The Palestinian Entity, 1959-1974: Arab Politics and the PLO (review)

282 SAIS REVIEW The Palestinian Entity, 1959-1974: Arab Politics and the PLO. By Moshe Shemesh. London: Frank Cass, 1988. 402 pp. $55.00/cloth. Reviewed by Davidf. Pervin, MA. SAIS, 1989. Since December 1987, with the beginning of the Palestinian intifada (Arabic for uprising), in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Palestinian issue has been at the center of Middle East politics as perhaps never before. This is not to say that the Palestinian cause was not previously of concern to the various Arab governments, but that in the absence of Palestinian self-assertion the cause was subordinated to the state and regime interests of these countries. The role of the Palestinian cause in the foreign policies of various Arab states is extensively examined in Moshe Shemesh's superb study The Palestinian Entity, 1959-1974: Arab Politics and the PLO. Shemesh, a lecturer in Middle East politics at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, demonstrates in comprehensive detail how the Palestinian cause was used as a propaganda weapon in the inter-Arab rivalries that beset the Arab world in the late 1950s and 1960s, a period Malcolm Kerr called the "Arab Cold War." Support for the Palestinian cause was, of course, a sine qua non of any state's claim for leadership in the Arab world, something Egypt's Nasser clearly understood. If the degree of support for the Palestinian cause was a factor in determining the legitimacy of a regime, the cause itself had existential implications for King Hussein ofJordan. Indeed, the most interesting sections of The Palestinian Entity concern the competition between Hussein and the Palestinian movement for the allegiance of the Palestinians. This competition was intrinsically unequal, Shemesh argues, as even prior to 1967 Hussein's efforts "to establish himself as representative of the Palestinians" were hampered by the fact that he "had to rule both the territory and the population of the West Bank [while] the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), on the other hand, needed only the political allegiance of the people." The sympathies of the West Bankers were never much with Hussein, and with the Israeli occupation they increasingly swung toward the PLO. Such is the background to Hussein's decision of July 1988 to disassociate Jordan from the West Bank. The repercussions of the intifada also add poignancy and irony to some earlier proposals for the Palestinians. Yitzhak Shamir, Israel's right-wing prime minister, is not the first advocate of "autonomy" for the Palestinians: In the early 1960s Ahmad al-Shuqayri, the first leader of the PLO, sought '"personal autonomy' for the population of the West Bank so long as the Hashemite regime controlled the land." And the Syrian Ba'th Party's criticism, during the late 1960s, that the PLOs continued reliance on terrorism would make it "a force of secondary importance" in the absence of "a general uprising" appears particularly prescient in retrospect. The Palestinian Entity is excellent at describing who did what to whom, how, and when, but the analysis of why is sometimes obscured by the wealth of detail. The conclusions are a succinct elucidation of some of the underlying themes, and are of particular interest in the wake of the intifida, but many passages will prove difficult for the non-specialist, as Shemesh assumes BOOK REVIEWS 283 considerable prior knowledge, at times mentioning an event without explaining in sufficient depth its importance. Notwithstanding these criticisms, The Palestinian Entity is an important contribution to the field and can be read profitably by both the specialist and the layman. Shemesh has extensively mined the Arab press, other primary Arabic sources, andJordanian intelligence reports captured in the 1967 war, shedding new light on the role of the Palestinian cause in Arab politics. Managing the Presidency: The Eisenhower Legacy—From Kennedy to Reagan. By Phillip G. Henderson. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1988. 198 pp. Reviewed by Marian Gibbon, M.A. candidate, SAIS. During the closing months of the Reagan administration, numerous books and documents analyzing the function of the National Security Council (NSC) within the foreign policymaking apparatus of the U.S. government were published. The Iran-Contra scandal clearly demonstrated the need to reorganize the NSC...