There was, Karsh argues, nothing inevitable about the Palestinian–Jewish confrontation. Had the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs been left to their own devices, ‘most probably’ they would have taken ‘advantage of the opportunities afforded by the growing Jewish presence in the country’. The twentieth century in Palestine was a tale of Jewish broad-mindedness versus Palestinian perfidy, with the Palestinians eventually getting exactly what they deserved. The Karsh divide between Jewish goodies and Palestinian baddies is comic in its simplicity. There are plenty of quotes available to anyone writing about the conflict to back up almost any argument. Thus Karsh quotes Ben-Gurion noting magnanimously that if ‘the Arabs agreed to our return to our land, we would help them … bring about the rebirth and unity of the Arab people’. I wonder whether there might have been just a hint of trouble with the reference to ‘our’ land. The Jewish writer Ahad Ha’am observed in 1891 that if a time came ‘when our people in Palestine push out the native inhabitants, these will not give up their places easily’. Not everyone, it seems, saw the Old Testament as a land title.

A peek at the index of Palestine Betrayed is instructive. Israel’s listings lean heavily on the heroic and the noble: attacked by Arab states; turns the tables on the invading armies; initiates secret talks with the Arab states; full equality of Arab citizens; readmits refugees; supports a two-state solution. In contrast, Palestinian Arab listings suggest a distinct lack of moral fibre: selling land to the Jews; refugees; violence; reluctance to fight; depopulation of villages; lack of communal solidarity.

While the focus of Karsh’s book is on Palestinian failings up to Israel’s creation in 1948, the book’s epilogue makes clear that nothing has changed. Sixty years on, Karsh writes, Israel remains the only state in the world whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged. That, we should note, is a blatant half-truth. There is another state whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged, especially in Israel. It is called Palestine.

Karsh treats the Oslo peace process of the 1990s with trademark stridency. The process, he asserts, enabled the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) under Yasser Arafat ‘to achieve in one fell swoop what it had failed to attain through many years of violence and terrorism. Here was Israel … asking the Palestinian organisation, at one of the lowest ebbs in its history, to establish a real political and military presence … right on its doorstep.’

Conveniently, there is no mention of the first intifada (Palestinian uprising), which erupted in the late 1980s and helped to convince hard-headed Israeli political leaders, such as Yitzhak Rabin, that the mould had to be broken. There is no mention of the growing awareness in Israel of the demographic tidal wave facing the Jewish state if it continues to rule over a burgeoning Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. And there is definitely no mention of the fact that even under the Oslo process – whose implicit goal was a two-state solution – Israeli settlement activity continued apace, with the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank doubling in the decade after Oslo. Settlements are airbrushed from Karsh’s ‘historical truth’.

It follows, of course, that the problems of Oslo were all of Palestinian doing, of constant rejection of Israeli ‘concessions’. Never mind that one of the worst terrorist incidents during the early years of Oslo was an attack by an Israeli settler on Muslim worshippers in Hebron, which led Rabin as prime minister to tell foreign diplomats that he was ashamed to be an Israeli and a Jew. Never mind that the effective end for Oslo began with Rabin’s assassination by an extremist Jewish opponent of a deal with the Palestinians.

The collection of essays edited by Raimond Gaita in Gaza: Morality, Law & Politics provides welcome relief from Palestine Betrayed. The essays offer a thought-provoking, nuanced examination of fundamental questions about Israel and the serious problems it confronts – not all of them, certainly, of its own making.

The peg for the collection was the Israeli–Hamas war in Gaza of late 2008 and early 2009, which left some 1400 Palestinians dead, including women and children. The Israeli invasion followed persistent Hamas and Islamic Jihad rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel. This was, as the essays make clear, indiscriminate targeting of Israeli civilians, notwithstanding that the death toll was light, the damage modest and, no matter how distressing, the rockets never posing an existential threat to the Israeli state.

