Missed Opportunities: U.S. Diplomatic Failures and the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1947-1967 (review)

When Yasir Arafat died in late 2004, many observers hoped that the Middle East peace process might finally be able to make some progress. The emergence of a more moderate leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and the proposal by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to withdraw from the Gaza Strip created hope that meaningful change might finally come about. But in early 2006 Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke, and a Hamas-led government was elected by the Palestinians. The war in Lebanon in July 2006 after terrorist attacks by Hamas and Hizbullah left the peace process in tatters. By early 2007, British and U.S. officials were still hoping to revive the peace process, but the chances of success appeared dim.

In Missed Opportunities, Candace Karp recounts the earliest, and now often forgotten, U.S. mediation efforts in the Middle East , from 1947 to 1967. She argues that the United States missed many opportunities in the roughly two decades between the emergence of the Israeli state and the settlement of the 1967 Six-Day Mideast War. Her theme is quite simple. The United States during these twenty years was the determining factor in the peace process. U.S. policy, in her view, was rarely in line with American strategic interests during the Cold War, and the United States was responsible for the failure of the diplomatic process, thereby "contributing to the entrenchment of the Arab-Israeli conflict" (p. i). Karp claims that a gap on this topic exists in the historiography and that she seeks to fill it. She reviews U.S. policy during this period in a decidedly subjective manner, repeatedly blaming U.S. policymakers for failing to take advantage of supposedly promising diplomatic opportunities. The core of Karp's argument is that the Truman and Johnson administrations should have followed the approach adopted by the Eisenhower administration in the pursuit of peace. In her view, if the United States had pressured Israel to return all territories outside the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, such pressure would have reduced tension in the region and permitted a greater affinity between the United States and the Arab world.

Karp's insistence that the United States was the party most culpable for the failure of diplomacy in the Middle East is at odds with the analysis one finds in three other recent books that cover many of the same events and rely on similar documentary sources: Peter L. Hahn, Caught in the Middle East: U.S. Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1945–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hills: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). All three of these books apportion responsibility for diplomatic failures and successes in a more even-handed manner than Karp does. Karp is quite right to suggest that U.S. policymakers sought above all to maintain access to oil, prevent regional instability, keep the region out of the grasp of the Soviet Union, and create an environment conducive to U.S. commercial interests. She further argues that the Truman and Johnson administrations' efforts to achieve a comprehensive peace, or at least an end to belligerency, before Israel withdrew from territory seized in the wars of 1948 and 1967 were deeply misguided. Karp believes that these two U.S. administrations should have emulated the Eisenhower administration in pressuring Israel to withdraw from territory seized from Egypt in 1956 before meaningful negotiations could take place.

In developing this thesis, Karp does an excellent job of drawing on the relevant documentary collections, though she should have consulted a larger number of recent secondary sources, particularly the new breed of revisionist Israeli historians. Far too often she makes sweeping judgments in her repeated condemnations...