Scars of War, Wounds of Peace [antikvár]

Preface 'Do you think we can still make it?' I was asked by President Clinton when, on Saturday, 20 December 2000, I was leaving the Cabinet Room adjacent to the Oval Office in the White House where the President had just finished communicating to the Israeli and Palestinian delegations to the peace talks his final parameters for a setdement. 'I don't know, Mr President,' I replied, 'if we have enough political time left to wrap up an agreement, but what I am sure of is that if we fail, we'll all have plenty of time to write books about it.' After the sad chapter of our failure, Israelis and Palestinians, to reach a final peace setdement during President Clinton's last year at the White House, I did write about it in a book published in France {Quel avenir pour Israel?) and, in a more comprehensive work written in Hebrew, my personal account and perspective of the evolution of the peace process in its last phases, A. Front Without a Home Front: A Voyage to the Boundaries of the Peace Process. When considering the preparation of an English version of those books, I decided that, however important a separate analysis of both the Oslo process and the latest chapter of the peace talks surely are for drawing the necessary lessons for any future attempt to solve the Israeli— Palestinian tragedy, it should not be seen in isolation from the wider history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and of earlier stages in the quest for peace in the Middle East. Our capacity to better understand the present and look with sobriety at the future needs to draw on, and be inspired by, a broader historical perspective. When we went to Camp David, Prime Minister Ehud Barak took with him Alistair Home's book on the war of Algeria and the subsequent peace with France, A Savage War of Peace, while I looked for inspiration in Henry Kissinger's study on the Congress of Vienna and the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, ^ World Restored: the Politics of Conservatism in a Revolutionary Age. Neither of these books is, of course, a bad adviser for anyone wiUing to draw lessons for a transition from war to peace. But I later thought that an insightful overview of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and especially that of the Palestinian dilemma, might certainly have been no less helpful to us botii.