Recent scholarship on the 1948 War has concentrated on Israeli concerns. Central to revisionist studies of the last two decades has been the importance of the Zionist–Transjordanian alliance that emerged during the 1930s and 1940s. The opening of the Israeli archives has determined this line of inquiry, which presents the balance of power in the region in an entirely new light. The Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, was not David fighting an Arab Goliath, we have learned. In part, this reflected the military balance of power, but it was also due to the political understandings reached among Zionist leaders, King ʿAbdullah, and the British. We now have a much clearer understanding of how disunited the Arabs were, how little reason the Yishuv had to fear the Arab Legion, and how close the Zionists came to avoiding war with the Arab states altogether. The “new historians” have focused on Israel and Jordan at the expense of the other Arab states, about which we know relatively little. The Arab states, not surprisingly, were also influenced by the Amman–Tel Aviv secret dialogue, and the threat it posed.

For Syria, the danger of King ʿAbdullah's dialogue with the Jewish Agency was not so much the likelihood that it would help the Yishuv to become a state, which most believed to be quite small. The real danger was the prospect that it would allow the Hashemites to become the dominant power in the region. From the outset of the war, the primary concern of the Arab states was the inter-Arab conflict.