto, excerpts of Theodore Herzl's Jewish State and a 1905 French journal piece by Negib Azouri to the 1915 letter of Sir Henry McMahon to Hussein the Sherif of Mecca, the Peel Commission report, the US Special Committee on Palestine and the Partition Plan of the UN General Assembly. The Third section runs from the Camp David Accords to Madrid, including statements from various commissions, the Arab League Jordanian Crown Prince Al-Hassan Bin Talal, and Lebanon and Israel's 1983 truce agreement. Also included is the Hamas charter, the Palestine National Council political resolution and declaration of independence of 1988 and Iraqi speech of Saddam Hussein as well as a 1991 U.S. letter of assurance to the Palestinians.The Israel-Arab Reader's last section includes many Arab documents on Oslo and runs through 2001 statements by the Palestinian negotiating team and former President Bill Clinton.It is hard to argue against reading important original documents, and forming your own opinion. Once you do, you will see many of the factors that have shaped the current Middle East as well as international and U.S. policy. Alyssa A. Lappen

From the Manifesto of the Bilu (1882) and Theodore Herzl's "Der Judenstaat" (The Jewish State) published in 1896, to Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yassir Arafat speeches accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1994, this book contains an unique collection of documents that will provide the reader with a better understanding of the Middle East and the conflict between Arabs and Israelis. This last, and fifth, edition, published in 1995 adds new documents covering the most significant events of the 1990-1994 period, including the famous Palestinian-Israeli Declaration of Principles signed in the White House in September of 1993, and although the reader will not find in this edition, any document of later events, this book, already a classic, maintains its place as a documentary history of the Arab-Israeli conflict that is indispensable to understand current Middle East affairs. As they have done with previous editions, historians and Middle East specialist Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin present a selection of key documents that reflect the viewpoints of all involved parties in this dramatic history. A great reference book.

This is a tremendous resource for everyone interested in the Israel-Arab relationship. Nowhere else have so many primary documents been collected into one volume, complete with maps, to better understand the context of current events in the Middle East. Hardly a week goes by that I do not refer to something in this collection to explain the historical context of a topic in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations or to support a position on a given issue of the peace process.The only problem is that the documents collected in this volume are current only up to the mid-1990s. Another volume is needed soon because so much is happening in relation to the Middle East peace process.

For any scholar or interested party in the Middle East conflict, this collection of primary source material is one of the best around although it can always afford to be updated. It is subtly "pro-Israel" in choice and emphasis but the material is real and finely assembled. There are of course, minor inaccuracies (Erskine Childers is listed as an English writer rather than an Irish writer and his personal and background credentials are ignored, perhaps because his essay is uncomfortably pro-Palestinian for the editors.) Still, buy this book no matter where your sympathies lie. The editors deserve the reward for a fine effort and a wealth of material will be at your fingertips..