To judge from the declarations in English of their secular Fatah-dominated leadership, headed by Yasser Arafat, the Palestinians have strived since 1988 for a Palestinian state alongside Israel: the "two-state solution." To judge from the statements of some of these same Fatah leaders (including Arafat) in Arabic, and from the pronouncements by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they seek Israel’s destruction and replacement by an Arab (or Islamic) state. Why the forked tongue of most of the Fatah leaders? Perhaps they really aspire to a two-state solution but feel that they must appease their people with rejectionist pronouncements. Perhaps, like the Islamicists, they really intend to destroy Israel but feel that they must dupe sympathetic Israelis and Western supporters of Israel who might be antagonised by a frank rejectionism.

In their new book, Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal write that their "central argument" is that "the creation of the Palestinian nation has been as much the product of events, acts, and institutions at the grassroots level as it has been the doing of top leaders." So let us attend to the grassroots: to judge by Palestinian opinion polls and street demonstrations, most Palestinians today do not seek only the liberation of the territories from Israel’s occupation. They seek also the destruction of Israel. And the masses express their hatred of the Jewish state by supporting suicide bombings inside Israel proper, against buses, supermarkets, and restaurants. For the Palestinians, each suicide bombing represents a microcosmic assault on Israel’s existence; and each street celebration following successful bombings testifies to the popularity of the method and the goal.

Kimmerling and Migdal point out that in the early and mid-1990s, before the Oslo peace process began to expire, opinion polls showed that the Palestinians largely supported a two-state solution. Like good liberals, Kimmerling and Migdal generally give Arafat and his colleagues the benefit of the doubt, dismissing their rejectionist assertions to Arab and Muslim audiences as so much posturing. But even Kimmerling and Migdal, to judge by their tone at the end of the book, are far from sanguine. Recent Palestinian actions, it would seem, have managed to jar even their liberal moorings:

Speaking for myself, Palestinian behaviour during the past three years has provided the unhappy ground for a serious re-examination of my own political assumptions. But, to be completely candid, it is not just the experience of the past three years that has provoked this reconsideration. I have spent the past twenty years studying the hundred years of Zionist-Palestinian conflict. I have come away from my examination of the history of the conflict with a sense of the instinctive rejectionism that runs like a dark thread through Palestinian history- a rejection, to the point of absurdity, of the history of the Jewish link to the land of Israel; a rejection of the legitimacy of Jewish claims to Palestine; a rejection of the right of the Jewish state to exist. And, worse, this rejectionism has over the decades been leavened by a healthy dose of antisemitism, a perception of the Jew as God’s and humanity’s unchosen.

More recently, in its founding charter or "Covenant," which was composed in 1988, Hamas (which today commands the support of about one-half of the Palestinians and probably a far greater proportion in Gaza and the refugee camps) described "the Jews" as "an instrument of evil"; and it ascribes the outbreak of the French and Russian revolutions, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the eruption of World War I and World War II to Jewish machinations.

For Arafat, the Jews are a curio, the caftaned, bearded worshippers of his childhood, seen making their way to the Wailing Wall, heads bowed, eyes averted, through the Arab markets of the Old City. The Palestinian National Charter, the platform of the PLO, calls for the dismantling of "the Zionist entity." Though the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s committed itself to annulling the relevant clauses, it is unclear whether they have in fact been permanently revoked. Nothing more revealing was said at the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000 than Arafat’s response to President Clinton’s effort to persuade him to compromise over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (Al-Haram al-Sharif, the site of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock). Arafat said: "What temple? The Jews had no temples there. It’s a legend." Arafat - and this is common fare in sermons in the mosques of the West Bank and Gaza - was denying that the Jewish people had any historic connection to Jerusalem and, by extension, to Palestine.

The Palestinian and pan-Arab rout of 1948, the nakba or "catastrophe," and the continuous defeats that Israel has since inflicted on the Arab world, as Kimmerling and Migdal rightly perceive, are seen by most Palestinians (and probably by most Arabs and Muslims) as a basic violation or disruption of the "cosmic order," something humiliating and unfathomable. Arafat likes to compare himself to Saladin (who was also the hero of the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad), the Muslim Kurdish general who defeated the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. Arafat continuously speaks of "planting the Arab flag on the walls of Jerusalem" as Saladin did in 1187. That act symbolised the destruction of the Crusader state - and Arafat’s use of the phrase is understood by his Arab listeners to refer to the destruction of the Zionist "kingdom."

