BLOOD OF ABRAHAM

In Carter, the US had a Christian president for whom biblical history was as real as it was for his Muslim and Jewish opposite-numbers, Egypt's Sadat and Israel's Begin: hence the titular image of three peoples, three faiths with a single source. But, as Carter was to discover, the political world is more complicated. "My early optimism in dealing with Assad and the entire Middle East question was unjustified," he writes apropos of his meeting with Syria's president in 1977. "Without my overconfidence, however, I would probably not have been willing to explore the opportunities that did exist." Most of the book is potted history—repotted, as Carter recognizes, to present the Middle East problem successively from the Israeli, Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Jordanian, Egyptian, and Saudi Arabian points of view. He's had help from area-specialists, and there is little with which to quibble in these summaries of Mideast conflict from the Roman occupation through the Ottoman and colonial periods to Jewish settlement of Palestine, Israeli independence, the Arab-Israeli wars, and the impasse over Palestinian nationalism. Internal developments in each country are reasonably indicated too—up to Israeli rifts over Lebanon but not including Egyptian disaffection with Sadat, which Carter cannot or will not see. (His attempt to be up-to-the-minute has dated the book already—viz, the Israeli pullout from Lebanon—but he's to be commended for forthrightly mentioning the date of writing.) His conclusions are equally unremarkable: in brief, the Arab nations must recognize Israel's right to exist; Israel must recognize the Palestinian right to "self-determination"; and the US must somehow take a hand. But, going back, there are numerous inconsistencies and contradictions. Assad's 1977 readiness to consider a non-PLO Palestinian presence at prospective Geneva peace talks ("the main obstacle") ended at Sadat's unilateral visit to Jerusalem. Begin's invocation of biblical history was such as to block implementation of the Camp David accords in regard to Palestinian self-determination—and even bring a call for absorption of the East Bank (i.e., Jordan). As for a major US role: "The judgments concerning what is best for Israel will be made in Jerusalem"—Washington's influence is "sometimes embarrassingly slight," Arab leaders doubt the US will exert effective pressure. So we are where we have been for some time: what Carter has done is to explain the stalemate multilaterally, in least-common-denominator terms. . . without the canniness (or hard-headedness) of the adversaries: on a 1983 visit to Jerusalem, he's outraged when an Israeli soldier accompanying him on his morning jogging swerves ("the sidewalk was wide enough for us to pass easily") to knock newspapers out of the hands of curbside Arab readers. Carter sees callousness, arrogance, humiliation; the soldier sees cover for guns. Still: a creditable work of popular instruction, by a celebrated author.