Close
UCL Bookshelf: 'The View from the Fence: The Arab-Israeli Conflict from the Present to its Roots' by Neill Lochery (UCL Hebrew & Jewish Studies)
29 February 2008
Muhammad Khan, 'The Muslim News' Just as the number of politicians who are genuinely impartial when it comes to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are far and few, the same is true of the number of scholars and writers who are prepared to take a fair and balanced approach to understanding this tragic conflict.
Neill Lochery, author of the book under review, has worked as an advisor to Middle Eastern politicians on both sides of the divide. Currently the Director of the Centre for Israeli Studies at UCL, Lochery has written a concise and highly readable history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. …
He takes a genuinely non-partisan approach to a complex and intractable political problem. …
He contends that the "conflict in the Middle East is not simply about Israel versus Arabs. Splits between the various Arab states, and between these states and the Palestinians have played just as important a role in the region as the battle between Israel and the Arab world has done. Additional factors that have come to play a role in the conflict include the relative failure of modernisation in the Arab world, difficulties over allocation of resources, and the diminishing amount of the region's natural resources." …
Follow us
