Book
The UN’s Multidimensional Approach to the Israel-Arab Conflict, 1967–1982: An Architecture for Peace
In this book, Diego Salama analyses how the United Nations built coordinated regional peacekeeping operations across the Israel-Arab conflict between 1967 and 1982.
- Author
- Diego Salama
- Date
- 16 September 2026
- Links
- View the book
This book analytically traces the history of the United Nations in the Israel-Arab conflict between 1967 and 1982, through an assessment of its political action and its increasingly complex peacekeeping operations. Drawing on previously classified UN archives, it examines the two together rather than separately and argues that their relationship explains both the organisation's achievements and its limits.
Across this period the UN built a regional architecture. UNTSO, UNEF II, UNDOF and UNIFIL were formally separate missions with separate mandates, and in practice they came to operate as a coordinated system, sharing personnel, logistics and institutional knowledge across borders. The book introduces the concept of inter-operation collaboration to describe this, and traces the career of General Ensio Siilasvuo, who chaired the 1973 ceasefire negotiations at Kilometre 101 and later designed and held the post of Chief Coordinator of UN Peacekeeping in the Middle East.
The architecture was not designed at Headquarters. It accumulated through field improvisation, which New York subsequently ratified. The verdict the book reaches is mixed rather than celebratory. The Secretariat achieved a great deal operationally within political limits it could not overcome, and when the political space narrowed after Camp David, those operational achievements did not survive. That distinction, between what an organisation can build in practice and what it can sustain politically, remains the central question for peace operations today.