ABSTRACT
This chapter, which has already been referred to many times, begins with a condensed set of events in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but then takes on a slower pace and eventually covers all four decades of the Cold War. The first subchapters address great power influence in the region and Czechoslovak–Soviet–Israeli diplomatic and secret military cooperation during Israel's War of Independence around 1948, involving mainly leftover arms originally produced for the Nazi German army in the “Protectorate,” which were then sold and delivered to Israel.
