Lost Opportunities for Peace in the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Israel and Syria, 1948-2001

Overview

In a challenge to much of the conventional wisdom, Jerome Slater of the State University of New York writes that observers in the United States and Israel have unduly laid blame for the decades-old Israeli-Syrian conflict on the leadership in Damascus. Although both Israel and Syria have been "inflexible, ideological, and prone to maximal demands," Slater says, Israel bears greater responsibility for the lack of a comprehensive Israeli-Syrian settlement. Slater begins with an overview of the conventional wisdom and then assesses challenges to it by Israel's "new history movement." He then traces the "lost opportunities for peace" between the Israelis and the Syrians since 1948. Slater concludes that the key stumbling block remains Israel's unwillingness to withdraw to its pre-June 1967 borders.