Thursday, December 02, 2010

The Book and Its Editor

Well, one of its editors.

The book is "Peace in the Making" published by Gefen and edited by the late Harry Hurwitz and me.


Photo credit: Ilana Brown


As it happens, today I was at the American Center and leafed through a volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States series, which is not online, and found a Memorandum of Conversation between Begin, then Minister without Portfolio, Ambassador Rabin and Embassy Minister Effy Evron with WW Rostow and Harold Saunders at a meeting in Washington on June 17, 1968.

Rostow tried to differentiate between "peace treaties" and "a peace settlement" - even then the term "settlement" did not sit well with him.  After the explanation, I found this:

"Mr. Begin made some general comments which showed little inclination to accept Mr. Rostow's general approach to peacemaking..."

As anyone who will read our new book, it is clear that Begin was determined to achieve no less than a peace treaty and that any intermediate situations were intolerable.

^

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