ABSTRACT
The Middle East seems to have dropped considerably on the scale of foreign policy priorities during M. S. Gorbachev's first years. There was no chance of a departure from the venturesome policy toward the Third World introduced under Nikita Khrushchev. Israel's coalition of the accommodating Labour bloc and the intran sigent Likud had largely disabled the country's foreign policy and polarized domestic politics. The Soviet press noted that Israeli authorities prohibited anti-Soviet manifestations by extreme rightist "non-Israeli" Zionists. Syria is all but indispensable to the Soviet Union in the Middle East region. The fragmentation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the rather belated renunciation of terrorism were no more in the Soviet interest than the long-term Syrian-Iraqi conflict played up during the Gulf war or Syria's negative attitude toward Jordan with which the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was just then intensifying cooperation.
