Britain changed tactics, seeking to appease the vociferous hostility towards a possible Jewish state on the part of the newly independent Arab states of Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia and of the Muslims of India by drastically restricting Jewish immigration and land purchase, and seeking to crush the militant Jewish national movement that emerged in Palestine even as the Second World War was being fought. In his penetrating study, Norman Rose describes the evolution and course of what Churchill — in 1946 — called Britain's "squalid, senseless war" against the Jews. It was a war characterised by mutual hatreds, reprisals, abductions and executions.

Rose, a distinguished Israeli historian, writes objective, hard-hitting history. He notes that as early as 1919, the American King-Crane Commission of Inquiry stated that no British officer in Palestine whom the commissioners consulted believed that the Zionist programme could be carried out except by force of arms. "In essence", Rose comments, "little changed until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948-and for many years thereafter."

The coming to power of the Labour Party in 1945 gave the Zionists cause for self-congratulation. Hugh Dalton, one of Churchill's wartime ministers, had drafted a resolution adopted by the Labour Party a few months before the election that contained the sentence: "Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in." Dalton proposed generous compensation for the displaced Arabs and for their resettlement to be "generously financed", in the "many wide territories" ruled by the Arabs. But the decision of the new Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, to refuse to allow 100,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to enter Palestine intensified the violence in Palestine between Briton and Jew. Rose gives a powerful, detailed and meticulously documented account of that violence, shaming to both the contending parties.

Sixty-one years have now passed, and three major Arab-Israeli wars been fought since Israeli independence. The third of those wars, that of 1973, has been followed by further fighting inside Lebanon and Gaza and by continuous strife within Israel's borders. The peace process that began at Madrid and continued, via Oslo and Camp David, until today is still being kept alive — just — by both sides, and with varying degrees of international involvement, including a sustained effort by Tony Blair. Where will it lead? Benny Morris, the author of a seminal book on the 1948 war, now sets out the case for a two-state solution as first proposed by a British Royal Commission in 1937, endorsed by the UN ten years later, and currently at the centre of negotiations, of the Saudi peace plan and of President Barack Obama's Middle East vision. 

Morris sees grave danger in a single, binational state between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan, arguing that it would mean the end of any possibility of a Jewish majority and with it the end of the Zionist ideal of a national home for the Jews in any part of pre-1948 Palestine. But Palestinian Arab grievances are many, 1948 remains the traumatic time of mass dispossession, occupation has been a growing burden and there will be a need to find ways to redress these legitimate grievances. 

On balance, Morris is an optimist, despite what he sees as "violent opposition from Islamic fundamentalist countries and factions". As Gordon Brown discovered when he was in Jerusalem and Bethlehem in July 2008, the opportunities that beckon to both sides in the event of a true peace are so great, not only in economic terms but in the normal modalities of daily life, that moderates across the divide — which in places is a formidable concrete wall with few crossing points — will demand that wise counsels prevail. 

The difficult concessions both sides will have to make, putting aside legitimate historic grievances, will have to be accepted for the greater good.