ABSTRACT
The period that followed the 1949 General Armistice Agreements saw relative quiet in the Arab-Israeli theater. The Soviet attitude of principle that called for direct Arab-Israeli negotiations was intended on the operative plane to minimize Western influences in the Arab-Israeli arena. “Arab-Israeli hostility was said to "enable the imperialists to interfere permanently in the domestic affairs of both the Arab countries and the State of Israel." The USSR derived a double benefit from the existence of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Although aware that the Arab-Israeli conflict was the central components of Middle Eastern politics and cognizant of the advantages likely to accrue from it for the USSR, the Soviet leadership exercised the utmost caution in all that related to the conflict in the May 1949-March 1953 period. The Soviet government was nonetheless "convinced" that the United Nation would be able to find a solution for the Jerusalem problem that both the Arab and Jewish sections of the city would "accept."
