The social studies teacher in today’s elementary and secondary school is faced with a serious problem in attempting to determine the curriculum for a geography, cultures or history course: does one discuss each of the 145 or so independent states in the world, allowing only one hour of class period per country, or should particular attention be directed to certain nations? Of course, the latter is the only logical alternative. The problem remains, however, of how to select those states that will be examined in detail.

In the decade since the Six-Day War of June 1967, a multitude of peace plans and procedural formulas for the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict have been advanced by governments, international organizations, private groups, and individuals. No other international dispute has inspired so many and variegated suggestions on how to proceed toward its settlement. Particularly prolific in ideas have been private sources, which, unlike national governments and their officials, are not fettered by the requirements of diplomatic bargaining or the burdens of political responsibility. The apparent intractability of the complex of problems and issues that have come to be collectively known as The Middle East Conflict, while generally acknowledged, has not dampened the ardor of would be peace-makers. To the contrary, academics and retired diplomats, journalists and jurists, think tanks and study groups have found it a spur to their imagination and a challenge to their ingenuity. The result has been an outpour of literally hundreds of proposals in varying degrees of comprehensiveness and originality, scattered over the pages of books, scholarly journals, popular magazines and the daily press of the Middle East, Europe and North America.