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Robert Fulford on Chronicle of a War Foretold

A short, sharp shock of a book: Canada's former ambassador to Israel takes a practical look at the conflict and emerges both a realist and an optimist

CHRONICLE OF A WAR FORETOLD: HOW MIDEAST PEACE BECAME AMERICA'S FIGHT by Norman Spector

Douglas & McIntyre

179 pp., $24.95

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Norman Spector writes about the Middle East with frankness and unpretentious clarity, which is something of a miracle when you remember he spent decades in the linguistic swamps of Canadian public policy.

Chronicle of a War Foretold, a marriage of newspaper columns and scattered memoirs, comes across as a short, sharp shock of a book, full of uncomfortable truths and political comment expressed as personal revelation.

For example, a striking statement of Arab attitudes comes from a Palestinian woman who was Spector's lover in the early 1990s, when he was ambassador to Israel. They conducted a mostly clandestine relationship, because of Arab society's strict sexual taboos, but one evening he took her to the movies to see Schindler's List. She watched restlessly, which he attributed to discomfort over Nazi genocide. "Later ... I learned from her that for many Palestinians the Holocaust is not a fact, but Zionist propaganda." When terrorists blew up a Tel Aviv bus, killing many Israelis, he asked her how her family would react. She said they would have smiles on their faces.

Spector was, it should be clear by now, no ordinary ambassador. He was the first Jew Canada ever sent to Israel as a diplomat. More important, he rejected our government's institutionalized delusions. Ottawa natters on about Canada's part in "the peace process," but, as Spector says, the Middle East doesn't see it that way. The first Palestinian intellectual who heard him preach the Ottawa gospel (Canada, with no colonial past, seeks only peace) replied that he was either lying or representing a naive country. Spector saw the point and decided to ignore his official mandate.

The U.S. ambassador might make peace, but, in a political sense, "being Canadian ambassador to Israel was not a real job." So he spent his three-and-half years trying to improve Canadian relations with Israelis and Palestinians in science, business and culture.

He defends his former colleagues in the department of External Affairs against the charge of anti-Semitism. He says they're Arabists, quite a different matter. Their careers depend on sympathizing with the 21 Arab states, so they agree that Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is the cause of the region's strife. In truth, bitter conflict goes back at least to the partition of Palestine in the 1940s, which the Arabs rejected. "Jews accepted partition because they had nothing; Palestinians wanted everything and ended up with nothing."

Spector sees parallels between the Oslo Accords and Canada's Meech Lake process, both failed attempts to produce political stability. They foundered, he argues, for similar reasons: little Cabinet input, little scrutiny of negotiating positions and overselling of the merits by both sides.

Traces of Spector's exceptional career show up in just about every corner of the book. He started out as a lecturer at the University of Ottawa with three graduate degrees: a master's and a doctorate from Columbia in government and a master's in television and radio from Syracuse. Since then, he's held eight jobs: Ontario civil servant, B.C. civil servant and deputy minister to the premier, senior civil servant in Ottawa, Mulroney's chief of staff, ambassador, president of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, vice-president of Imperial Tobacco and publisher of the Jerusalem Post. Now, just turned 54, Spector appears in various newspapers as an educated commentator on the Middle East and Canadian politics. He supports Israel but not Ariel Sharon. He's a thorn in the side of the CBC, whose anti-Israel bias he finds repugnant.

Unusually for a public-policy book, Chronicle of a War Foretold left me wanting more, particularly about Spector's own experience. He writes in public about government the way others with his background speak in private. Even so, he shows that writing about Israel (and, for that matter, governing Israel) often requires holding incompatible ideas. The Oslo Accords depended on making peace with a terrorist-led community, a clear impossibility. Yet Israel's government, and many of its friends abroad, decided to bet everything on that idea, because nothing better was available.

Spector ignores similar contradictions. He's never met a Palestinian who believes in Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state, but he ends his book with the wistful hope that, after Iraq is defeated and the Arab world modernized, the Arabs will reverse their most passionate opinion and see that Israel can "help pull the MidEast out of its current torpor."

In Oslo days, that was a favourite theme of Israeli politicians, but to most Arabs it was (and probably remains) inconceivable. How could their most hated enemy become their leader? Norman Spector considers himself a realist, with some justification. But on Israel's future, he, too, remains a dreamer. It comes with the territory.

robert.fulford@utoronto.ca

Color Photo: (Book cover of Chronicle of a War Foretold: How Mideast Peace Became America's Fight.)