Enemy in the Promised Land

In 1974, as a 23-year-old graduate student at Harvard, Hasan (coauthor of Between Enemies: A Compassionate Dialogue Between an Israeli & an Arab, daughter of a former Egyptian ambassador to the U.S., made an extended visit to Israel, an act considered traitorous less than a year after the Yom Kippur War. Although the immediacy of her risktaking wanes in light of the subsequent Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, and Hasan is a bit too enamored with her celebrity as an Egyptian in Israel, this is, nonetheless, an absorbing account of her headstrong encounters with leading politicians, radical Socialist kibbutzniks, zealous converts to Judaism, Sephardic prostitutes and Israeli Arabs. The reader senses that Hasan's desire for peace is sincere, yet she presents only the Arab side of the dispute as factual history, missing the opportunity for effective dialogue about the Middle East. (January 30)