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Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security and Foreign Policy. By Zeev Maoz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. ISBN 0-472-11540-5. Maps. Tables. Figures. Glossary. Notes. References. Indexes. Pp. xii, 713. $45.00.
Let's get the criticism out of the way. Israeli scholar Zeev Maoz has written a landmark book about Israel's "forever war" against the Arabs and Palestinians. But it's also a "forever book"-he could have done it in half the number of pages, with the excess profitably spun off into monographs and articles.
Maoz's thesis is succinctly captured in a bumper sticker I saw recently: "War isn't working." The simplified story line of the Arab-Israeli conflict is that Israel was the heroic underdog from the 1948 War of Independence through the dramatic success of the 1967 Six Day War, after which things began to go south: the seemingly pointless War of Attrition, the nasty surprise of the Yom Kippur War, the invasion of Lebanon that dragged on for an incredible eighteen years, while festering in the background was the rising tide of unrest in the occupied territories. Maoz, however, takes us all the way back to demonstrate that while the War of Independence might have been a "just war," it was the only one to which Israelis can point. In subsequent decades, he argues, Israel consistently relied on military force as the principal instrument of foreign policy-fumbling, time and again, genuine diplomatic opportunities to resolve crises and build stable relationships with its neighbors. From the outset Israel's political leadership and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) settled on the "limited use of military force" as the best way to deal with their apparently intractable Arab neighbors. Reasonable, you might think, until Maoz explains that what they really meant was "unlimited use of limited military force"-an ongoing policy of military reprisals directed at the neighboring states from which cross-border terrorist activity was...