Four Arab-Israeli Wars and the Peace Process - Softcover

In focusing on four major wars in the Arab-Israeli conflict from 1947 to 1979, all of them ending in agreed ceasefires, truces, or armistices, this book concentrates on the external efforts after each war to help resolve the conflict.

This book describes the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, and four kinds of postwar mediation: by concerned individuals, UN mediators, committees of states, and the US government. Committees of states have been singularly ineffective. Concerned individuals and UN mediators have been mainly useful in reducing misperceptions, but agreements on issues where real interests were in conflict required the provision of external (US) resources. The author concludes by challenging some of the conventional wisdom about mediation (e.g. that face-to-face encounters between adversaries always help, that the mediator must necessarily be impartial, and that mediation is most effective when there is a power balance between the two sides).