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ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, by Nathan Thrall. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017. 336 pages. $28.
Reviewed by Ian S. Lustick
As a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, Nathan Thrall is both well-informed and well-respected. His book is divided into two parts. The title of the first chapter - 101 pages, including 31 pages of fascinating endnotes - is the same as that of the book: "The Only Language They Understand." The remaining two-thirds of the book are fascinating, well-documented, and updated versions of reports published by Thrall between 2010 and 2016 in publications such as The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, and The New York Times.
Thanks to considerable prepublication buzz, Thrall's argument in the first chapter is familiar to many Israel-Palestine watchers. Israel is ambitious, rational, and ruthless. This means that the country has only made concessions and will only make concessions (for peace or anything else) when it is presented with threats of loss that exceed the value of the concessions demanded. The other chapters are engaging, deeply informative, and even brilliant in their close evaluation of the delicate state of play among Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans. In the process, Thrall surfaces a great deal of information that will be new to most readers and some that will be startling even to close followers of the IsraeliPalestinian saga. However, although Thrall makes little effort to connect these chapters to his main argument, most of them do support the position that Israel will only compromise if it is forced to. One overall theme is that resistance in the two major Palestinian uprisings (known as intifadas) did have a marked and salutary effect on Israel. However, the coercive...