A few hundred yards from the Yad Layeled memorial to the Jewish children killed in the Holocaust lie the ruins of the Arab village of Al-Sumayriyya. Within days of the declaration of Israeli independence in May 1948, this village was reduced to rubble by Israeli sappers to ensure that its 800-odd inhabitants would never return. Just three years after the horror of the Nazi concentration camps their victims were turning on the Arabs who stood in the way of their total command of the Holy Land. As the author of this book expresses it, "the wandering Jew found a home while the homeless Palestinians still wander the Middle East".
The juxtaposition of these two memorials stands for Anton La Guardia as an emblem of the Palestinian problem. Of course the extermination of the Jews belongs to a different universe of evil to the dispossession of the Palestinians - the Jews did not gas the Arabs. But La Guardia sees in the Middle East tragedy two communities closely related in victimhood, nourished by a depth of mutual fear and resentment which distort their memory and identity.
Anton La Guardia spent 10 years in Israel as Middle East correspondent of the Daily Telegraph and used his time to research a book that would reveal the mysteries of this quarrelsome place to the lay reader without losing interest for the well-informed. To casual western observers of the hatreds of this region, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Wailing Wall merge into the fog of modern religious bigotry, just as we can imagine the Ardoyne and the Bogside do for their Israeli counterparts. This is the book to fill the gaps, with rich historical background enlivened by stories of individual experience and the reporter's eye for detail. If it lacks a certain clarity in the structuring of the material, often leaving the reader flipping back in search of the organising theme, it compensates with vivid imagery and the sad judgments of an honest reporter on the intractable clashes of history which define the problem.
The book was completed well before the events of September 11th forced the idea of a Palestinian state into the foreign policy priorities of the West. The original dream of Theodor Herzl to found a Jewish state came to him in the wake of anti-Semitic propaganda in the context of the Dreyfus Affair of 1896. Anti-Semitism, he decided, was incurable. Only a Jewish state could secure Jews against the hatred of the world. Herzl was not set on Palestine; Argentina, Cyprus, even Uganda were considered as homes. Though Herzl's proposal seemed outlandish to Jewish readers when first published in 1896, within a few years the idea had taken root among his followers, and soon only in relation to Palestine.
Their version of the dream was first realised in February 1947, when the United Nations voted to partition the territory of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. Moshe Dayan, the great Israeli general of the 1967 war, recalls the emotion of hearing the vote on the radio: "We were happy that night, and we danced . . . but we knew that ahead of us lay the battlefield."
La Guardia dwells extensively on the place and cult of the Israeli military. Dayan reflects the best and the worst of this military tradition and indeed of this insecure nation. His own successes and failures, his dashing heroism and arrogance, speak the contradictions of the society. (The author sees Dayan's famous eyepatch as a metaphor for Israel, "one eye filled with vision and the other hopelessly blind".)
Notwithstanding the strong democratic and socialist strains in Israeli state-building, women have not yet been considered as key players in the defence effort. Though the first female F-16 pilot graduated in 1998, the author tells us, the general attitude to women in the army is still summed up by the military dictum: "The best men to the cockpits, and the best women to the pilots."
La Guardia strives to be fair to both sides, fair to the stories that each community tells of the justice of its case. In the anti-Semitism and ran- dom violence which Israelis charge to the Palestinians, he finds good cause. But his overall verdict, as indicated by the tone and weight of evidence presented in this book, is undoubtedly harsher to the Israelis. Maybe that's the best that fairness can achieve in this context.
The most security-conscious nation on earth is the least secure; but it is the lesson of September 11th rather than the lesson of its history that may at last force it to seek its security with the Palestinians rather than against them.
Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin