ABSTRACT
Between 13 September and 14 November 19 51, the Palestine Conciliation Commission met in Paris for a series of 12 formal meetings, alternating between Israeli and Arab delegations. This episode would prove to be the last post-1948 effort by the United Nations at the conference style of Middle East diplomacy. Owing perhaps to a combination of its lack of results and the difficulty in obtaining primary source materials, the Paris Conference has merited little more than a passing mention in both traditional and revisionist studies to date. I Although the official UN records remain closed, in this and the following chapter we have been able to reconstruct the activities and calculations of the main actors based on a number of newly available sources. 2
Two things become strikingly evident from the detailed examination of the Paris conference offered below:
• the declining ability of the PCC and the US to influence the principal parties; and
• the sophisticated techniques of avoidance which both Israelis and Arabs were perfecting, and which demonstrated their improved ability to hold fast to their entrenched and incompatible positions.
Despite its barren outcome, the archival record also reveals that both the PCC and the US State Department invested much effort into 'stage-managing' the conference, beginning with elaborate preparations which included-for the first time-the formulation of a USinspired PCC plan for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement.
