Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel 1917-2017
Ian Black
Penguin, £25.00
This is an ambitious book, confronting as it does three major challenges: first, the length of the period covered; second, the challenge of finding something new to say in a thoroughly examined field; and third, the attempt ‘to tell the story of, and from both sides’.
Relating 100 years of the history of one of the world’s most high-profile disputes in a single volume would be hard enough but in fact the book covers more than 100 years, as it looks back to the first Zionist settlers from Eastern Europe – the Hovevei Zion or Lovers of Zion – in 1882.
