Salim Yaqub's Imperfect Strangers, about the fateful course of US–Arab relations in the 1970s, weaves together two stories. The first is a familiar one, about Henry Kissinger's prodigious efforts to secure a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, although Yaqub tells it differently from most others. The second, about the emergence of an organized Arab-American political community in the United States, is much less well known. Similar to accounts that see the decolonization of Africa influencing the course of African-American political activism in the 1950s and 1960s, the decade of the “oil crisis,” shuttle diplomacy, and the Camp David Accords led increasing numbers of Americans of Arab descent to assert themselves politically, and many others in the United States to see Arabs, not least Palestinians, more humanely than the portraits of them in the era's blockbuster films about hijackings and other “terrorist” misdeeds. There is a great deal to learn and debate in Imperfect Strangers. And since he tells these intertwined stories with flare, it is an engaging text to teach.

Yaqub contributes to the recent trend in intellectual, diplomatic, and economic history inviting us to rethink the place of the 1970s in the history of the United States and the broader international order in which it is entangled. The world we are living in now emerged, this school argues, out of the tumult of that decade. The Cold War gave way to détente. The Bretton Woods system to resurgent globalization. The end of decolonization saw the beginning of the so-called human rights revolution. For the intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers, the escalating war of ideas marked a new “age of fracture.” Perhaps most relevant for Yaqub, US military power began its pivot from Southeast Asia to the Middle East. A recent study by retired colonel and emeritus professor of history Andrew Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East (New York: Random House, 2016), analyzes the now nearly four-decade-long (and counting) US military campaign, one in which the Arab–Israeli theater hardly matters. Imperfect Strangers explains why.

Yaqub focuses his critical gaze on the Harvard political scientist, Henry Kissinger, who joined the Richard Nixon administration in 1969 as national security advisor. Kissinger later did double duty as secretary of state, outlasting the disgraced president and continuing on in the Gerald Ford administration until 1977, when the Democrats regained the White House. That gave him plenty of time to engineer the break-up of the Arab confrontation front, sabotage the search for a comprehensive peace that would gain the Palestinians independence, and secure Israel's permanent control over the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. It turns out, in other words, that Kissinger's record in the Middle East is no more positive than in Southeast Asia and South America. The difference with these other Cold War arenas is that an additional factor came into play in the double-dealing, step-by-step diplomacy that paved the way for the Camp David Accords, namely, Kissinger's identity as a German-Jewish refugee with a strong personal commitment to assuring Israel's victory over its Arab adversaries. It is unusual but not unprecedented to argue that Kissinger's Jewish identity mattered.

He takes an even more unusual tack however with his account of the mobilization of Arab Americans in the aftermath of Israel's victory in the June 1967 war. Yaqub traces the rise of organizations (the National Association of Arab Americans, the Association of Arab American University Graduates, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee). He discusses the key activists and would-be political entrepreneurs (e.g., South Dakota House and later Senate representative James Abourezk; Joseph Baroody, whose father headed the conservative American Enterprise Institute; the Detroit antiwar activist, attorney, and FBI target, Abdeen Jabara). And he explores the ideological differences that emerged among them—particularly their incompatible understanding of the drivers of US policy—as these organizations sought to move American governments and publics to reexamine their views of Arab peoples and of the legitimacy of Palestinian claims for self-determination.

Yaqub recognizes the meager harvest (“successes were rare and modest” [p. 13]) of these efforts to shape public opinion and change, that is, humanize, mass media images, let alone to transform US Middle East policy. We are still contending with the caricatures of rapacious oil shaykhs and kafiyyeh-wrapped killers from that decade. Yaqub himself recalls when the Nixon administration began to screen Arab visa applicants in the wake of the Black September Organization's attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Some of his interlocutors described the “Operation Boulder” visa program, together with a parallel program to monitor resident Arab immigrants, as a “dry run” for the post-9/11 surveillance regime (p. 89).

Still, as he puts it, “Arab American figures and groups began receiving a more respectful hearing in the mainstream media and public institutions” (p. 10). Washington took greater notice. Activists gained some minimal access to the White House, and, as Yaqub shows, a few prominent professors even served as intermediaries between the Carter administration and the PLO. One example he misses is when Columbia University's Edward Said traveled to Beirut in March 1979 at the behest of US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. While the groups with which he was associated were busy condemning the September 1978 Camp David Accords, Said tried but failed to gain chairman Yasir ʿArafat's agreement to recognize UN resolution 242 in return for US recognition of the PLO and a role in the proposed autonomy negotiations (see Said's interview with David Barsamian, Z Magazine, 52, December 1993, accessed 7 May 2017, http://desip.igc.org/ArafatRejectsCarter.html).

My students were generally quite skeptical of Yaqub's explanation for Kissinger's scuttling of the comprehensive peace agreement. Their reactions matter because they hadn't read other accounts, such as that of Daniel Sargent, who argues that Kissinger's support for Israel “did not derive from Kissinger's Jewish background, as Nixon [and now Yaqub] suspected, so much as from geopolitical logic” (A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015], p. 151). They judged Yaqub solely on the basis of the quality of the evidence he assembles, which amounts to a few quotes from Kissinger's diaries and a passage in his memoir. He might have strengthened his case, therefore, by contrasting Kissinger to figures such as President Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinksi and the latter's advisor William E. Griffith, who had equally impeccable geopolitical credentials yet positions different from Kissinger's on Israel. I finished the book thinking he had not attended carefully enough to what social scientists call the problem of “internal validity” or the confidence we can have that his and not some other cause explains the outcome of interest.