ABSTRACT
The two years between the end of the Lausanne Conference and the beginning of the Paris Conference were uneventful in terms of military confrontations or progress towards a political solution. But they were crucial for setting the pattern of what has become the protracted Arab-Israeli conflict. Between 1949 and 1951, the following features came to characterize relations between Israel and the Arab states:
• Israel's determination to hold fast to the territorial status quo, while building up the new state through Jewish immigration and economic development;
• the Arab states' determination to do everything possible to undermine Israel's 1948-49 military and political victories through economic boycott, blockade, and lobbying at the United Nations and in Western capitals;
• the Palestinian refugees' growing despair that their plight would not be relieved either by the Arabs' regaining Palestine or through United Nations efforts at repatriation and resettlement;
• repeated signs of the untenable nature of the Armistice Agreements signed between Israel and her neighbours;
• the Western powers' periodic expressions of concern for the deterioration of the armistice regimes, especially if instability in the Arab-Israeli conflict threatened to weaken Western influence in a region which was fast becoming the object of East-West rivalry;
• an arms race, in which all Middle Eastern states requested
military equipment ostensibly for 'defensive' purposes and the maintenance of internal stability.
