Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin made an astute decision in the summer of 1992 when he entrusted the highly respected rector of Tel Aviv University, Itamar Rabinovich, with the task of reinvigorating the moribund Israeli–Syrian negotiations that had grown out of the Madrid Conference the previous October. Rabinovich had launched a stellar academic career by writing what remains arguably the best study of Syrian domestic politics during the Ba⊂thist era; his subsequent work explores the dynamics of the civil war in Lebanon, the intricacies of Egypt's relations with Palestine during the 1940s and 1950s, and the origins of inter-Arab diplomacy, among many other topics. More important, in 1991 Rabinovich published an authoritative yet accessible overview of the tangled history of direct talks among the governments of Israel and its Arab neighbors in the years immediately after the 1948 war. The book not only undermines the general presumption that the Arab–Israeli dilemma is inherently insoluble, but also elucidates the miscalculations and tactical errors that derailed early attempts to resolve the conflict. Rabinovich was clearly the right person to supervise delicate bargaining with the Syrians, and might have been expected to compose a notable account of his experiences once his term as Israel's chief negotiator came to an end.