Israel's Covert Diplomacy in Lebanon

Schulze, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, deals with Israel's policy toward the Maronites (the Catholics of Lebanon) from 1948 to 1984. She does a more than competent job of researching in depth this narrow topic but then undermines the value of her diligent work by forcing it to serve an unpersuasive thesis about Israeli foreign policy. In Schulze's view, Israel's approach to the Maronites proves that "intervention in the political affairs of neighboring Arab states" has been a constant and central feature of its foreign policy. Or, as she puts it elsewhere, the goal of what she calls "Israeli aggression" is "not Israel survival but hegemony." This thesis makes no sense: her own pages show Israeli leaders wracked with worries about survival; relations with the Maronites can hardly stand in for those with powerful states such as Egypt and Syria; and the whole notion of Israeli "hegemony" smacks of the nasty canard about Israel seeking to dominate a region from the Nile to the Euphrates rivers. Sad to say, Schulze in the end merely adds one more arrow, and a small one at that, to the great academic assault on Israel.