The contributors largely agree that 1983 was a year in which basic changes did not take place in the Middle East. Gabriel BenDor notes that "there was 'lots of motion but very little movement.' There were no major breakthroughs, and no stalemates were broken.... No major problems were resolved, and no new horizons were opened." Barry Rubin holds that "there was no regional crisis ... nor internal upheavals, nor threats to Gulf security." Writers on inter-Arab relations, Islamic affairs, the Iraq-Iran war, Egypt, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel, and Turkey all confirm these generalizations.
As ever, the Dayan Center has pulled together the events of a year with precision and great clarity. The planned change to calendar-year coverage in 1986 will bring the Survey into line with other reference books and make it easier to use. Rightly, the editors devote nearly half the annual to regional affairs and the rest to a country-by-country survey. The one serious complaint has to do with timeliness. Although articles for this volume were written in early 1986, it took two years for the book to appear in print. If only the editors could shave one year off this process, their efforts would gain even greater utility.
