Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East

I thought this book was a concise and readable historical study of how, for over 30 years, the U.S. has been "Israel's lawyer" instead of trying to achieve a lasting and just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. It is at heart a work of history, so do not the expect simplified sound-byte-filled prose that we are accustomed to getting from fake pop "scholar/journalists" like Thomas Friedman and others. Khalidi lays out the abuse of language that has created the Orwellian status quo in the Middle East. He shows that while the U.S. supports Israel with billions of dollars and diplomatic cover for continued occupation and territorial expansion, they have simultaneously posed as the "honest broker", all the while preventing real negotiations based on international and human rights law and UN resolutions to take place. The author goes into three historical moments to analyze and expose the charade of "even-handed" American mediation. Probably the most interesting chapters are on the peace negotiations of the 1990s, the chapter on President Obama, and the Conclusion. What makes the chapter on the negotiations of the 90's so interesting is that Khalidi participated in them as an advisor so he cites original, never-before-seen primary documents showing the American and Israeli positions. As AN American I can only hope that President Obama in his second term does something to change the destructive and blind support of Israel, and that the U.S. actually acts as an honest broker to make a just and equitable peace between Israel and the Palestinians. This would not only be good for the people of the region but would greatly enhance U.S. standing and security in the world. I also saw that Khalidi had an op-ed in the NYT, March 13, 2013

One of the ultimate counter-testimonies to the self-congratulatory penchant of American Exceptionalism. I highly recommend this book to all those who appreciate reality and critical thinking.

Prof. Rashid Khalidi's book is conscise, blunt, honest and revealing on USA's role as the supposed " honest broker" trying to get Palestinian representatives and Israel to reach a final peace settlement for Palestinians. The US has always favoured Israel for its strategic position in the region and this is clearly evidenced by USA's continued unconditional support of Israel and the US use of its veto power in the UN to curb or frustrate any limitations placed on Israel . In many ways the USA has been instrumental in exasperating the Palestinian/ Israel conflict. If there is one book that succintly explains and exposes US' deceitful position, it is this book !

I believe this book is essential reading for anyone like myself who had hope for middle east peace with the signing of the Oslo Accords twenty years ago. Until recently I believed the United States had the best interests of the people of I/P but I realized especially after Operation Cast Lead the the US blatantly supports Israel at the expense of the indigenous population, the Palestinians. The days are numbered for the ethnocentric apartheid state we know as Israel and the Israelis know it. The "peace process" has enabled them to by time until the world demands one state and one vote for everyone.

I do NOT buy a history book to have an insertion from "Misilla Internet" seller preaching his Christian-God fanaticism, a very bad poem & non-science lies trees of praying to his God! Full refund required. Will go to a bookstore!

This is one of the best books written on this subject. It gives an excellent overvue of the history of US as "brokers of peace" and makes it clear that the US has never made any serious effort in that regard. A must read for anyone trying to understand why the peace process un US supervision always fails and why any subsequent attempts by the current administration should be taken with a grain of salt the size of a cinderblock.

"Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East" certainly identifies the reasons for the failure of the "Peace Process." That ten million Palestinian arabs have had to suffer in various ways--as second-rate Israeli citizens, as "internal refugees", as refugees driven out of their homes and villages at gunpoint, or simply murdered in cold blood in the middle of the night by israeli terrorists--because of the dishonest dealing with which our Secretaries of State have been willing partners is disturbing. Rashid Khalidi has certainly laid out the important facts behind the continuing impasse. The US has a great deal of innocent blood on its hands.

Anyone who wants to know "the other side" of the Middle East story will be fascinated by the facts and analysis this book presents. It is obvious that Khalidi knows, sometimes from personal experience, what he is talking about. He gives a voice to the Palestinians.

Buch kam in bester verfassung und pünkltlich an. Der Inhalt ist genau was ich erwartete. Ist schon bestürzend, wie ein kleines Land die Großmacht USA an der Nase herumführt.

