Recent Books
196 foreign affairs
stacles. The risk of a war with Israel is
high. Economic decline at home and the
fracturing of Shiite communities abroad
may also curtail Soleimani’s ambitions.Be Strong and of Good Courage: How Israel’s
Most Important Leaders Shaped Its Destiny
BY DENNIS ROSS AND DAVID
M A KOV S K Y. PublicAffairs, 2019, 384 pp.The authors, both well-known experts
on Arab-Israeli affairs, present an
important book in two parts. The first
consists of biographical sketches of four
Israeli leaders who all made momentous
decisions affecting Israel’s relations with
its Arab adversaries: David Ben-Gurion,
who announced the birth of Israel in
1948, immediately precipitating a war
with its Arab neighbors; Menachem
Begin, who promoted unilateral peace
with Egypt in 1977, giving up the Sinai
Desert in the process; Yitzhak Rabin,
who embraced the Oslo peace process;
and Ariel Sharon, who unilaterally
withdrew from Gaza in 2005. These four
leaders were committed to a two-state
solution, which Ross and Makovsky
emphatically endorse, an outcome that
would avoid the creation of a binational
state in which a third or more of the
population would be Palestinian. In the
more intriguing, second part of the
book, the authors lay out the arguments
for and against the notion that Israel is
endangered by an internal Arab
demographic “time bomb.” The authors
believe that the growth of the Palestin-
ian population is a long-term threat to
Israel’s democratic system. They also
offer suggestions for what Israel could
do unilaterally to move toward a two-
state solution—and how Washington
could support such actions. The authorsMiddle East
John Waterbury
Temperature Rising: Iran’s Revolutionary
Guards and Wars in the Middle East
BY NADER USKOWI. Rowman &
Littlefield, 2018, 226 pp.
T
his insightful monograph exam-
ines the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps of Iran, founded in
1979 to defend the country’s Islamic
Revolution. In 1980, Iran created the
Quds Force, a detachment of the Revolu-
tionary Guards intended to mobilize
Shiite communities throughout the
Middle East and Central Asia. Uskowi
focuses on the Quds Force and Qasem
Soleimani, who has led the group since
- Although Uskowi has served as a
senior U.S. military adviser, his respect
for Soleimani is clear. The force’s 200,000
members include Iranians, Afghan
Hazaras, Iraqi Shiites, and others. Its
budget is largely off the books, siphoned
from the operations of Iranian founda-
tions and companies. Annual funding for
the group may be as much as $20 billion.
Its biggest operation by far is in Syria, but
the force is also active in Iraq, through
militias that boast 100,000 fighters (twice
as many as are in the regular Iraqi mili-
tary); in Lebanon, through Hezbollah; in
Afghanistan, through logistical support
for the Taliban; and, since 2014, in Yemen,
through the Houthis. In Syria, the Quds
Force has established a land bridge from
Iran to Lebanon. Despite these gains,
Soleimani’s group and its parent body, the
Revolutionary Guards, face major ob-