Elliott Abrams - Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

This book tells the full inside story of the George W. Bush administration and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Written by a top National Security Council officer who worked at the White House with Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice and attended dozens of meetings with figures like Ariel Sharon, Hosni Mubarak, the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and Palestinian leaders, it brings the reader inside the White House and the palaces of Middle Eastern officials. How did 9/11 change American policy toward Yasser Arafat and Sharon's tough efforts against the Second Intifada? What influence did the Saudis have on President Bush? Did the American approach change when Arafat died? How did Sharon decide to get out of Gaza, and why did the peace negotiations fail? In the first book by an administration official to focus on Bush and the Middle East, Elliott Abrams brings the story of Bush, the Israelis, and the Palestinians to life.

Elliott Abrams was educated at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and the London School of Economics. After working on the staffs of the late Senators Henry M. Jackson and Daniel P. Moynihan, he served all eight years of the Reagan administration as an assistant secretary of state and received the Secretary's Distinguished Service Award from Secretary of State George P. Shultz. Abrams is former president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC. He was a member and later chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom from 1999 to 2001, and he was reappointed to membership in 2012. He is currently a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which directs the activities of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Abrams is the author or editor of six books. He served at the White House as a deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor in the administration of President George W. Bush, where he supervised U.S. policy in the Middle East. Abrams is now a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and teaches about U.S. policy in the Middle East at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

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Many people helped me bring this book to publication. I should start with President George W. Bush and Dr. Condoleezza Rice, who hired me in 2001 for the White House staff, and with Steve Hadley, the national security advisor in the president's second term. The many officials and former officials mostly Americans, but also Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians who agreed to be interviewed helped me immeasurably to reconstruct the relevant events of the Bush administration. Many of them are mentioned in the text, but doing my work in the White House also required the assistance of a number of people whose names do not appear here. These are the young officers, mostly from the State Department and CIA, who worked for me at the National Security Council (NSC) in the Bush years. Their dedication to advancing American interests in the Middle East and their ability to make their boss look good were enormous, as is my gratitude to them all.