Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict is presented as both a struggle over occupation and a revealing test of the standards applied to state violence. In the book’s account, the September 11 attacks sharply worsened Palestinians’ position: Israel moved against Palestinian cities within days, while the United States’ close support for Israel and the unequal treatment of occupation remained largely obscured in American public discussion. The conflict thus connects immediate events on the ground to a broader argument about selective knowledge, strategic power, and the consequences of retaliatory violence.

Unequal Occupations and Divergent Understandings

The book frames the conflict through a contrast between how the United States responds to occupation by Iraq and occupation by Israel. The distinction, it argues, is among the most striking examples of the gap between American and European understanding and what people in the Middle East regard as politically decisive. The two cases are not treated alike in US policy or public discussion, even though the disparity shapes how the region interprets American claims about justice and international conduct.

This difference is especially visible in American accounts of the 2000 Camp David Summit. Proposals praised in the United States as generous and magnanimous were not viewed that way across the Middle East. The book says that the reasons for rejecting them were discussed in detail in Israel and elsewhere, and points to maps as a way of understanding why the proposals were unacceptable to critics. Its point is not simply that views differ: what American commentary presents as a reassuring account is, in the region, a contested description of the terms and realities of the conflict.

The book also locates public anger within a wider regional history of US policy. It cites support for corrupt and brutal governments that obstruct democracy and development, and connects that policy to the protection of US interests in Middle Eastern oil. After September 11, a survey by The Wall Street Journal of wealthy, Westernized Muslims found that respondents’ feelings were intensified by US policy in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and in Iraq. The account challenges explanations that attribute popular anger mainly to hostility toward freedom or democracy, arguing that such explanations leave out the policies people identify as consequential.

September 11 and the Immediate Escalation

The attacks of September 11 dealt a severe blow to Palestinians, according to the book, and Palestinians recognized this almost immediately. Israel, it says, openly welcomed the new prospects for acting against Palestinians with impunity. In the days after the attacks, Israeli tanks entered Jenin, Ramallah, and Jericho; the book notes that this was the first time tanks had entered those cities. Several dozen Palestinians were killed, and Israeli pressure on the population tightened further.

The book places this sequence within a recurring pattern of escalating violence rather than treating it as an isolated response. It compares the dynamics to conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Balkans as well as Israel and Palestine: violence and retaliation can each become a pretext for further escalation. In this account, September 11 altered the political conditions surrounding the conflict, but did not resolve its underlying disputes. Instead, the changed climate enabled a harsher immediate turn against Palestinians.

US Policy, Alliances, and Political Leverage

The conflict also exposes limits in the apparent shift toward multilateral cooperation after September 11. The book traces the principle of acting multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary to Bill Clinton’s 1993 statement to the United Nations, and notes that Madeleine Albright and William Cohen later reiterated related positions. It argues that the Bush administration went further, alarming allies, and that the need to assemble a coalition might soften official rhetoric without changing policy. Coalition partners, in this reading, were expected to support US action without meaningful participation, while Washington retained the right to act as it chose.

The consequences for Palestinians, the book argues, were unlikely to be positive. It says that the September 11 attacks had already dealt them a severe setback, acknowledged by Palestinians and Israel alike. It further reports that George W. Bush and Colin Powell did not go as far as the Camp David proposals made under Clinton, despite the favorable treatment those proposals received in much of the American press. The prospect of a newly assembled international coalition therefore does not, in the book’s analysis, amount to a meaningful change in the underlying US approach to the conflict.

The account links this approach to strategic interests and to the language through which power is exercised. It describes Washington as seeking access to major energy reserves, especially those in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, as well as to resources in Central Asia. In a broader argument about US military reach, it says that the post-September 11 period brought major American bases to Central Asia for the first time, extending a network directed toward the Gulf and improving the capacity for intervention. These claims situate policy toward the conflict within a larger regional strategy rather than presenting it as separate from questions of resources and military influence.

Violence, Accountability, and Consistent Standards

The book’s analysis of the conflict forms part of a wider criticism of how terrorism and state violence are discussed. It recounts a September 2001 argument by Michael Walzer calling for an ideological campaign against arguments said to justify terrorism. The book contends that, in practice, this position can also dismiss efforts to examine the reasons for attacks directed against states Walzer supports. It connects that criticism to Israeli political assassinations of Palestinians described by Israel as supporters of terrorism, arguing that evidence was not presented or treated as necessary and that civilian deaths were routinely relegated to the category of collateral damage. It notes that US-provided attack helicopters had carried out a number of such killings during the preceding ten months.

The book also challenges the way the word assassination is set aside when the actions under discussion are Israeli, while criticism of Israeli conduct is dismissed as distorted. It places that rhetorical asymmetry alongside the long military occupation of Palestinian territories and US support for Israel. The issue, in its account, is not only which actions are condemned, but whether the standards used to judge violence remain consistent when the actor is an ally.

This question is bound to the book’s wider warning about retaliation. It argues that severe violence against civilian populations can fulfill the aims of those seeking to provoke a broader conflict, intensify anger and despair, and help draw new volunteers toward violent causes. That warning is applied across the book’s examples, but it clarifies the stakes of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict in this account: treating violence as an exception when committed by a favored state weakens the force of universal standards and risks sustaining the very escalation that policy claims to oppose.