cover image Crossing the Jordan: Israel's Hard Road to Peace

Crossing the Jordan: Israel's Hard Road to Peace

Samuel Segev. St. Martin's Press, $29.95 (420pp) ISBN 978-0-312-15506-3

The unresolved issues and supposed hidden agendas behind the Israeli-PLO pact of 1993 are the focus of this revelatory, convincing report and, according to the author, threaten to undermine the historic handshake between Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Israeli journalist Segev demonstrates that army hero Rabin, a pragmatist who accepted ""land for peace"" as a necessary compromise, did not envisage full statehood for a ""Palestinian entity."" In meetings with American Jewish leaders and briefings with correspondents, Rabin made clear, before his assassination in 1995, that he saw massive resettlement of Palestinian refugees in various Arab countries as a final resolution to the conflict. Criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's expansive settlement activity and intransigent posture, Segev nevertheless calls Arafat the most serious obstacle to peace, faulting the PLO chief's corrupt administration and his reneging on his commitment to end violence. Segev's report bristles with contentions concerning secret back-channel negotiations (in Stockholm, Oslo, Morocco, Iran, Jordan), CIA monitoring of peace talks, Israel's behind-the-scenes maneuvers during the Gulf War and Rabin's disregard of his 1974 order to assassinate Arafat. (May)