Bregman's bias against Israel leads him to paint the Jewish state in the worst possible light and deny it any benefit of the doubt: whereas many have praised Israeli defence minister Moshe Dayan's policies toward the territories in the early days as "magnanimous", Bregman posits that they were in fact "Machiavellian"; when the Israelis began to censor Palestinian Arab textbooks, replacing phrases such as "Our unity will frighten the enemy" with "Our success will please our parents", Bregman makes no criticism of Arab protestations; when Israel was negotiating with Jordan's King Hussein in the aftermath of the war, Bregman dismisses the possibility that the monarch might have been at fault for refusing proposals in the hope he might get more, in favour of the view that Israel probably offered very little; Israel's establishment of employment agencies in the West Bank, which did much for the Arabs' wellbeing, was "apparently in the interests of the [Arab] workers, but in reality to satisfy the needs of Israeli business and industry, and also to screen workers . . . [for] security"; American support for Israel, in Bregman's telling, is down to the machinations of the "Jewish lobby" and little else; he describes deportation of Arabs as "ethnic cleansing" but deportation of Jews as mere "relocation"; and he provides a statistic for how many Arab women were left to give birth at checkpoints during the Second Intifada, but says nothing about how explosives for use against Israeli civilians were transported in Red Crescent ambulances, in contravention of international law and, more importantly, of basic decency. One is hard pressed to find a single policy that Israel implemented of which Bregman approves.

The book's acute tendentiousness aside, a focus on the Israeli presence in the territories is quite legitimate and by no means uninteresting. But with such narrowness comes the danger of ignoring broader context, and this is evident in Cursed Victory in many ways — most egregiously in the reader's impression that 1967 is essentially the beginning of Arab-Israeli history. The wider reality is, however, ultimately inescapable, and although Bregman argues (wholly unconvincingly) that Israel might have been able to solve the conflict by making concessions immediately following the 1967 war, even he cannot avoid the problem of 1948: he recounts how Yasser Arafat turned down a superlatively generous offer in 2001 and suggests it might have been because he "didn't want to have to stand before his people and tell them that . . . he had failed to gain for the Palestinians a right to return to old Palestine". In other words, Arafat "could not bear to abandon the central element in Palestinian identity and life". This is doubtless an understatement, since there was never any question of Arafat settling for anything less than the destruction of Israel. But what it goes to show is that even Bregman, a diehard opponent of the Israeli presence in the territories who imagines them to be somehow distinct from the rest of the land, who seems to believe an Israeli renunciation of them will usher in real peace and who tries to evade consideration of anything before 1967, still cannot overcome the problem posed by 1948.

Until that problem is confronted and the Arab world comes to terms with the permanence of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, prisoner releases, settlement freezes and the like, such as those the Israeli government has been lately pressured to offer, will remain futile and counter-productive.