A Middle East diplomatic memoir with heft

Feb 5, 2023
Open diary book, old accessories and postcards. sentimental vintage style background.

Bob Bowker’s recently published memoir enriches our understanding of the Middle East and reminds us that the corpse of the two-state solution in Israel-Palestine has been lying in the sun for years, though many countries, including Australia, determinedly hold their noses and avert their gaze.

Diplomatic memoirs come in all shapes and sizes. Some offer valuable insight into the business and importance of diplomacy. Others can be top heavy with ego and the desire to settle old scores. The best memoirs weave an interesting personal story with sage advice for current and future policy makers. This is the case with a new book by Dr Bob Bowker, one of Australia’s leading experts on Middle East affairs.

What makes a good diplomatic memoir? According to one British reviewer, authors should resist the temptation to provide descriptions of the scenery observed in their travels, eschew potted geography lessons, and avoid mind-numbing repetition of the description of ambassadors as honest people sent abroad to lie for their countries.

A short paper published by a Slovenian researcher in late 2020 asked “Why do Slovenian diplomats write memoirs?” The answer to that question from the 13 current or former diplomats interviewed for the paper included a wish to analyse events they had been involved in, an “inner need”, and the “professional and moral duty of diplomats” to enrich national identity and collective memory. One of the 13 added that memoirs should also be interesting, which was not always a given since “uninteresting people get into diplomacy”.

Bob Bowker’s recently published memoir, Tomorrow there will be apricots—an Australian diplomat in the Arab World, both holds our interest and enriches our understanding of a region that has always mattered to Australia. Bowker’s is a rare knowledge, built over almost 50 years working on the region as an Australian diplomat, a UN official, and academic and author.

His book has a self-confessed split personality, one part charting the career of “a Middle East tragic”, the other offering “reflections” on ongoing policy challenges. Bowker warns that while some countries may be more exposed than Australia, no country is immune from the consequences of what unfolds in the Middle East. He cautions also that it would be foolish for Australia, or any other western country, to assume a commitment of sufficient resources, planning and policy attention on the part of the United States to secure the fruits of any short-term successes in the Middle East, “let alone rebuild societies and foster support for a new order”.

Bowker rightly takes aim at the double-standards the US and others, including Australia, bring to their dealings with the region. “I was struck by the absence of interest in maintaining consistency between US rhetoric about freedom on one hand, and US practice on the other, especially regarding Israel … Western policy-makers have also eroded our own credibility by accommodating the corruption and human rights abuses of regimes.”

Bowker cites the so-called “Arab Spring” as a major failure of policy analysis by governments both within the region and beyond. Arab regimes manifestly failed to grasp how their interests would be affected by growing educational opportunities and the boom in social media. “There was a thirty-fold increase in the number of Arabs online between 2000 and 2012 but regimes paid little attention to the impact of the internet and social media on alienated Muslims in Arab and Western societies.”

With refreshing candour, Bowker writes that Western policy makers and officials, “myself included, shared in that analytical failure. We were too close to, and too comfortable with, familiar Arab regimes. We wanted to believe their assurances about how they were reshaping their countries … we didn’t pay enough attention to the gaps between rhetoric and political and social reality.”

It’s no surprise that Bowker can offer no good news on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The corpse of the two-state solution has been lying in the sun for years though many countries, including Australia, determinedly hold their noses and avert their gaze. Bowker writes that while politically convenient, “reaffirmation of support for the principle of a two-state solution with no prospect of achieving such an outcome has become divorced from political reality on the ground. It is a wilful prevarication regarding the fundamental question of whether, in the present era, a Jewish state of Israel ruling a Palestinian majority is an unacceptable anachronism. In my view, it is.”

This book is a must read for Australian policy-makers and for anyone with an interest in the Middle East and the demands and rewards of diplomacy.

Tomorrow there will be apricots – an Australian diplomat in the Arab world, will be launched by The Hon. Tim Watts MP, Assistant Foreign Minister, at the ANU’s Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies on 15 February 2023.

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