A Soldier in Search of Peace: An Inside Look At Israel's Strategy

Plot

Major-General Avraham Tamir is not one of the highest-ranking Israeli soldiers or politicians to write of his view of the groundbreaking 1979 Israeli-Egyptian Peace Accords. This is both a positive and negative in his book. On the plus side, it means he probably has less reason than higly-celebrated military men (e.g., Moshe Dayan, Ariel Sharon) to distort the behind-the-scenes accounts that would reflect poorly on him. On the negative, he is mostly recounting what higher-ups are doing and negotiating, as his role was mostly to dialogue and implement with his 2nd-tier counterparts from the Arab side.

The book does do a good job of showing how complex foreign policy negotiations over contentious issues can become: back channel negotiations, trial balloons, public pronouncements designed to mislead your negotiating adversary, playing for media and public support back home, and of course, trying to have the United States lean ever-so-slightly to your position. Tamir does a good job of giving us a taste of how this is done at the level just below the prominent newsmakers we see nightly on our evening news. For good measure, Tamir and his colleagues occasionally interact with those higherups, be they Menachem Begin, Moshe Dayan, or Anwar Sadat.

The book is not organized chronologically, and this makes the book a more difficult read compared to other autobiographies or books on the Middle East conflicts. It tends to zig-zag from the author's recollections to other past historical events, some of which have little connection. Chapters and paragraphs do not seem to have any major themes, other than the narratives of what military and political backups like Tamir did to assist the major negotiators. If the book's intent was to impress upon readers the difficulty of multi-lateral negotiatons on many fronts, it does that very well. If the intent was to write a narrative like "My Life" (Dayan) or "Warrior" (Sharon), it fails.

Tamir just touches upon the major post-1948 events like the 1956, 1967, and 1973 conflicts. The accounts of Lebanon in the 1980's similary requires previous understanding of the basic conflict and major actors on the stage, otherwise, the back-and-forth approach that Tamir utilizes between his back channel contacts and what was happening in the theater is somewhat tough to digest.

This book was originally published in Hebrew, so it is also possible that it reads a bit more fluently in the author's native tounge.

This book should not be considered a substitute for historical books dealing with Arab-Israeli conflicts, like Oren's "Six Days of War" or Rabinovich's "The Yom Kippur War."