This solid monograph follows the Palestine conflict from a special angle, that of the surrounding Arab states and the agreements and disagreements among them. The main part of the book runs from the early 1930s to the war of 1948, with a final chapter on the Egyptian revolution of 1952 and U.S. policy serving as a kind of floating epilogue. Rubin knows his subject and has unearthed much archival material (mainly British and American) as well as Arab sources, but the murky history of inter-Arab relations does not yield all its mysteries.