Prologue PROLOGUE As I was FaceTiming with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert recently, I asked the seventy-nine-year-old statesman a poignant question: "Do you consider the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas your friend?" Sitting in front of shelves full of well-worn books, he thought for a moment before responding that he created an atmosphere with the Palestinian president that developed into a "friendly relation." He went further to speculate that Abbas probably regards him as more of a friend than not a friend. His response reminded me of the ancient adage "The mightiest of the mighty turns an enemy into a friend." I asked him about recent proposals to clear out the Gaza Strip, transfer the population, and annex the West Bank. He sounded indignant. Practically, he pointed out that Jordan or Egypt might collapse. Morally, he did not want to live in an "apartheid" state. Ehud Olmert has been called many things by many people.

By his detractors, he has been described as corrupt and even a traitor for seeking peace with the Arabs. To admirers like former Israeli foreign minister and renowned historian Shlomo Ben-Ami, he was a good prime minister who was unfairly targeted by investigations because he compromised with the Palestinians. Militarily, the low point of his time as premier was the prosecution of two wars, in Lebanon and Gaza, against Hezbollah and Hamas respectively; in both cases, Israel''s actions were condemned internationally, and its adversaries dug in deeper. The high point of his military achievement was unquestionably the destruction of Bashar al-Assad''s plutonium reactor in 2007 in an area of Syria that had been taken over by the Islamic State terrorists seven years later. Few regional governments today would admit the truth: that they secretly welcomed the loss of Syria''s nuclear weapons program. One can legitimately criticize Olmert''s conduct in war; but as this single operation in Syria suggests, a traitor who went soft on security he was not. It is precisely because of Olmert''s aggressiveness in military affairs--and in the case of Syria his destruction of their nuclear reactor--that his peacemaking efforts should be taken so seriously. In fact, the former prime minister''s most significant diplomatic failure turns out to be one of the most significant diplomatic accomplishments in modern Middle Eastern history.

While he and Mahmoud Abbas did not consummate a peace deal for reasons that will be explored later, the two former enemies demonstrated clearly to the world that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not intractable. Olmert''s map (see page 249), which at the time was unavailable to the public, has now been revealed; two states, land swaps, a shared Jerusalem, multinational oversight on holy sites, peace and security. Abbas could not say no and he never did. No other Israeli prime minister--not Begin, not Rabin, not Barak--ever cracked this core code, presenting a deal that would be acceptable to Israelis, Palestinians, and the broader Arab and Islamic world. Whenever the subject of peace in the Middle East arises, I think of this plan. While I have disagreed with many actions undertaken during Olmert''s time as premier, there is no other plan that has been demonstrated to be viable. The secret sauce is that it enables both nations to express their right to self-determination with dignity and security. It seeks to establish a modicum of fairness and justice, however unfair and unjust the situation actually is.

I have every reason to believe that the vast majority of Jews and Palestinians would overwhelmingly support this plan--if they understood it--and if they understood that the other side was serious. For any world leaders looking to solve this conflict, starting with Olmert''s plan is a good place to begin. The View from Below Behavioral ecologists will tell you that hornets are terribly misunderstood insects. They are beautiful and indeed wonderful creatures, part of the diverse family of wasps, capable of building elegant social geometries, and vitally important to the global ecosystem. Most of us know only what happens when they and their homes are attacked. I thought this to be an apt metaphor for America''s engagement in the Middle East over the past eight decades--and also how the subject itself might be approached empathetically. I have decided to begin with brief commentary on the events of October 7, 2023, and the events that followed, along with an autobiographical reflection, so that the reader might better understand some experiences, which I believe to be unique, that have been influential in shaping the questions I have asked as well as the manner in which I have drawn my conclusions. Unlike many of my generation, I had first visited the Middle East as an impressionable child and witnessed firsthand the devastations wrought by war.

But like many of my generation, my interest in U.S. foreign policy was shaped in the most basic way as a teenager, as I witnessed broadcasts of the Twin Towers collapsing on September 11. Subsequently, I watched my country, blinded by rage, stumble into two failed wars, the effects of which persist to the present. In college, the topic seemed to grow all the more important. By 2006, the UC Berkeley campus was brimming with anger over the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and then Lebanon. As an undergraduate, I did not feel I could add much value to campus arguments and so did not attempt to. I felt that I had too much to learn.

It was said of Eleanor Roosevelt that she would rather light a candle than curse the darkness. I wanted to do the same. And so I launched a campaign against one of the greatest killers in the Middle East region: type 2 diabetes. Few people I spoke to in the region understood how destructive this disease is to virtually every organ and bodily function. Few doctors were prepared to deal with the enormous public health and economic implications of type 2 diabetes and its associated co-morbidities. I thought then and still think that the global noncommunicable disease pandemic is a threat to regional stability and also constitutes an international security threat. I traveled to the West Bank and, using funds I won through the Haas and Strauss Scholarships competitions, worked to improve public health for refugee and low-income communities. My trips would result in the invention of the "microclinic" model, which my colleagues and I eventually scaled throughout the Middle East, with the aid of Queen Rania of Jordan and her Royal Health Awareness Society, the Jordanian Ministry of Health, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which was requested by the Israeli government to serve refugees with its full cooperation in the West Bank and Gaza.

Over a decade ago, my colleagues and I ended up training tens of thousands of lay health-care workers, who serve millions of refugees and low-income individuals in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Despite the many terrible things occurring in the political arena, as a matter of empirical fact we knew that our work had improved metabolic health and saved lives. And in the process, I had learned lessons that could not be gleaned from books. When I started my humanitarian efforts in 2005, I did so at a basic level, working with individuals and their families in the West Bank before branching out to other countries. I was pained as I met ordinary Palestinian families--grandmothers, grandfathers, mothers, fathers, and especially beautiful children and babies, many of whom had lost aspects of what I would consider a "normal" childhood. I visited people in their homes and, despite rampant poverty, was welcomed to meals with great hospitality and inspired by stories of resilience--of births under curfew and near misses with bullets. I visited the local university, where I also saw a worrying rise in support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Most troubling of all, I saw what happens when politics fails: the supporters of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a small but growing group, were gaining traction.

This latter organization, while thus far espousing nonviolence, shares objectives with Al Qaeda and ISIS insofar as it wishes to resurrect a global caliphate and bring Muslim and non-Muslim societies under the rule of Islamic Law. Interestingly, it is opposed to all Middle Eastern governments, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority. I considered the possibility that misguided U.S. foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan had made nostalgia stronger for a selective reading of Islamic history. My worry was that if things got desperate enough, Hamas and Islamic Jihad could one day be replaced with something even more extreme, such as a violent version of Hizb ut-Tahrir. My fears would be actualized, not in Palestine in 2005, but in 2014 in Iraq and Syria, where the so-called Islamic State (a.k.

a. ISIS or ISIL) would desecrate the legacy of two powerhouses and historic seats of the Islamic "Golden Age"--Iraq and Syria--committing genocide against religious minorities and hijacking vast oil resources. ISIS came close to seizing Syria''s chemical weapons, and as mentioned previously, had Olmert not destroyed Syria''s nuclear program, they may have seized a plutonium reactor as well. In a failed attempt to secure a meeting with President Bashar al-Assad, I had visited Syria in late 2010, standing in awe of its beautiful landscape, culture, and history. Soon thereafter, the uprisings of 2011--known to the wider world as the Arab Spring--left the government so severely compromised that al-Assad had to be propped up by Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia. In a failed attempt to meet with former prime minister F.