Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy (review)

Kathleen Christison: Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 370 pages. ISBN 0-520-21717-9. $40 (cloth). Reviewed by Stanley Kober.

"I am an invisible man," begins Ralph Ellison's classic novel, Invisible Man. "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." Kathleen Christison, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst, has in effect taken Ellison's theme and applied it to describe American perceptions of the Palestinians. "In line with the principle that what is out of sight is out of mind, the Palestinians rarely entered U.S. policy considerations throughout the 1950 and 1960s," she writes. "After their dispersal in 1948, the name Palestine disappeared from the world's political register, primarily because for Israel and even some Arab states the name was inconvenient. . . . As far as the United States was concerned, the Palestinians did not exist politically . . . and, as a result, an entire generation of policy makers came of age not knowing, and not thinking it necessary to learn, the Palestinians' story" (emphasis in original).

For Christison, this invisibility lies at the root of the enduring tensions in the Middle East: "Until the intifada, Palestinians had remained completely inaudible, the hidden component of what came to be known as the Arab-Israeli rather than the Palestinian-Israeli conflict." Among her many criticisms of the United States, she faults American leaders for failing to understand the dying appeal of pan-Arabism and the central importance of the emergence of a separate Palestinian nationality. "Recognizing the death of pan-Arabism would have meant acknowledging that Palestinians had no other identity except as Palestinians and that they could not find a solution to their problem as part of the broader Arab world," she emphasizes. "The real problem that had existed since Israel's creation . . . was the displacement of the Palestinians and a smoldering Palestinian nationalism."

Here, as elsewhere, her judgments seem too harsh. Without question, the issue of the Palestinians was neglected, but American leaders were not alone in this regard. And even if we accept the proposition that the Palestinian dispossession was at the root of the Middle East conflict, we cannot disregard the wars Israel fought with its Arab neighbors. If the Palestinians were ignored, it was in large part because a mistake with them would not be fatal to Israel's survival. "The Israelis did not have much doubt that they would prevail in a war with the Arabs," she writes of 1967, but even if that is true (and predicting the outcome of wars is notoriously difficult, as the United States was discovering at that time in Vietnam), it implicitly acknowledges that the Israelis also had to concern themselves with the possibility of war with their neighbors--and if they could be so confident of victory, it was only because they were so well prepared. Moreover, although Israel prevailed easily in 1967, the 1973 war demonstrated the country's vulnerability. Given two serious wars with Arab neighbors in such a short time, it is understandable that the attention of the Israelis, and of their American allies, was concentrated on the Arab threat rather than on the Palestinians. The diplomatic possibilities presented by Anwar Sadat's overtures and the Camp David agreements simply reinforced that focus.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to disagree with Christison's main thesis that the Palestinian problem was neglected for too long. Even here, however, her analysis leads to what appear to be contradictory conclusions. On the one hand, she is very tough on some American leaders, in particular President Reagan and his administration, which "missed repeated opportunities to advance the peace process throughout its eight years in office." But at the same time she criticizes the Reagan administration, she effectively absolves it by claiming that its attitudes were predetermined by a history of American identification with Israel and the Jewish claim to the land...