The Arab-Israeli conflict’s path from 1948-1990 reflected the interplay between internal dynamics and the global Soviet and US perspectives during the Cold War. While Arab-Israeli matters were not the only factor, they do help explain the Soviet and US alliance patterns in the region, and the copious amounts of arms that followed. The superpowers played crucial roles in each Arab-Israeli war from 1948 to 1973; often those roles were deeply destabilizing. The same cannot be said of the peacemaking efforts of the 1970s and 1980s, when Washington largely froze out Moscow's diplomats. US unilateral negotiating handily beat out Soviet multilateral diplomacy. Nonetheless, there were moments of cooperation over the decades, such as in the early recognition of the State of Israel, the shared disappointment at the 1956 Suez War, the definition of the land-for-peace formula (in UNSCR 242) and the mutual recognition that the Palestinian question had a national-political dimension, not just a humanitarian one. As a secondary focus, this paper will also address patterns of superpower interaction with their client states between the wars. (This paper is a draft chapter for the the Cambridge University Press Companion to the Cold War in the Middle East and North Africa.)