Kai Bird - CROSSING MANDELBAUM GATE (Scribner, $30)
This is the most compassionate, even-handed history of the Middle East that I have read. As Kai Bird says, “I now realize that no one can comprehend the Middle’s East’s Nakba without an understanding of Europe’s Shoah.” A tragedy indeed - in which two dispossessed peoples claim the same land. Bird’s account gives us a full history of the making of the modern Middle East from Saudi Arabia to Palestine/ Israel, from Egypt to Lebanon. In this relatively short book, Bird offers a course in modern history, including Nasser’s secular Egypt, on one hand, and the intensely religious closed society of Saudi Arabia. The United States always chose a short term fix.
Here is what Bird says about Arabia: "In the 1960s we opposed the Free Princes and their reformist plans for a constitutional monarchy. Both Aramco (the oil company) and Washington valued stability in the form of an absolute monarchy over the uncertainty of any alternative…All of this was done because of our desire to control Arabian black gold." In Egypt: "The Agency had a long-standing relationship with Nasser’s most implacable enemy—the Muslim Brotherhood…'We thought of Islam as a counterweight to communism,' said Talcott Seelye, a foreign service officer." In Jordan, the United States supported Hashemite King Hussein over the Palestinians even though half of the population of Jordan was Palestinian. Nixon, with Kissinger’s backing opposed a pro-Palestinian state. "Neither the Nixon administration nor the Israelis could stomach the notion of a Palestinian state on the east bank of the River Jordon." Bird wonders what would have happened had a Palestinian state emerged in 1970. The last 100 pages are about the Holocaust and the emergence of modern Israel, a nation deeply divided about its geography and inclusiveness since its beginnings.
Kai Bird is a historian who has won much acclaim - for his biographies of John McCloy and the Bundy brothers and particularly for American Prometheus, the brilliant portrait of Robert Oppenheimer which Bird wrote with Martin J. Sherwin, and which won many awards for its co-authors. So you can be assured of exemplary historical writing. What is remarkable in Crossing Mandelbaum Gate is that Bird so gracefully weaves his own history. As the son of a Foreign Service officer who was stationed in those countries, he grew up with the events that set into motion the terrible quandary we now know as the Middle East. He claims no special knowledge, but a special concern and empathy.
Kai Bird will appear at Politics & Prose on May 5.