Beyond The Promised Land: Jews And Arabs On The Hard Road To A New Israel - Hardcover

The Sisyphean task known as "the Middle East peace process" having broken again in the mid-1990s, Washington Post reporter Glenn Frankel's account of a "new Israel" painfully emerging acquires a renewed and enhanced significance. Frankel, the Post's Jerusalem bureau chief from 1986 to 1989, is himself an American Jew, a background that makes him both uniquely equipped and inevitably embroiled in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Interviews with key players such as Natan Sharansky, Yitzhak Samir, and Israeli general Amram Mitzna enliven this important work.

This journalistic narrative spans five years of Israeli history, from the 1987 onset of the intifada to the 1992 electoral defeat of the hard-line Likud bloc. The public now knows that the Labor Party victory was a watershed leading to Rabin's shaking the hand of Arafat; Frankel recounts how that spectacle resulted from innumerable clashes on the ground between Arab and Jew. Frankel tracked these often deadly encounters as the Washington Post's reporter on the spot and fills these pages with detailed narratives of ordinary individuals swept up by the uprising and crackdown. One tale of Palestinian Jad Isaac's jailing is matched by a profile of the Israeli general in charge (Amram Mitzna); similarly, when the scene shifts to the raucous proceedings that pass for Knesset debate, Frankel personifies the underlying questions that agitate Israeli identity (Are you Sephardim or Ashkenazi? Secular or religious?). His purpose with this human-interest method is to mark the passing of the Zionist generation, along with its socialistic institutions and militant posture, and the coming, with grave anxieties, of peace negotiations. A knowledgeable, unflamboyant report that is not as likely to create as huge a demand as did the retrospective of another American reporter's assignment to Israel, Thomas Friedman's From Beruit to Jerusalem. Gilbert Taylor