Bernard Wasserstein was born in London in 1948, educated at Oxford and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is currently Professor of History at Glasgow University and a visiting Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.

This book grew out of the Leonard Stein Lecture Series that Wasserstein delivered at Balliol College, Oxford, in 2002. He is encouraged by the emergence in recent years of a move towards “consensus on hitherto contentious issues” by many Israeli and Palestinian historians. He aims to further this development by bringing “to the foreground some relatively neglected aspects of Israeli-Palestinian relations”, namely, the demographic, socio-economic, environmental and territorial dimensions of the struggle. He tackles each of these aspects a chapter at a time, and concludes with a fifth chapter entitled “Dynamics of Political Change”.

In the first chapter, he explodes two myths. The first is that the majority of Jewish settlers from the 1880s on had been Zionists in their home countries, and attracted to the concept of a Jewish State. He maintains that most went there simply because other countries were closed to them. Nevertheless, once there, they reinvented themselves. “In a common pattern of nationalist myth-making, they invested their [and their ancestors’] presence in the country with a retrospective significance that was at variance with historical reality”.

The other, more recent, myth is that the Palestinian population has grown chiefly because of immigration. Instead, Wasserstein produces statistics to demonstrate that it has been due to a much higher birth-rate compared to the Jewish rate. Hence the Zionist dream of a majority Jewish population has not been realised, particularly given dwindling Jewish immigration.

In the second chapter, he traces the history of Jewish settlement, and the failure of the early Zionists to build a viable rural working class, and thereby create a hermetic Jewish society and economy. Israelis and Palestinians, instead, are “economically intertwined”.

Development indeed has come at an enormous cost to the environment. At the beginning of the third chapter, he cites the death of the four Australians at the 1997 Maccabean Games as an illustration of the problem of water pollution. In fact, the problem of water and its distribution is pivotal to Wasserstein’s insistence that Palestinians and Israelis must learn to live together in interdependence.

In the fourth chapter, he tackles the thorny problem of territory. While outlining the history of settlement, he never questions Israel’s right to exist as a nation state. He is, however, very critical of Jewish, as well as Muslim, terrorism, and argues forcefully for territorial compromise. But borders should be “porous”: the two peoples need to learn to live as neighbours and not enemies for their mutual benefit.

Whether those aforementioned historians can continue to develop consensus, and help their people realise that benefit, even Wasserstein is wary of predicting. Nonetheless, his optimism is a welcome respite.

Sue Bolton