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122 SHOFAR Summer 1995 Vol. 13, No.4 wearing a diadem. It is hard to believe that this was indeed the case. I· suggest that a cloth head covering is meant here by the word iXE), as stated in Ben-Yehuda's thesaurus and other dictionaries, and, dealing with matters sartorial, the "expensive silk garment" on page 18 was more specifically satin (O'~X). These are minor points. The translator goes too far in cleaning up the book by leaving out altogether a reference to "a government, Turkish in the full, nasty meaning of that word" (my translation) on page 80. Ben-Yehuda was far ahead of his time in his sensitivity to ethnic issues, as proven by his long and dark ponderings upon his first encounter with Palestinian Arabs (pp. 50-52). It is unnecessary to make him conform to our canons of correctness. Benjamin H. Vromen Division of Social Sciences Bard College The United States and Israel: The Limits of the Special Relationship, by Abraham Ben-Zvi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.312 pp. $35.00. Abraham Ben-Zvi's book, The United States and Israel: The Limits of the Special Relationship, analyzes the very complicated relationship between the United States and Israel by using a series of case studies over the period between 1953 (the B'not Ya'akov water crisis) and 1991 (the Gulf War). His thesis is that the bilateral relationship is structured by two very different, and sometimes incompatible, paradigms, the special relationship paradigm and the national interest paradigm. The special relationship paradigm is premised on the view that Israel is a strategic asset to the United States, that the two countries share many values in common, and that the goodwill that exists toward Israel in the United States is not restricted to the Jewish community alone. Those who advocated and mobilized the special relationship perspective were members of Congress as well as a host of pro-Israel lobbies. The national interest orientation, in contrast, derives from a strategic view of the international system and American geo-strategic interests in the Middle East, most importantly the containment of Soviet influence in the region, continued access to Arab oil, and the need to restrain the Arab-Israel conflict. Advocates of the national interest paradigm as a foundation for policy making were found primarily in the administration, the White House and the State Department. Book Reviews 123 The formulation of u.s. policy toward Israel and the resolution of bilateral disputes were the result of the dynamics between these two paradigms. Not to be forgotten in these dynamics were also the domestic politics of Israel and Israel's determination of its own national interests. The question in each of Ben-Zvi's eight case studies was the ability of the United States to use coercive diplomacy to influence Israeli behavior. Given the obvious differences in size and capacity between Israel and the United States, this book is a fascinating analysis of the constraints that often limited superpower behavior. "When the special relationship dominated, the [U.S.] administration had little latitude in pursuing coercive diplomacy; when the national interest orientation dominated, policymakers had a wider latitude of choice" (p. 192). When the two paradigms were not in conflict, crises between the u.S. and Israel were resolved in a manner which maintained the very complex relationship largely unchanged. When Ben-Zvi completed his manuscript (in 1992), the Rabin government had just assumed office. Among its priorities was a reduction in tensions between the United States and Israel over settlements in the West Bank as well as over the pace of the peace process. Dialogue with the PLO, peace talks with Jordan, and the incipient moves toward some normalization of relations with Syria were still in the future. The situation in the Middle East at the end of the summer of 1994 is thus dramatically different from that which provides the environment for Ben-Zvi's analysis. Nonetheless, this book is important for the detailed examination it provides of the various crises and the way in which each was resolved. It makes the point that even wheon the u.S. got most of what it wanted-in...

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