First published in 1984, Ovendale's study went through seven printings and now appears in a second, updated edition; it is therefore a major source of information on the Arab-Israeli conflict. (Incidentally, the study is misnamed, being more about the wars themselves than their origins.) Too bad, for it's an eccentric and biased work.
In Ovendale's view, "the Arab-Israeli wars resulted from great, and then superpower, policies." He blames London and Washington most, Paris and Moscow secondarily. He finds U.S. influence everywhere: "it was the United States that fathered Israel." American citizens engaged in "blackmail" to win United Nations support for partition in 1947. This bizarre understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict leads the author to devote more space to the shaping of American opinion than to military buildups in the Middle East. Missiles, in short, matter to him less than movies. The cinema offers Ovendale an opportunity to showcase other odd views. He cites The Graduate (yes, the Dustin Hoffman movie) as proof that Jews had by the 1960s been absorbed into something he calls "American hyphenate culture." Fascinating, to be sure, but what has this to do with the origins of Arab-Israeli wars? In the section on Gamal Abdel Nasser's alienation of Western opinion, he discusses the way movies portrayed homosexuals in Nazi Germany; for some reason, he thinks that the absence of feature films on this subject helped Israel's image in the West vis-à-vis the Arabs. Eccentric may be to mild a term to describe Ovendale's mind.