This is an important contribution to the literature on Israel-Palestine. As Khalidi says towards the end of the book, there are many volumes that deal with the cruel regime imposed on the Palestinians by Israel. This book does something different however: it spells out the American role in the imposition of that regime. And it does so by exposing the lies, propaganda and half-truths that are served up by America, not for Israel's consumption - because Israel knows and is not ashamed of the truth of its colonialist enterprise - but for the consumption of the American public. What these evasions hide from the American public, which is anyway little interested in Palestinian rights, is just how dishonest a broker America has been in its role as Middle East mediator. Khalidi takes three moments in Israel-Palestine negotiations as pivotal episodes for his narrative of American duplicity. The first moment he investigates is the "Reagan Plan" of 1982, at a time when Cold War priorities shaped US thinking. The second moment covers the period from 1991 to 1993 after the Madrid Peace Conference, culminating in the signing of the secretly negotiated Oslo accords. The events of these two episodes are well documented elsewhere, including in Hanan Ashrawi's autobiographical account, but the third, that of Barack Obama's back-pedalling over demands to end settlement-building in the West Bank is new and nicely rounds off Khalidi's account. He is well placed to enlighten us on the frustration of Obama's hopes, as he was a colleague of Obama's at Chicago University, and a family friend. Indeed, as Khalidi is of Palestinian descent, this friendship was dragged up by the gutter press in its attacks on Obama as he ran for President. Khalidi's original contribution in all these episodes lies in the detailing of how the language of American brokership was duplicitous and entirely a construct of Israeli propaganda. He points out that even the term "peace process" had become a construct that was an "impermeable barrier to Palestinian emancipation." So why does the American political machine, in this case centred on the State Department (the equivalent to Britain's Foreign Office), need to adopt Israeli propaganda in presenting its policies to the American public? As Khalidi points out State Department officials from the time of President Truman were convinced that US interests did not lie with Israel at all. My own research has convinced me that Israel has always been a total strategic and financial liability to the US. But presidents as politicians are conscious of voting constituencies that are mostly unversed in the realities of the Middle East, and could not afford to take the advice of their experts. Truman was quite clear: he had to satisfy those voters concerned with the success of Zionism. Those voters were not the Jews however, they were too few. It was the Christian Zionists who were and remain the huge constituency who need to be satisfied. They are effectively a vote factory manipulated by the Israel lobby, though their preoccupations remain inoffensive to the mainstream because they mostly do not impinge on domestic policy. By speaking the language of the Israel apologists and propagandists, successive Presidents gained their majorities. Speak that language with the smallest hesitation and the presidency can be lost - as George Bush senior found to his cost. Carter too was forced to backpedal on his mispronunciation, as has Obama more recently. Khalidi's book is important, then, for exposing this strange mechanism in American internal politics. It can be read alongside works that detail the power of the Israel lobby (AIPAC), and works that spell out the power of the Christian Zionists, in order to gain a full picture of an American political culture that is in this one respect quite deadly to the rights of the people of a small foreign land, the Palestinians. I would like to see a work that brings all this together, along with the insight that there is in fact a slumbering American constituency that could become the opposing cultural force to Zionism: the atheists, secularists, agnostics and unchurched. There, bizarrely, lies the hope for Palestinian rights. This group, if fully aware of the situation, could demand the end to a foreign policy based on Old Testament belief. Galvanising this group remains the real challenge. My novel, [...] is one such attempt.

Excellent book by an excellent author who participated in some of the meetings and deeply researched others that penalized the Palestinians to the point they are at today. A must read for anyone is interested in Middle East history and cares about its people.

An eye-opener with lots of historical facts that illustrate precisely how the US became so easily manipulated by Israel on the issue of Palestine and Palestinian rights. A quote from the book: "The Spectacle of a superpower near the apogee of its global dominance being inhibited from taking actions that might be in its self-interest, and being obliged to tiptoe around because of fear of offending its much smaller ally, is a demeaning one."

Very good