The Road Not Taken, Early Arab-Israeli Negotiations

(New York, Oxford University Press, 1991) Winner of the Jewish Book Award.

For five decades, the Arab world has technically been in a state of war with Israel, a pattern broken only by Cairo's Camp David accord with Jerusalem. No conflict in international politics has seemed more intractable. But for a few brief years after Israel's War of Independence, the Jewish and Arab states engaged in direct negotiations that came tantalizingly close to a permanent settlement. In The Road Not Taken, Itamar Rabinovich mines a wealth of new sources to reconstruct those critical talks, showing how close they came to success, and how their failure laid the grounds for the current impasse.