The Art of the Possible

IN this short essay, Professor Reisman tries to stimulate interest in possible ways of decreasing the current level of instability in the Middle East and defusing the Arab-Israeli conflict. He begins with a short analysis of the history of the conflict and of the present crisis (the book was written in 1969), which highlights, rightly, the paradoxes of the relationship between big powers and small ones, in which the latter have much more leverage than might be expected; and the very complex structure of coincidental and interacting conflicts among the indigenous peoples of the Middle East. He points out that the Arab-Israeli conflict is only one of several international clashes in the region and that one can discern particular and different characteristics in the separate sub-conflicts that Israel has with different Arab countries. All this has been discussed already in different publications, but it is still worth re-emphasising and, even more, elaborating upon. This elaboration is missing, and the book goes on to discuss four partial solutions to the conflict

Development economics · Economics · Indigenous · Leverage (statistics) · Middle East · Peaceful coexistence · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Mathematics · Jewish-Arab relations