BOOK: Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict

There has been more than half a century of raging conflict between Jews and Arabs – a violent, costly struggle that has had catastrophic repercussions in a critical region of the world. John Judis’s Genesis reveals the fatal flaw in American policy, which can be traced back to the Truman years. What happened between 1945 and 1949 sealed the fate of the Middle East for the remainder of the century. As a result, understanding that period holds the key to explaining almost everything that follows – right down to George W. Bush’s unsuccessful and ill-conceived effort to win peace through holding elections among the Palestinians, and Barack Obama’s failed attempt to bring both parties to the negotiating table.

John Judis will offer a fresh look at these critical postwar years, arguing that if we can understand how this stalemate originated, we will be better positioned to help end it.

John B. Judis is an American journalist. Born in Chicago he attended Amherst College and received B.A. and M.A. degrees in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a senior editor at The New Republic and a contributing editor to The American Prospect. A founding editor of Socialist Revolution (nowSocialist Review) in 1969 and of the East Bay Voice in the 1970s, Judis started reporting from Washington in 1982, when he became a founding editor and Washington correspondent for In These Times, a democratic-socialist weekly magazine. He has also written for GQ, Foreign Affairs, Mother Jones, The New York Times Magazineand The Washington Post.