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Why can't those people just get along? You know—the Arabs and the Jews. Isn't it obvious that, whatever is at the base of their inexplicable mutual hatred, the two parties are getting further and further away from even trying to understand each other? With each passing day, it seems, some new offense of one party against the other adds another layer of grievance, one more complication to be unwound before we can get the parties thinking again about putting it all behind and getting on with what everyone else on earth is getting on with.
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Perhaps if we walked the parties backwards over the chronological ground, they could observe the intensity of the quarrel getting less and less (retrospectively), until we find the moment when the two parties were actually talking to each other civilly; and then we could walk the parties forward from that same point and show them that it had all been about a failure to communicate.
Amy Dockser Marcus believes that she has found that moment. It was during the year 1913 when there took place "what can only be described as the first Arab-Israeli peace negotiations over the future of Palestine," indeed the "[first] serious effort to negotiate what we today would call a Middle East peace agreement."
Marcus is certainly entitled to respectful attention. She lived nearly a decade in Israel as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and has developed a valuable network of friends and colleagues in the land, with whose help she has found her way into several private family archives. Working in these materials, she has brought to our attention a number of sturdy personalities who were significant movers and shakers in several of the component communities of pre-Mandate Palestine. In her introduction, she announces that if we keep our eyes on the comings and goings of these actors we will find our way to the moment of truth announced in the opening pages.
This is not, however, as easy to do as she suggests. Her characters are introduced abruptly, then re-introduced in flashbacks from 1913 and later escorted past that year in a few flash-forwards. There are so many digressions that we fear she has forgotten the pivotal significance of the year 1913; and when she does get to her rendezvous, she glances off it at once and heads down other poorly lit byways.
The pivotal section occurs on pages 124 to 133. What is disclosed here will, I believe, disappoint most readers. It is a somewhat vague account of conversations between certain freelance Arab nationalist thinkers and politicians active at Istanbul in months prior to World War I and subsequent contacts of these parties with two Jewish figures with middle-level Zionist connections. One of these latter, a certain Sami Hochberg, shows up as a participant at the Arab National Congress held in Paris in June of 1913, an assembly attended by 23 persons, including 11 Muslims, 11 Christians, and one Jew. Hochberg is said to have talked about Zionism with the others; but no evidence appears that these Arabs (Muslim and Christian) incorporated any of his insights into their program. This is no surprise since, by Marcus' description, Hochberg "was neither an official employee, nor a high-ranking member of the Zionist movement … [and thus] his mission could be disavowed at any time." The point of this story seems to be that since the declaration that issued from this Congress did not contain a tirade against Zionism—and since Arabs would never again meet in any kind of formal setting without putting such a tirade at the heart of their conclusions—it must have been a fruitful moment for Arab-Israeli relations.
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