Some of this story can be found in Kimmerling and Migdal’s book. But the almost unrelenting rejectionist message of Palestinian history is routinely blunted by soporific padding.

Rather idiosyncratically, Kimmerling and Migdal point to a peasant revolt in Palestine against the Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali in 1834 as the moment when the Palestinian people was born. The peasants (and the townspeople) refused to supply the Egyptians with the conscripts that they demanded. Within months, the rebels, who did not demand independence or "Palestinian rights" were crushed, leaving no "national" values or tradition as a heritage.

In focusing on 1834, Kimmerling and Migdal are implicitly denying that the Palestinian people was born in large measure as a response to Zionism. Most serious historians point instead to the 1920s and 1930s as the time when the Arabs of Palestine began thinking of themselves as a people separate from those of Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan (though, to be sure, they still regarded, and continue to regard, themselves as part of the wider Arab umma or nation), with a separate political destiny. Between 1920 and 1935, Palestinian "nationalism" was propounded in a narrow circle of educated upper-class and middle-class families. During the revolt of 1936-1939, the national idea spread from the urban upper classes to much of the countryside, though - to the embarrassment of Palestinian nationalists - many villages refused to participate in the uprising, and many Palestinians helped the British and the Zionists to crush the revolt.

Since then, the Palestinians have indeed forged a collective identity and a separate history, which most historians view as necessary components of nationhood. Each Palestinian rebellion has been more popular and more massive than its predecessor, mirroring the spread of a national consciousness.

Most national movements grow up in antagonism to neighbouring nationalisms, and usually in conflict over borderlands. But in Palestine it was the whole of the homeland that was exclusively claimed by both peoples. It is difficult to think of any comparable case in modern history. There is little wonder, then, that the Palestinian national movement matured as a rejectionist enterprise; indeed, that the rejection of Zionism and all that it embodies has defined its essence. Rejectionism, like the drive to return to "the Lost Garden," as Kimmerling and Migdal put it, is built into the Palestinians’ identity (what the authors call "Palestinism"). Perhaps the wonder is that Zionism overcame its own initial denial of the Palestinians and ultimately accepted their presence in, and the co-legitimacy of their claim to, Palestine.

The Zionists, too, at first sought sovereignty over the whole of the land. But over the decades the Zionists came to recognise that the land was inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Arabs who devised their own collective identity and began to resist the Jewish influx. Following the start of the Arab Revolt, the Zionist movement formally accepted - in 1937, in response to the Peel Commission recommendations - the principle of partition, meaning a division of Palestine between its two communities. And in 1947, the movement accepted both the principle of partition and the specific United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, which, positing the establishment of two states, awarded the Zionists some 55 percent of Palestine (most of it in the Negev desert) and the Palestinian Arabs some 40 percent.

Between 1949 and 1967, Israel existed quite happily without the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The 1967 war, with Israel’s conquest of vast territories, conjured up the possibility - and, for many Israelis at the time, the temptation - that Israel might permanently incorporate the West Bank and Gaza. This was the premise that sired the expansionist settlers’ movement. By the early 1990s, primarily under the impact of the first intifada, the Israelis reverted to their old acceptance of partition. This underlay the Rabin-Peres policy during the Oslo process and Barak’s proposals at Camp David in 2000. And this acceptance of the necessity (and also the justice) of partition is still true of most of Israel’s Jews, though many Palestinians suspect that Israelis secretly desire a "Greater Israel," much as many Arabs believe that Zionism was and remains ultimately bent on establishing a Jewish "kingdom" stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, as prefigured in the Bible.

Of course, the Palestinians throughout their history have been weak - and guerrilla warfare and terrorism are the weapons of the weak. But at the deeper level of traditions, habits, and abilities, unconventional warfare suits them (witness the very poor performance of the PLO regular formations, with tanks and artillery, against the invading Israeli Defence Forces in southern Lebanon in June 1982). And in this sense the Palestinians, and especially Hamas, are in sync with radical Islam’s more general assault on the West - of which Israel, the "little Satan," is but a bridgehead in its region - and are natural participants in the age of terrorism that is upon us.

Moreover, the Palestinian national movement has always been characterised by undemocratic political structures and social norms. At no point in their history have Palestinian nationalists ever been able to look back in time or to look sideways around themselves - at neighbouring Arab countries - for models of democratic practice or aspiration.

