Walter Laqueur - The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict

It is close to fifty years that work on the first edition of this Reader began, but a solution to this conflict seems as remote as ever. Eight years have gone by since publication of the last (seventh) edition. These years have witnessed further negotiations and further fighting, but no significant progress towards peace, even though some important Arab-Israeli issues have been settled. New politicians and new military leaders have been dealing with the issues involved, but in many ways they are further away now from agreement than they were twenty or forty years ago, especially on the question of whether there should be one state or two on the territory of what was once the League of Nations mandate of Palestine.

In the waning years of the last century, when talk was on the Middle East conflict, it could be taken for granted this referred to Israel and the Palestinians. But this is no longer the case: now it could refer to Iraq or Iran, to Syria or Yemen, to the Islamic State or the confrontation between Sunnis and Shiites, or to the region as a whole. When the Reader first appeared, the Six-Day War had been fought, but the Yom Kippur Warlet alone the Lebanese civil war (which lasted fifteen years)was still ahead, as were two intifadas and scores of peace plans. Gamal Abdel Nasser was still ruling Egypt, the Shah was in power in Iran, and Bashar al-Assad had just been born. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah had been established. The wave of religious fanaticism that was to sweep not only the Middle East but large parts of Asia and Africa had not remotely reached its present intensity.

It is useful to recall that while the Middle East in the late 1960s was not among the worlds calmest regions, many of its more violent conflicts lie still ahead. But the conflict we document in this volume already existed. As it has endured, so have the attempts to bring it to an end, or at least to achieve temporary or local arrangements to defuse it, and an ever greater number of leading statesmen has visited the region. But no significant progress has been achieved. Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties with Israel and there was even an Israel-PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) agreement, albeit one that was never fully implemented within a comprehensive peace settlement. The Gaza Strip fell under Hamas rule; it was temporarily invaded and hit hard by Israeli forces that inflicted greater damage following military action against Israel by Hamas and by other militants infiltrating Israel through tunnels, as well as bombarding Israeli cities and settlements with thousands of rockets.

For more than five decades The Israel-Arab Reader has tried to document these developments as objectively as possible. Over the years it has become a standard text for those wishing to familiarize themselves with the essential issues involved in this conflict.

This new edition is dedicated to the memory of Barry Rubin, who acted as co-editor of the Reader for more than two decades. Without his decisive contribution, work on this Reader would not have continued.

We also wish to thank Christopher Wall and Josh Klein for their help in the preparation of the present edition.

Walter Laqueur Dan Schueftan