| The best way to begin a book about peace in the Middle East is to acknowledge that this is not a promising subject. Everything in the historical record must encourage the most pervasive pessimism. While it is good to favor peace, comforting to suppose that peace is what the mass of ordinary people in the world desire, and tempting to ascribe the persistence of conflict to needless fears and misunderstandings, in the Middle East it is far too late for such simple-mindedness. Clearly we are contending with more fundamental difficulties, such that peace has been at best an intermediate objective for some and indeed a negative value for others. At key moments prolongation of the conflict has always been a tolerable price to pay, if it was a price at all, for the pursuit of other interests. This holds true not only for Israelis and Arabs but for the leading members of the United Nations as well, notably the United States. |
| Naturally enough, throughout the history of the Palestine conflict there have been periodic reassessments and flurries of diplo- |
 | | | Malcolm H. Kerr is Dean of the Division of Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1931 and educated at Princeton, the American University of Beirut, Harvard, and the School for Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University, he taught at the American University of Beirut before joining the faculty of UCLA in 1962. In 197172 he served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. |
| | | Kerr's books include Lebanon in the Last Years of Feudalism, 18401868 (American University of Beirut, 1959); Islamic Reform (University of California Press, 1966); The Arab Cold War (Oxford University Press, third edition, 1971); and, coauthored with A. S. Becker and B. Hansen, The Economics and Politics of the Middle East (New York, Elsevier, 1975). |
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