Taking a Balanced View of State of the Palestine Conflict

WAR WITHOUT END

Israelis, Palestinians and the

Struggle for a Promised Land

By Anton La Guardia

Thomas Dunne/St. Martins

408 pages, $25.95

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“War Without End” is a thorough, dispassionate look at the history and the contemporary, complex realities of the struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinians for that piece of land at the Mediterranean’s eastern shore now divided between the state of Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Anton La Guardia, former Middle East correspondent for the Daily Telegraph of London and now its diplomatic editor, is clear about what he thinks should happen. He believes, as do many in the world, that the Palestinians should have a recognized state of their own.

“Only the promise of internationally recognized statehood for the Palestinians,” La Guardia writes, “and of lasting peace for Israelis with guarantees of no further Palestinian claims against the Jewish state” will be strong enough to bring about a compromise and an end to conflict. That would be best accomplished, he argues, through secret meetings between Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon, both leaders with a long history of apparent intransigence. That widely shared analysis, however, may have been derailed by President Bush’s continued support for Sharon and his call for new Palestinian leadership before their state can be established.

As always in the Middle East, partisans will find much to object to in La Guardia’s survey. Some Israelis will resent his clumsy characterization of Israel as “a Jewish dagger in the heart of the Arab world.” Some Arabs will be offended by his unrelenting portrait of Arafat as a slippery, untrustworthy leader.

La Guardia accepts the national myths of neither side, but he does give them weight, for they help to explain the passionate feelings, and hence the actions, of each combatant. Although La Guardia characterizes the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Britain promised the Jews a national home in the Palestine mandate that Britain held, as an act of traditional imperialism, he recognizes that the subsequent Holocaust and Israel’s recognition by the United Nations stamp Israel with its legal and moral right to exist.

But La Guardia also foresees the day when the U.N. will validate the Palestinians’ suffering and dispossession with a state of their own.

He notes that “the Palestinians see themselves not, like the Israelis, as a nation of extraordinary fighters, but as a nation of martyrs,” and he quotes Arabic poetry extolling the glorious deaths of Islamic martyrs.