In recent days, Israel has withdrawn in haste from southern Lebanon, leaving a chaotic vacuum in its former "security zone" but bringing political kudos at home to the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, and ending 22 years of occupation in a matter of days. The full drama unfolded on television screens around the world - just as one of the major dramas in the sequence of events that led to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon unfolded on television screens almost 30 years, giving Ehud Barak a role in Lebanon that he would later regret.
Simon Reeve's book sets out to tell the events over 24 hours in September 1972, when a Palestinian commando squad captured a group of Israeli athletes in the Olympic village during the Munich Games, the bungled German attempts to negotiate with the hostage takers, and the ensuing farce that came to a climax with an airport firefight and ended with a death toll of 11 Israelis, five Palestinians and a German policeman.
The Munich Games should have been a showpiece, a symbol of Germany's rehabilitation in the democratic world. They should have provided new images for Munich, the city close to Dachau and closely identified with the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews. But everything went wrong for the new Munich and the new Germany as the world watched Jews suffering once again on German soil.
The Israeli athletes had good reasons to fear their journey to Munich: the months immediately before the games had been marked by hijackings, bombings and murders following King Hussein's ruthless expulsion of militant Palestinians from Jordan in a violent month that became known as "Black September", a month that gave its name to a radical group of Palestinian militants.
Reeve tries to paint pictures of the Palestinians, Israelis and Germans - and the Olympic officials caught up in the drama. And a dramatic approach, rather than political analysis, dominates a book based on an Oscar-winning documentary, claiming to rely on previously secret documents - mainly in Israel and Germany.
Although half a dozen identities have been offered for "Issa", the Palestinian leader of the attack, Reeves claims with certainty to have identified him as Luttif Afif, who was born in Nazareth to a wealthy Christian Arab businessman and a Jewish mother. If correct, this identity would challenge stereotypical images linking Palestinian militants with Islamic fundamentalists, and disturb many Israelis who know Jewish identity is passed on only by mothers to their children. Reeve becomes less credible when he blames Yasser Arafat for Munich without compelling evidence, and identifies the main conspirator as Abu Daoud. Daoud has always denied any involvement, and has recently returned to the West Bank, where he runs the Fatah membership office in Ramallah.
Reeve is more sympathetic as he tells the sad stories of the Israeli victims and survivors. Shaul Ladany, who survived the attack, had survived a direct hit on his family home in Belgrade when he was five; at the age of eight he was freed from Bergen-Belsen with his mother, father, and sister, but recalls chillingly: "My grandmother and grandfather were made into soap in Auschwitz". Mark Slavin, the Russian-born wrestler who died, arrived in Israel only four months before the Games and had taken up wrestling to avoid being beaten up by anti-Semitic bullies in his home city of Minsk.
Germans and officials of the International Olympic Committee later blamed Jews and Arabs for ruining the Munich Olympics. But Reeve blames nine of the 11 Israeli deaths on German bungling, and catalogues a series of farcical decisions that ended in chaos and disaster: negotiations with Egypt were mishandled; police refused to disguise themselves as Lufthansa crew on what might have been a getaway jet; only five snipers were brought in to pick off eight guerrillas, without telespcopic sights or infra-red; and backup tanks on their way to the airfield were snarled in the traffic jams created by sightseers.
The book is less than complimentary about Avery Brundage, the IOC President, who was tactless as he addressed the memorial service the day after the disaster, and who pressed for the Olympics to continue despite the murder of athletes and the withdrawal of others - after all, these were the Olympics of Mark Spitz, Mary Peters and Olga Korbut.
The attack gave Israel an excuse to launch revenge attacks, with Ehud Barak leading Operation Spring of Youth in Lebanon. The consequent train of events was unstoppable: one of the worst massacres in Lebanon later took place in Chatila, the refugee camp that nourished some of the guerrillas who died in Munich.
Reeve tells the sad and human story of the trauma that has continued to haunt the families of the Israelis killed in Munich. But books like this also help to continue the image of Israel as the victim in the Middle East. He might have spent more time with the families of the Palestinians caught up in this tragedy; they too are victims of the conflict in the Middle East, and the greatest hope in this book is offered by the parents of one of the guerrillas, Afif Hamid, who still mourn their loss but hope for reconciliation between Palestinians and Jews.
Patrick Comerford is Foreign Desk Editor of The Irish Times.