On May 29, 1948, two weeks after five regular Arab armies invaded Palestine in an attempt to erase the lately established Jewish state, the UN Security Council imposed an embargo, which banned the supply of arms, war materials, and other forms of military aid to the parties directly involved in the Palestine conflict. During the embargo the Arab-Israeli war was fought and decided, and the concluding armistice of 1949 between the rival parties marked a new era in the history of the Middle East. What, Amitzur Ilan asks, was the link between the UN embargo and the conclusion of the war, and how did the concluding armistice mark a new era in the history of the Middle East? Defining four important junctures of the war, Ilan looks at the real (as opposed to stated) Orders of Battles for both sides and points out the immense impact of the embargo on the decline of military capability of the Arabs and the Israelis, and at the same time depicts the relative advantage it created in Israel's favor. Employing a large number of Israeli, British, American, and Czech documents, The Origin of the Arab-Israeli Arms Race provides an excellent point of departure for those wishing to understand the actions that created and fed the arms race between the Arabs and Israelis.
Amitzur Ilan is Lecturer in the American Studies and History Departments at the Hebrew University.
-, "For Cynthia Lee, legal analysis is not a scholastic exercise in logical deduction or philosophical puzzle-solving, but a vivid form of social criticism. In relentlessly exposing the law's foundation in partisan social norms, she challenges the prevailing modes of legal scholarship as well as the prevailing understandings of voluntary manslaughter and self-defense doctrine. Murder and the Reasonable Man establishes Lee as one of the pre-eminent commentators on American criminal law." -Dan Kahan, Professor of Law, Yale Law School "Lee's book is a compelling and well-informed analysis of the issues raised when courts confront questions of reasonableness in high-profile, headline-grabbing cases." -"Choice", "Provocative and persuasive. In this well-written and meticulously documented book, Cynthia Lee demonstrates how the law has defined 'reasonableness' in criminal law to favor men against women, straight men against gay men, and whites against blacks. Lee's synthesis of many seemingly different examples, with thoughtful responses to the various objections that might be raised, is legal scholarship that can make a difference in our social practices. This is a serious and compelling book that should lead to reform." -Frank H. Wu, author of "Yellow: Race in America beyond Black and White" "Smart, insightful, and important, this book proves that the criminal justice system does not treat all persons equally--that the reasonable man is a man, and that men get away with murder, while women pay with their lives. Must reading for students of the law, gender studies, and all those who care about equal justice." -Susan Estrich, Robert Kingsley Professor of Law and Political Science, University of Southern California, and author of "Real Rape, Getting Away with Murder: How Politics is Destroying the Criminal Justice System"