So was Israel’s attack disproportionate? Gaita says he has ‘no doubt that Israel committed war crimes and it is credible that it also committed crimes against humanity’. But he argues that Israeli politicians and soldiers should not be prosecuted unless Hamas also is. Geoffrey Brahm Levey (founding director of the University of New South Wales Program in Jewish Studies) argues that Israel’s resort to force ‘was morally justified under the cir-cumstances’ but that its ‘prosecution of the Gaza war clearly violated some of our war conventions’.

Hamas hangs heavily over any discussion of future directions. Gaita and his fellow essayists are trenchant in their criticism of Hamas and its seemingly implacable enmity towards Israel. It is an easy line to follow, given that the Hamas charter seeks the destruction of the Jewish state. Gaita appears sceptical about those commentators (of which I am one) who suggest that Hamas is not monolithic and contains pragmatists as well as hardliners. Mark Baker (Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Studies at Monash University) writes that ‘it would be fanciful to believe that Hamas would be satisfied with any withdrawal that does not altogether extinguish Israeli sovereignty in Palestine’. If that really is the case, it is utterly pointless to hope that there can be any negotiated peaceful resolution.

Levey comments that Israelis can hardly be blamed for believing what Hamas says about its intention to destroy the Jewish state. But he argues, in effect, that shunning Hamas is unsustainable and that ‘the parties will have to deal with one another’. Gerry Simpson (University of Melbourne) asks the important question whether fewer or no rockets would fall on southern Israel if the Jewish state ‘ceased its policy of slicing and dicing the West Bank with settlements and roads’. It is worth recalling here comments by Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (assassinated by the Israelis in early 2004), that the ‘main battle has always been against Israeli soldiers and settlers ... the strategy of our movement ... is to defend ourselves against an occupying army and settlers and settlements’.

Gaita concludes that Israel must lift the siege of Gaza, must not just halt settlements but must dismantle them, and must stop treating the West Bank as a bargaining chip in negotiations. ‘Only then will her demand that Hamas renounce its charter and recognise the legitimacy of a Jewish state have the moral authority it deserves.’ These are wise words, but there is no reason to think that any serious change is likely.

Israel, with the backing of the Obama administration, makes a virtue of shunning the democratically elected Hamas government until it recognises Israel, renounces violence and undertakes to respect all earlier agreements. This is a self-defeating, hypocritical policy, not merely because politics in the Middle East is as fluid as anywhere and there was a time when Israel actively favoured Hamas as a counterpoint to Arafat’s PLO. It is self-defeating and hypocritical because Israel does not recognise Hamas, has not renounced violence and has a track record of cherry-picking which parts of past agreements it will respect. Mutual recognition and a renunciation of violence must be the stuff of negotiations, not their precondition.

Levey notes the plaintive question by the late Edward Said as to why the Palestinians always had to make the first concessions. The answer, as Levey suggests, is simple. They are in the worse position. The harsh reality is that any peace process based on a two-state solution involves the Palestinians negotiating their final terms of surrender. In this grinding, demoralising struggle, violence is an integral, logical element. Simpson notes that ‘Israelis kill Palestinian civilians because this is the only way to attack Palestinian fighters ... Palestinians kill Israeli civilians because this is the only way to attack the Israeli state.’

Most readers of these two contrasting books will, I hope, look for answers, not declarations. Karsh offers plenty of the latter and essentially none of the former. It is undoubtedly true that, at times, Palestinians have behaved foolishly, indeed atrociously; their leaders have been short-sighted and have missed opportunities. So too have the Israelis. But in 2010 the best response should be, so what? Adding up the scoreboard of bad behaviour yet again may make us feel better about ‘our’ team, but offers no way out of the mess. Baker observes that ‘the assignment of guilt to one side of the Arab–Israel conflict is both false and reckless; false because it does not take into account the histories and moral underpinnings of Zionist and Palestinian claims to the land, and reckless because it communicates a message to both sides that inures them against their own agency in the conflict’.

 The final word should belong to Ghassan Hage (University of Melbourne), who comments pithily in Gaza that everybody thinks ‘they are very smart and knowledgeable when it comes to the Arab–Israeli conflict, and one has to wonder why a conflict with so many smart people involved can go on for so very long’. The answer, I fear, is that too many of those smart people – on both sides – are hostages to an ‘historical truth’ that in reality is only half the story.