Reappraisals

In "States of Exception", Tony Judt offers a brave, broad-based and clear-eyed examination of the prospects, six years on, for Israel and the United States of a "War on Terror" that has drawn the two countries together into a dangerously isolated relationship.

He brings into focus the bind in which Israel finds itself, with the assistance of an American Presidency unwilling to use any of its leverage to prevent Israel's right-wing hawks from bringing draconian measures to bear to solve problems stubbornly resistant to any quick or ham-handed solutions.

He then broadens his vantage to consider the recent role of the United States in the Palestinian question and in the region more broadly, a role that has been, in short, an unmitigated disaster.In the name of remaking the Middle East into an environment safer for Israeli and American interests, the past six years have instead seen the region transformed into a cauldron of violence, as Iraq descends into civil war and anarchy, Iran flexes its nuclear muscle, Lebanon falls more securely into Syria's orbit, Afghanistan teeters on the brink, and the region's autocrats rest easier at night, secure that the downside of democratic "transformation" has been made all too clear.

Neither America nor Israel now has the credibility to bring other developed countries along with them to face a crisis of mounting intensity.

In the meantime, honest analysis of the mutually-damaging relationship between the Bush Administration and the Israeli Right is shouted down as unpatriotic - or worse - leading to a climate of opinion in which reasoned thinking is difficult if not impossible.

A tough-minded, fearless and far-seeing analysis by a thinker who is justly famous for all three qualities, "States of Insecurity" is the book this vitally important subject so urgently needs.