When Eytan Benstur started this book, he was near the end of serving as deputy director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The book itself is a readable and fascinating account of his involvement in the unfolding of the two years of Israeli–American discussions that led to the convocation of the October–November 1991 Madrid Middle East Peace Conference (MMEPC) and his assessment of the two years of negotiations that followed. One-third of the book is an appendix of the speeches delivered at the conference. For Bentsur, the conference was “a major historic breakthrough…a watershed event, the most significant foreign policy development since the (1979) peace agreement with Egypt, an auspicious turning point in the history of the Arab–Israeli dispute” (pp. vii, 157, 172). Given Bentsur's quarter-century experience in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, his book is a satisfying appetizer but serves no main course.

The conference and the negotiating processes designed for its aftermath aimed at achieving the elusive comprehensive peace that Jimmy Carter had sought in the late 1970s. The MMEPC was based on “a fresh political conception”—namely, a dual-track approach to resolving outstanding issues, first through bilateral talks between Israel and its neighbors, and second and simultaneously multilateral discussions among Arab states, Israel, and other countries interested in tackling broader issues such as refugees, regional economic development, security, water availability, and the environment. Bentsur's excitement and delight in participating in this process carry throughout the book, in large measure because the dual negotiating levels succeeded to one degree or another, but also because it was Bentsur's original idea, proposed to U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, that this two-track initiative be designed and implemented. To Baker Bentsur gives enormous credit for cobbling together the Madrid summit and for pushing forward the dual-track approach, in effect extracting positive results from Bentsur's idea. While the Madrid framework for negotiations on two levels was overtaken by the Oslo process—the U.S.–PLO negotiating track, interrupted by the second intifada—it introduced into the negotiating calculus the active participation of the international community, with the “Road Map” in 2002 and the Arab League Summit resolutions of 2003 as main focal points for resolving most Palestinian–Israeli differences.

If anything, Bentsur's book is short on perspective and comparative analyses. He tells us little about the failed Arab–Israeli conferences that came earlier in the century—the 1939 London Conference, the 1949 Lausanne Conference, the 1973 Geneva Conference, and the aborted 1977 effort under Carter's initiative. With his Israeli Foreign Ministry experience stretching back to the early 1970s, Bentsur's views on what he witnessed—who did what, to whom, and when—would have been illuminating. Having worked for more than half of Israel's governments since its establishment, he could have revealed more. Perhaps his stalwart professional demeanor prevented a tastier and meatier book. His summary of his time as consul of Israel in Los Angeles is revealing but too brief. We still need to know how Israeli representatives seek and work connections to promote Israel. He could have given us examples, reasons, and insights into many of the bureaucratic skirmishes within the Israeli Foreign Ministry. To have learned about how Golda Meir froze out Foreign Minister Abba Eban in favor of Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz after the 1973 war would not be a kiss-and-tell-all story but would remind us that Israeli foreign policy rests in the prime minister's office and not the Foreign Ministry compound or office building. Particularly tasty from Bentsur would have been his personal assessments comparing the periods after the 1973 war and the Gulf War. He was one of the only diplomats, Israeli or otherwise, who attended both Middle East peace conferences.

Bentsur's renditions are too sparse, too careful, too coiffed. Therein is the conclusion. Presidents, kings, generals, secretaries of state, defense ministers, national security advisers, and those engaged in Arab–Israeli negotiations write memoirs, most of them detailed but rarely self-deprecating. Unfortunately, longtime civil servants in Arab, Israeli, and American foreign ministries rarely write their memoirs. These are the folks who learn to take notes at important meetings while downing lunch simultaneously. They draft the memos, write the cables, and mostly forget little. They have a limited number of axes to grind and usually serve and survive a variety of political masters. Where else but in a memoir by a civil servant such as Bentsur would we candidly learn about Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's outlook, which was “riddled with doubt, suspicion, and even dread concerning what the future might bring…. [T]he prevailing desire was nothing more than to get the Madrid Conference over and done with” (p. 121).

The knowledge of diplomatic historians and those interested in contemporary policymaking would be enhanced by more memoirs. Unfortunately, Israel's long-serving civil servants Epi Evron and Hanan Bar-On and Egypt's Tahsin Bashir died before putting their incredible memories to paper. Likewise, a memoir from the recently departed Joe Sisco, who served so ably during the Kissinger shuttle missions of the 1970s, would have revealed that he was the author of U.N. Security Council Resolution 338; he defined the term “negotiations between the parties.” Perhaps it is not too late to cajole Daniel Kurtzer, Nabil Arabi, and Michael Shilo to write their memoirs, for each toiled for decades in the American, Egyptian, and Israeli foreign ministries, respectively.

Memoirs like Bentsur's are useful, but we need more of them that illuminate nuance. Knowing the meaning of a term in its original historical context provides insight into what any set of drafters intended. Knowing original intention helps restrain the urge to interpret history via today's avant-garde political theme. What did the drafters of Security Council Resolution 242 mean by “withdrawal” as compared with the various meanings placed on the term over time by Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Yasir Arafat, and Shaykh Yasin? Of course, even when sharp and astute memoirs are written, they are not always read by those who should read them. What would have been different about handling Iraq in the postwar phase if Paul Bremer had read and implemented the warnings about ethnic groups so explicit in Gertrude Bell's letters of fourscore years ago?