Chronicle of a War Foretold: How Mideast Peace Became America's Fight

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

From 1992 to 1995, Norman Spector was Canada’s ambassador to Israel
and the Palestine Authority. Raised as a Jew, he knew sufficient Hebrew
that he could read newspapers and speak on television. He then learned
Arabic well enough to deliver speeches. Professionals at the Department
of External Affairs resented him as a political appointee of Brian
Mulroney’s who had leapfrogged to the top over career diplomats, but
their language skills, he says, were weaker than his. As ambassador, he
met innumerable Israelis and Palestinians—including Yitzak Rabin and
Yasser Arafat—and made friends on both sides of the great divide.
Spector, a bachelor, even became romantically involved with a
Palestinian woman.

Since his return to Canada, Spector has become a columnist in a number
of Canadian newspapers. Chronicle of a War Foretold consists of reprints
of his columns. Whatever one says about the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict is necessarily controversial, and Spector’s book has as much
or as little credibility as his newspaper columns. He attacks the
supposedly pro-Arab bias of the Ottawa establishment (diplomats and
federal Liberals) and of Western European governments. He admires George
W. Bush and defends his attack on Iraq. He considers Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon an obstacle to peace.

Spector says that as Ambassador, he considered his instructions from
the Department of External Affairs to promote peace quite unrealistic.
He left that challenge to the U.S. Ambassador and spent his time on what
he really could achieve: the strengthening of Canada’s commercial,
economic, and cultural ties with both Israelis and Palestinians.
Canada’s free-trade agreement with Israel was probably the most
significant result of his efforts. Helping the worthy migrate to Canada
was another part of his responsibilities, as he saw them.

Spector argues persuasively that without a knowledge of Arabic, neither
journalists nor diplomats can understand the complexities of that
unfortunate part of the world. The book is useful as a collection of one
expert’s thoughts, and an index would have made it more useful.