The Ways of Syria
Stasis in Damascus
Article Summary and Author Biography
As Washington considers a rapprochement with Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, Itamar Rabinovich’s commanding new book makes clear that change will not come quickly or easily -- and, if the past is any indication, it may not come at all.
FOUAD AJAMI is Professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Vallentine Mitchell
2008
365 pp.
$49.95
Reading List
An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on Syrian politics.
In one of his sweeping insights, Henry Kissinger once captured the forces at play in Syrian history. "Damascus is at one and the same time the fount of modern Arab nationalism and the exhibit of its frustrations," he wrote. "Syrian history alternates achievement with catastrophe. . . . The injustice of foreigners is burned deep into the Syrian soul." A big and commanding new book of history and diplomacy by the Israeli scholar Itamar Rabinovich takes readers deep into the world of the Syrian state -- and into that mix of pride and injury that has shaped its modern history. Rabinovich tracks the twists and turns of Syria's political journey in recent decades, its transformation from the plaything of outside powers into a player of consequence in the Levant. No other writer has dug as deep into such material as Rabinovich has in this book, a distillation of a lifetime of concern with the ways of Syria.
What the great historian Edward Gibbon once called "the most disgusting of pronouns" -- the writer's "I" -- hardly appears in this rich and luminous book of essays. Yet although it draws on historical material, including memoirs and archives, in Arabic, English, French, and Hebrew, it is also enriched by personal experience. In 1993, the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin gave Rabinovich the opportunity of a lifetime: he pulled him out of the academy and appointed him ambassador to Washington and also (and more important for the purposes of this book) chief negotiator with Syria.
To my knowledge, Rabinovich has not walked the streets of Damascus and Aleppo. But his passion for Syria's life runs through this volume. For Rabinovich, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Syrian Baath Party, Syria has always been achingly close yet a forbidden land across a hostile border. His four decades of scholarly and policy work, it could be said, have been a relentless quest to document and understand the puzzle of Syria.
FATHERS AND SONS
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