The Middle East has always been a source of great power confrontations, vast religious movements, and historic "about- faces." It has also had a magnetic pull, enticing commitments and allegiances from other countries. The conflict between Israel and the Arab states has been characterized by failure to compromise, deep animosities, and drastic misperceptions that have remained, despite the passage of generations, bitter and intractable. Although this conflict is essentially a struggle between two national movements - Arab and Jewish - its impact reaches far beyond the Middle East.

Amerikansk bog om Yom Kippurkrigens politiske historie.

The Yom Kippur War was a watershed moment in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the modern Middle East more broadly. It marked the beginning of a US-led peace process between Israel and her Arab neighbours; it introduced oil diplomacy as a new means of leverage in international politics; and it affected irreversibly the development of the European Community and the Palestinian struggle for independence. Moreover, the regional order which emerged at the end of the war remained largely unchallenged for nearly four decades, until the recent wave of democratic revolutions in the Arab world. The fortieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War provides a timely opportunity to reassess the major themes that emerged during the war and in its aftermath, and the contributors to this book provide the first comprehensive account of the domestic and international factors which informed the policies of Israel, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, as well as external actors before, during and after the war. In addition to chapters on the superpowers, the EU and the Palestinians, the book also deals with the strategic themes of intelligence and political of the war on Israeli and Arab societies.

The 1980s have witnessed increased concern over the impact of ethnic interest groups on foreign policy, particularly in the case of Jewish lobbying efforts in behalf of the state of Israel. In this study, Professor Goldberg presents a detailed comparison of American and Canadian Jewish lobbying organizations over the past fifteen years, offering a careful assessment of their influence on foreign policy decisions affecting the Middle East. Professor Goldberg focuses primarily on the two most prominent Jewish foreign policy interest groups: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Canada-Israel Committee (CIC). He examines the response of these organizations to a series of crisis issues, beginning with the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 and including the current Palestinian uprising. Using a set of analytical criteria, he correlates their responses with the conduct of U.S. and Canadian foreign policy during the same period. His analysis shows how the variable successes and failures of the two interest groups have been influenced both by differences in the political systems in which they operate and their own internal political and organizational characteristics. In addition to presenting significant new information on the Israel lobby, this analysis provides a groundwork for future studies of ethnic foreign policy interest groups operating in varying political systems and cultures. This volume is a valuable resource for the Jewish community as well as scholars and professionals in Middle East studies, ethnic studies, foreign policy, and related fields.

This 1977 book was undertaken with the purpose of determining the degree of Soviet involvement in the Middle East crisis, from the expulsion of the Soviet advisers from Egypt in 1972, through the planning stage of the war and the war itself, up to the disengagement agreements which in fact finally brought the war to a close. Dr Golan first investigates Soviet interests in the region, particularly in connection with the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the relationships of these regional interests - be they strategic, political, economic or ideological - to Soviet global interests. There follows a detailed study of Soviet policy towards the Middle East crisis as seen through Soviet relations with the Arab states and the Palestinians, Soviet propaganda to the Arab world, Soviet-American relations, Soviet domestic and international problems related to Middle East policy, and, more specifically, the Soviet attitude towards a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Nearly all empirical work in political science is fundamentally historical, yet very little attention has been given to the problem of grounding claims to historical knowledge. In Writing the Arab-Israeli Conflict Jonathan B. Isacoff constructs the nature of historical knowledge by deftly examining the multiple histories of the Arab-Israeli conflict written by generations of Israeli scholars. He also undertakes briefer analysis of literature, drawn from both historians and political scientists of the Vietnam War, demonstrating that historical revisionism is not unique to the study of the Middle East. Focusing on different schools of historical interpretation Writing the Arab-Israeli Conflict argues for a pragmatist approach in the tradition of John Dewey. Most importantly, this exceptional work suggests a number of practical methodological measures that can be taken to produce more sophisticated and nuanced political science scholarship.