Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 Book

The last chapter makes the book.

I chose to read this book because I am on a quest to learn about Arab history and the Arab mind, and those intersecting with Israel would be a bonus, or so I thought. I was disappointed. I didn't learn much about either the Arab mind or it's history. The book is Kai Bird's memories and experiences, mostly childhood, of growing up in Arab-controlled West Jerusalem where his father was an American Foreign Service officer. He also lived in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and attended some college in Lebanon. Because he grew up with the Palestinians his bias is very definitely with them, and he makes no apologies about this.

I don't think he even used the word "Muslim" until the last 5 pages of the book. How do you understand anything about the Arabs and leave out their Islamicism? He mentioned the events that concerned Israel in a very detached and cardboard kind of way. When he said the Israelis invaded Lebanon, for example, he glossed over the fact that the Palestinians were camped along the border and attacking Israel from there. Leaving out the Israeli side of events was a serious lack.

One interesting idea I gained from the book is this: In the 1970 Jordan "civil" war, as he calls it, when actually the Palestinian refugees caused so much ruckus in Jordan that the Jordanians had to run them out, he writes about the road not taken. If Israel had let the Palestinians over-throw King Hussein's monarchy and take over Jordan, as they were about to do, then the Palestinians would have a country and the whole Palestinian-Israeli question may have been solved. It would have been the "Jordanian solution" as the answer for Palestinian self-determination. Right-wing Israelis (Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon) wanted to actively support the PLO in it's drive to transform the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan into the Republic of Palestine. As it was, Golda Meir, Abba Eban, and Yitzhak Rabin saw King Hussein as the most moderate of the Arab leaders and thought he might someday conduct a separate peace deal with Israel, and their views prevailed.

That insight offered in the "Black September 1970" chapter and the last chapter, "The Hebrew Republic" are all that make the book worthwhile, in my opinion. The last chapter described the Holocaust and was very moving and meaningful. It also described the making of Israel and some important Jewish writers and thinkers such as Victor Navasky and Hillel Kook, a. k. a. Peter Bergson.