IB Tauris £24.50 pp306
Independently wealthy, fearsomely intelligent and hopelessly romantic, Gertrude Bell spent much of the early 20th century wandering the Middle East as an adviser to the British government. She helped draw up the maps that divided the Ottoman empire, and she was a close companion to Sheik Faisal as he struggled to take control of Iraq. Along the way, she had overwrought relationships with two married men, which, in common with too much here, are opaquely described. Lukitz is good on the undercovered Middle Eastern theatre and consequences of the first world war, but is less sure-footed with her subject. We never get a sense of how the anti-suffrage Bell felt about sex, for instance, which was clearly a huge issue — she burnt Marie Stopes’s Married Love. Imperfect, but fascinating.
SCARS OF WAR, WOUNDS OF PEACE: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy
by Shlomo Ben-Ami
Weidenfeld £20 pp354
Ben-Ami was Israel’s minister of foreign affairs during the 2000 Camp David summit. His heartbreaking analysis of 60 years of failed peacemaking explains how only hawkish Israeli politicians have been politically strong enough to make concessions, how Holocaust obsession and victimhood have warped Israeli thinking and been appropriated by Palestinians, and how the personal agendas of certain leaders, Yasser Arafat in particular, have militated against compromise. In Israeli terms, Ben-Ami is a dove, and he takes his country to task for its illegitimate land-grabbing, as well as its opponents for their intransigent terrorist dreams. The best passages of this excellent book discuss the obvious truth that progress will come only when both sides accept that it will cost substantive concessions.
Advertisement
WE ARE IRAN
by Nasrin Alavi
Portobello Books £12.99 pp365
Farsi is the world’s fourth most popular language for writing online diaries, and Alavi mines the rich seam of surreptitious scribbling in modern Iran to produce a powerful picture of popular feeling there. The defiant and optimistic voice that emerges is proudly Iranian, loves western films and scorns the backward, hate-filled religious minority whose rule the writers regard as illegitimate. This view is skewed towards the educated and affluent, but Iran is a young nation, with high levels of computer literacy and broad access to higher education. Recent hysterical action against online diarists is one of many signs that the clerics are battening down the hatches, but the diarists insist that Iran must democratise itself and that any attempt by America to interfere would be catastrophic.