To prepare for President Obama’s trip to Israel this week, it’s worth reading Elliott Abrams’s book Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
“Tested by Zion is two books in one. In addition to being a candid memoir, it is a meticulous history, peppered with passages from interviews with the key American, European, and Middle Eastern participants in the events. These testimonials alone make this an indispensable source for anyone interested in understanding the evolution of American policy toward the Middle East. But this is no mere chronicle; its heart and soul is a defense of Bush’s departure from the foreign policy “consensus.” As such, it represents the single most cogent statement of the neoconservative analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” writes Michael S. Doran about Abrams’s book in this magazine.
