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Reviewed by:
  • Israel and the Persian Gulf: Retrospect and Prospect
  • Joshua Teitelbaum
Israel and the Persian Gulf: Retrospect and Prospect, by Gawdat Bahgat. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. 188 pp. $59.95.

On the face of it, a book-length survey of the relations between Israel and the countries of the Persian Gulf would seem a bit out of place. After all, these states are far away from Israel’s borders, relations have been minimal, and, with the exception of Iraq, they have never directly confronted Israel in a war.

But over the years the role of these countries in the conflict with Israel has grown, particularly that of Saudi Arabia and Iran, a development that is commensurate with the rise in stature of these two cross-Gulf rivals over the past quarter-century. Bahgat’s survey based on English-language secondary sources [End Page 129] contains five chapters: Introduction, Iran and Israel, Iraq and Israel, the Gulf Monarchies and Israel, and the Persian Gulf and the Levant. The first four chapters are logically titled, since this division is a natural one, but the last chapter has little to do with Israel, and its inclusion in the book is puzzling.

This book will certainly meet the needs of part of the readership the author intended—university students (I would limit it to undergraduates), government officials, and educated laymen interested in international relations (p. viii). It contains the necessary background, often at the most elementary of levels (“For centuries Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire” [p. 71]). At times, however, there is so much background not directly related to relations with Israel that the reader runs the danger of not seeing the forest for the trees.

The book’s analysis concentrates on the Persian Gulf side of the relationship, and one comes away without a real sense of how Israel views its relationship with these countries. Indeed, Israel has sought out relations with the Arab oil monarchies for many years, and covert contacts have been reliably reported often in the press.

The author does go into some detail on Israel when discussing Iraqi and Iranian nuclear ambitions, and he has a good quote from a U.S. official about the American view on Israeli nuclear weapons— “We tolerate nuclear weapons in Israel for the same reason we tolerate them in Britain and France.” (The quotation, however, is attributed to Douglas Frantz, who is actually the author of the article in the Los Angeles Times.) Probably the most memorable endorsement of Israeli nuclear weapons on the record by a high-ranking U.S. official comes from former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

Israel is a small state with a small population. It’s a democracy and it exists in a neighborhood that in many—over a period of time has opined from time to time that they’d prefer it not be there and they’d like it to be put in the sea. And Israel has opined that it would prefer not to get put in the sea, and as a result, over a period of decades, it has arranged itself so it hasn’t been put in the sea.

(“Availability at the Munich Conference on Security Policy,” February 7, 2004, online at http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2036 )

Israel and the Persian Gulf would have profited from a close use of Middle East Contemporary Survey (MECS), which relies on primary sources. A liberal resort to MECS would have thickened out the book considerably in areas [End Page 130] where it is quite thin on the ground. (Full disclosure: From many years, I wrote the MECS chapters on most of the Persian Gulf countries.)

Joshua Teitelbaum
Senior Fellow, Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University;
Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Department of Political Science, Stanford University
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