Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Robert Satloff

On Saturday, October 17, at The Washington Institute’s annual Weinberg Founders Conference at Lansdowne, I was privileged to serve as master of ceremonies for the announcement of our second annual Book Prize for outstanding books on the Middle East published in the previous year. This is a major literary award, one of the most lucrative for non-fiction works in the world. And this year’s winners—chosen by a three-person panel of jurors that included Washington Post/Newsweek columnist Lally Weymouth; former State Department counselor (and SAIS professor) Eliot Cohen; and Emory University Middle East professor Ken Stein—merited every dollar in prize money… and more.

The first prize, worth $30,000, went to Ronald and Allis Radosh’s A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel; the second ($15,000) went to Ali A. Allawi’s The Crisis of Islamic Civilization; and the third ($5,000) went to Martin Indyk’s Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East. What a broad, fascinating and provocative array of books! They include a history of what was perhaps the most contrary decision an American president has ever taken on Middle East policy (Harry Truman’s decision to buck the Foggy Bottom establishment and recognize the new Jewish state of Israel); a bold and courageous account by an Iraqi intellectual cum public servant about what ails Muslim societies and how to fix it; and a wonderfully introspective retrospective on a scholar-diplomat’s time on the front lines in the Middle East (and the no-less-violent battles about the Middle East back in Washington). I have no role in these decisions—we are scrupulous about having an independent, omnipotent jury whose members don’t even know the identities of their fellow jurors—but I was thrilled with how their deliberations came out.

For more information on our Book Prize winners, click here.