According to William Haddad, the publication of the article caused a sensation at the time. Haddad notes that the American syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft, a month later, echoed Yinon's ideas in an article that Syria would implode into confessional fragments composed of Alawite, Druze and Sunni communities were the country to be occupied after an Israeli invasion, and that such an event should cause reverberations throughout the Arab world, resulting in a reconfiguration of ethnic microstates guaranteed to introduce an era of peace. The idea was dismissed at the time. Yinon's article drew several other responses, and was reviewed in Newsweek (26 July 1982, p. 32) and the Wall Street Journal (8 December 1982, p. 34). Amos Elon reviewed the essay for Haaretz and worried that American commentators on Israel were turning a blind eye to the kind of irrational attitudes evinced by Yinon's article. Those who did point out such tendencies within Israeli politics were subjected to defamation. David Waines, reviewing the essay for the International Journal of Middle East Studies, contextualized it in terms of two other works appearing in the same year as Yinon's essay, a collection edited by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and a book by Michael J. Cohen on American, British and Zionist long-term regional policies, both arguing such policies were dictated solely by a realpolitik insouciant of Palestinian grievances. In the light of the immediate instance of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in that same year, Waines concluded that all three pieces created a 'grave apprehension about present and future developments in the Middle East.'