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ENVISIONING THE ARAB FUTURE: MODERNIZATION IN U.S.-ARAB RELATIONS, 1945-1967 Nathan J. Citino Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. (xviii + 326 pages, bibliography, index, illustrations) $34.99 (cloth)
On 6 September 1970, two US airliners and one Swiss aircraft were hijacked by gunmen representing the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the most radical wing of the Palestinian nationalist movement. A fourth plane, El A1 flight 219 flying from Amsterdam to New York, was also hijacked by two Palestinian guerrillas, but El A1 crew members shot and killed one hijacker and wounded the other. The Palestinian hijackers took one of the planes-Pan Am flight 93-to Cairo, where, after the 170 persons aboard were evacuated, they blew up the plane. The other two planes were flown to Dawsons Field, an abandoned airfield thirty miles east of Amman, Jordan, where, for the next three weeks, Palestinian commandos and the J ordanian army engaged in a standoff for the safe release of the passengers.
For decades, the hijackings were viewed as largely a response to US and Israeli policy in the Middle East and to highlight the continued statelessness of the Palestinians. More recently, Paul Thomas Chamberlin argued that the hijackings were designed to send a message to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser after he agreed to a US-negotiated ceasefire, in August 1970, which ended the Egyptian-Israeli War of Attrition. But, as Nathan J. Citino argues in his outstanding book Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in U.S.-Arab Relations, the Palestinian guerrillas had a far different objective in mind when commandeering the planes. The hijackings, he claims, were the most vivid expression of the "the loss of faith in the modernizing state" (256). Fida'iyyin operations, and especially the PFLP-led hijackings, he claims, were "radical acts in which the individuals and militant cells rejected the authority of Arab governments and leaders, such as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jordan's King Hussein, who had staked their authority on the promise of development" (256).
By viewing the events of Black September as a consequence of the failed attempts by both Arabs and Americans to modernize the Middle East in the Cold War era, Citino, a professor of history at Rice University, offers a refreshing interpretation of US-Arab relations that moves away...