For more than four years, Ahron Bregman and Juhan El-Tahri interviewed heads of state, prime ministers, foreign ministers, defense ministers, intelligence chiefs, soldiers, guerrilla leaders, journalists and academics from sixteen countries to accumulate a wealth of new, rich, and surprising detail. Updated with a new afterword for this paperback edition, this definitive account of war and peace in the Middle East, explores Israel's earliest attempts to establish itself.
Israel and the Arabs includes a never-before-published transcript of a conversation between Jordan's late King Hussein and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir taped ten days before the 1973 war, and an interview with Shams el-din Badran, Egypt's Minister of War in 1967, which provides new insights into the role of the Soviet Union in provoking the Six-Day War. The book it encompasses the Camp David Accords in 1978, the Lebanon War of 1982, the start of the Intifada in 1987, and the recent attempts to consolidate a shaky reconciliation.