Review: The Much Too Promised Land

Aaron David Miller was an Arab-Israeli specialist at the State Department for almost a quarter century. He served six administrations along the way, Democratic and Republican, beginning with the Carter administration in 1978 and ending with the second Bush administration in 2003. The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli peace, is a testament of those years, rather than to those years: From Miller’s vantage point, America’s mediating role in the Middle East has been more limited than the public realizes, and less effective and failure-prone than American policy makers like to believe.

Miller’s story-telling is breezy and immediate. He was a witness to history, however unseemly the history. But his writing is atrocious. He cannot write a page without a cliché, and usually many more than that. His sports analogies, his penchant for quoting high officials’ obscenities, his sometimes stunningly sophomoric conclusions (“What stands in the way of a solution is the absence of political will and leadership on both sides to understand what’s necessary to meet the other side’s needs and to take the political decisions to move forward”) undermine the seriousness of the book.

Then again, those very deficiencies unwittingly speak of the very weaknesses in American policy that Miller diagnoses so well: the principal reason for the failure of American policy in the Arab-Israeli conflict is American officials’ insistence on seeing it all exclusively from the American and Israeli perspective, through the prism of American analogies, simplicities and history. Miller himself admits repeatedly to his biases. He once wrote a book about the PLO “with almost no contacts with actual Palestinians.” You’d think he’d learned a lesson. He hasn’t. Aside from his affinity for Arafat’s slippers and kindnesses, along with a couple of interesting negotiators and translators, Palestinians are absent from Miller’s book, just as they seem to be from American negotiators’ perspectives.

The book is nevertheless valuable for its summation of a history from that particularly American, and, by Miller’s own admission, glaringly deficient, perspective.

See my full review of Aaron David Miller's The Much Too Promised Land.