Candace Karp argues that the United States squandered opportunities to settle the Palestinian refugee problem, delineate final borders, and determine the status of Jerusalem in a manner that would have contributed to regional stability. Thus, writes Karp, the United States did a disservice both to the countries of the region and its own national interest. Karp deals with borders, refugees, and Jerusalem from 1947 to 1949, territory in 1956–57, and all of those issues with regard to the period immediately following the June 1967 war. Her verdict is that only in 1956–57 did the United States pursue a policy that both promoted its strategic objectives and diminished regional tension, forcing Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip. Karp favors the term “immediate deterrence” to describe U.S. diplomatic coercion and the determination to impose, were they to have been necessary, economic sanctions to force Israeli compliance.

According to Karp, in 1948–49 no such determination guided the administration of Harry S. Truman, which acquiesced to the territorial gains Israel made in the first Arab–Israeli war. She regards this as a missed opportunity. In her view, the United States should have withheld the $100 million Export–Import Bank loan to Israel that the administration in January 1949 authorized, adding diplomatic pressure to force it to withdraw to the borders of the 1947 United Nations partition plan (pp. 12–13). The Department of State recommended such a policy, and in the author's opinion, the failure of the White House to heed that counsel grievously damaged U.S. relations with Arab states. Instead, Israel remained in control of both the Negev region and the Galilee, bringing the dimensions of the Jewish state to one third more than the territory the partition plan had assigned it. The United States faltered with regard to Jerusalem, too, failing “to impress upon Israel and the Arab world its desire to see the city internationalized” (p. 124).

In Karp's view, the United States missed another opportunity when, in 1967, it failed to reverse Israeli territorial gains, compel Israel to readmit to the West Bank the refugees that fled to Jordan in a second “exodus,” and force it to relinquish the eastern part of Jerusalem. How should the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson have dealt with this situation? “The workable solution involved an Israeli withdrawal from East Jerusalem, along with the rest of the West Bank, and the Old City placed under an international regime” (p. 260). Karp does not clearly explain how, in the circumstances that prevailed after the 1967 war, the United States could have elicited Israeli compliance with such demands.

Four principal flaws mark this work. First, the depiction of U.S. policy toward the Arab–Israeli conflict as ineffectual and self-defeating is facile. Karp applauds President Dwight D. Eisenhower for a “diplomatic onslaught against [Israeli Prime Minister David] Ben Gurion [that] was efficient and relentless” (p. 169). However, the circumstances of early 1949 and mid-June 1967 were as vastly different from the situation in 1956 as they were from each other. The author greatly oversimplifies matters by stating that Truman was prepared to force upon Israel neither a solution to the refugee issue nor a retreat to the 1947 borders because he was “unwilling to punish a new nation with a horrific legacy,” that of the Holocaust (p. 282). In fact, the Truman administration saw no strategic justification for alienating Israel from the Western camp and, in late 1948, resisted British pressure to force the Israelis to give up the Negev. Karp's treatment of that aspect of U.S. policy is poorly focused, and she should have consulted the work of Zvi Ganin and William Roger Louis.

Karp claims that, in 1967, “American opposition to an Israeli withdrawal without corresponding Arab initiatives towards peace compromised its own position in the region” and benefited the Soviet Union (p. 213). However, it is neither clear that the United States in June 1967 could have forced an Israeli withdrawal nor apparent how doing so without an Arab quid pro quo would have contributed to regional stability. Karp quotes Lucius Battle, the assistant secretary of state who, in August 1967, noted that “U.S. influence and control in Israel is as limited as that of the Soviets over the Arabs” (p. 213). In any case, the Johnson administration wished not to reward the Arab states for their part in bringing about the 1967 War, while Arab losses in that war placed a severe strain upon the Soviet Union's relations with Egypt and Syria, both of which it had armed heavily.

A second flaw is the cursory treatment of salient aspects of both the Arab–Israeli conflict and the cold war in the Middle East. There is no mention of the primary Soviet goal in the late 1940s, preventing Palestine from becoming an Arab-dominated state that would host British bases. Karp fails to note the arms embargo that the United States in 1948 imposed on both Israel and the Arab states and refers almost not at all to Soviet and Western arms to the region during the entire period that the book covers. Moreover, she accords the Middle East policies of President John F. Kennedy less than a page, thus relegating to brief mention, in the context of the next administration, the plan of Joseph Johnson, Kennedy's initiative for a settlement of the refugee problem.

Third, the author has drawn extensively upon archival sources but is led by the documents, filling the text with numerous quotations and in some places reusing them (pp. 35, 80). A fourth shortcoming is that of historical inaccuracies and awkward passages throughout the book. These irregularities, many of which the editor should have corrected, undermine the author's arguments. An example of such confusion is Karp's explanation of the U.S. failure in June 1967 to publicly reprimand Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol for the Israeli role in creating and perpetuating a second Palestinian refugee crisis. She writes that “at any rate, White House strategy pertaining to a long-term comprehensive strategy, based, in the short term, around its linkage strategy, negated any chance that Tel Aviv would moderate its behavior” (p. 241).

Some readers may not care for the author's repeated reference to “Tel Aviv.” In fact, Israel conducts its affairs of government in Jerusalem and considers that city its capital. Writers who wish to remain aloof from the controversy over sovereignty may avoid using either city as a substitute for references to Israel. The author also terms the first Arab–Israeli war the “War of Independence.” Perhaps she should have preferred the neutral “1948 war.” These faults should not deter researchers dealing with U.S. policy toward the Arab–Israeli conflict from consulting this work, but a more clearly written book may be more suitable for classroom use.