Atlantic Books, London, 2006, 366 pages, £17.99

For many people in the West, the Israel/Palestine struggle is understood as a conflict between equal but competing claims for one land. This new book, aimed at the general reader, shows how unequal the claims are in merit. It is both a history of Palestine up to 1948 and an account of the author’s family showing the continuity of habitation that every Palestinian family today can claim with Palestine. Most Palestinians can name their forbears and the towns and villages they inhabited, going back for two hundred years or more. Most Israelis, apart from the ten percent of Jews who lived in Palestine before the 1920s and 1930s, can demonstrate no such continuity, relying instead on a spurious history derived from treating the Old Testament as a history book rather than a work of theology, mysticism, poetry and fiction. Karl Sabbagh addresses five different claims used by Israel to argue that it has a right to the land, and he demolishes them one by one. He shows that there is little or no evidence to back up the Old Testament story of a major Jewish empire ruling over Palestine for centuries; he shows the absurdity of the claim that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land;" he shows how the Balfour Declaration had little to do with the desire of the British government to hand Palestine over to Zionists but was written by Zionists and handed over to the government for Balfour to sign; he reveals the extent of Zionist bribery and threats in the UN to achieve the votes that tipped the balance in favour of partition; and he uses modern Israeli sources to nail the lie that the Palestinians left of their own accord, and lays out the full horror of the deliberate terrorising and expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1947/8. As an undercurrent to the history of the country, Sabbagh tells the story of his ancestors and their role in Palestine, including the rarely told story of the ‘first king of Palestine,’ Daher Al-Omar and his finance minister, Ibrahim Sabbagh. His style is a mixture of historical evidence and reportage, where he describes visits to Palestine in search of his ancestors and relatives. Near the end of the book, he writes of a meeting with Yasser Arafat three weeks before his death and uses this as the starting point for a vigorous refutation of the statement often made by supporters of Israel that the Palestinians were partly to blame for the loss of their land. “The fact is the Palestinians did nothing to cause their own fate," Sabbagh writes. “Did the Palestinians slaughter and expel themselves? Did they compel Jews from Europe to flock to Palestine and buy up land? Did the Palestinians lobby the British government to give away a land that didn’t belong to them?" Karl Sabbagh is a British writer, journalist and television producer. He has produced major documentaries for American and British broadcasters and has written for the Sunday Times, New Scientist, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph magazine and Scientific American. He is the author of several books including A Rum Affair, Power Into Art and Dr Riemann’s Zeros.