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Civil-Military Relations in Israel, by Yehuda Ben Meir. (Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies) 235 pages, appendices, notes, index. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. $29.95 (Cloth) ISBN 0-231-09684-4

Dam invariably returns to interand intra-sectarian strife as a motivating force, subsuming those other factors within a framework that is primordial and immutable. There are numerous problems with this book. First, Van Dam treats Syrian politics in isolation; international affairs appear to have no significance other than to provide a backdrop for internecine confrontation. His analysis of the 1970 Jordanian civil war and its repercussions is two sentences long; he renders the October War of 1973, Syrian intervention in Lebanon and the Camp David Accords likewise inconsequential. Second, Van Dam approaches his sources too uncritically. Since, according to its own rhetoric, the Ba'th Party is committed to combat "all ... forms of factional solidarity such as religious, sectarian, tribal, racial, and regional factionalism," allusions to sectarianism found in the party publications Van Dam uses must be read with the same skepticism one would use when reading accusations of "revisionism" within official Soviet publications. A similar skepticism must be brought to bear when quoting Jordanian and Egyptian critiques of Syrian politics, and, of course, the memoirs of regime critics. And in spite of the paucity of sources, it is foolish to rely on tracts published by the Muslim Brotherhood for accounts of the 1982 Hama massacre. Third, Van Dam essentially ignores the consequences of Ba'thist economic and social policies on Syrian society. Only in his conclusion does he allude to the party's not entirely inefficacious attempts to construct a new historic bloc and effect national integration. Finally, by republishing his original work without reassessing its methodological premises, Van Dam slights almost two decades of social science literature that calls those very premises into question. JAMES L. GELVIN University of California, Los Angeles