On May 29, 1948, two weeks after five regular Arab armies invaded Palestine in an attempt to erase the lately established Jewish state, the UN Security Council imposed an embargo, which banned the supply of arms, war materials, and other forms of military aid to the parties directly involved in the Palestine conflict. During the embargo the Arab-Israeli war was fought and decided, and the concluding armistice of 1949 between the rival parties marked a new era in the history of the Middle East.

What, Amitzur Ilan asks, was the link between the embargo and the conclusion of the war, and how did the concluding armistice mark a new era in the history of the Middle East? Employing a large number of Israeli, British, American, and Czech documents, Ilan concludes that a study of the relative strengths of the two sides at different junctures in the war must be determined not by the number of arms possessed but also by the actual utility of those arms.