Behind the Uprising: Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians

Forget about the uprising; except for a superficial first chapter, Melman and Raviv hardly touch on the Palestinian intifada. The title is but a crude marketing ploy by the publisher to exploit interest in the hot issue of the moment.

An honest title would be something like "Clandestine Summits: Twenty-Four Years of Israel and Jordanian Meetings," for Melman and Raviv provide a fascinatingly detailed account of the longstanding relationship between the Israeli leadership and King al-Husayn of Jordan. While the topic is hardly a new one, no one has unearthed a fraction of the specifics provided by Melman and Raviv. And their story is a compelling one.

They explain how, when the summit meetings began in September 1963 at Husayn's request, the issues were minor (such as deciding on water allocation); then the 1967 war gave the two sides some very substantial topics to discuss (the return of the West Bank, the signing of a peace treaty); talks then ended during the Likud years, 1977-84. They subsequently revived, but by this time it was clear that a grand settlement was impossible; so the two sides retreated to the same sort of limited but practical agreements that they had reached in the first round. And these should not be sneered at: "While water, ecology, shale oil, and Dead Sea minerals seemed mundane, they were the stuff of peaceful coexistence in the Middle East-even without a formal peace treaty."

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