There is something deeply troubled about the present condition of Palestinian society. Even some Palestinians believe this, and occasionally say so. The rubble-strewn streets of the Palestinian cities, the continued subsistence of most Palestinians on donations from the international community, and above all the readiness of so many young Palestinians to become suicide bombers and the popularity of these suicide bombers within the Palestinian community: these are all signs of a sickness of the soul. A significant cause of this malaise is, of course, the triumph of Zionism and Israel, the agents of the Palestinian dispersion in 1948 and of the Palestinian subjugation since 1967; but that external cause is not the only cause.

After dealing with the allegedly decisive events of 1834, Kimmerling and Migdal, more realistically, move on to the years of British rule in Palestine, and the social and economic developments that underlay the emergence of Palestinian nationalism. They devote a chapter to the revolt of 1936-39. They provide an inadequate chapter on the nakba, the collapse of Palestinian society in 1948 under the hammer blows of the war of their own making - which the Palestinians then and subsequently, in a metaphysical spin, viewed as "an immense conspiracy and ... a monumental injustice" against themselves. Indeed, one of the characteristics of the Palestinian national movement has been the Palestinians’ view of themselves as perpetual victims of others-Ottoman Turks, British officials, Zionists, Americans-and never to appreciate that they are, at least in large part, victims of their own mistakes and iniquities.

Kimmerling and Migdal move briskly through the resurrection of the Palestinian national movement in the 1960s, under the PLO and Arafat; and Palestinian life under the post-1967 Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza; and the Palestinian failure to oust the occupier by means of violence in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally they arrive at the Oslo process, examining "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong."

Back in the 1990s, during the Oslo years, many Israelis shared a sense of cautious optimism. It was not that the terrorists had packed up and gone into retirement; indeed, in four attacks over an eight-day period in February and March 1996, Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers slaughtered more than forty Israelis and injured about two hundred in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and embarrassed the peacemaking Labor-led government so grievously that Shimon Peres lost the elections that spring to the Likud’s inexperienced Benjamin Netanyahu. Still, it appeared that the majority of Palestinians had at last chosen a different course. After a hundred years of saying no to every proposed compromise, their leadership seemed to have bowed to the judgment of reason and history.

Arafat set up the self-governing Palestinian National Authority, and an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, at peace with and alongside Israel, seemed merely a matter of time. There were joyous celebrations in the streets of Gaza and Ramallah and Nablus and Jenin and Tulkarm, and solid if quieter satisfaction in Tel Aviv. As Kimmerling and Migdal remind us, more than 70 percent of the Palestinians and Israelis supported Oslo.

But then came the spoilers, the fundamentalists from both camps - the Hamas and Islamic Jihad knifemen and shooters and bombers, active since 1991, and, from the Jewish side, Baruch Goldstein, the doctor from Kiryat Arba who in 1994 slaughtered twenty-nine Muslim worshippers at the al-Ibrahimiya Mosque (the Tomb of the Patriarchs) in Hebron, and Yigal Amir, the Bar-Ilan University law student and settlements groupie who in 1995 shot Yitzhak Rabin and killed him.

Palestinian terrorism steadily drove the Israeli public rightward, undermining its willingness to compromise and curbing the government’s ability to make concessions. The continued growth of the settlements, the daily humiliations of the continued semi-occupation, and the absence of visible economic benefits ate away at the Palestinians’ apparent rejection of rejectionism.

Kimmerling and Migdal attribute this asymmetry to the imbalance in power between the two sides. But there was also an internal logic to the asymmetry that the authors too readily ignore. The recognition of Israel’s legitimacy was a necessary initial component of any Israeli-Palestinian agreement; it was built into the very act of agreement. By starting to negotiate and to reach agreement with Israel, the Palestinians were effectively delivering the recognition that Israel desired.

Moreover, decades of Palestinian guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and deception had persuaded the Israeli leaders that they could take nothing on trust, and that the Palestinian leadership would have to demonstrate a willingness and an ability, over an extended period of time, to honour agreements and to curb their killers. Only then could Israel complete the handover of territory and the acknowledgment of sovereignty. Kimmerling and Migdal occasionally refer to the Palestinian terrorism of the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s, and 1980s, but they say not a word about Arafat’s performance in violating almost every agreement that he ever signed, starting with those concluded in the late 1960s and early 1970s with Lebanon and Jordan.

Kimmerling and Migdal assert that Oslo had pulled "the veil from the myth that the Palestinians would accept nothing less than the destruction of Israel." But this is, at a minimum, naïve. They fail to address the possibility that Oslo, from Arafat’s perspective, may have been a giant act of duplicity. He told a Muslim audience in a Johannesburg mosque in 1994 that he was willing to play along in order to win concessions but without ever intending to sign a final peace treaty that recognised Israel’s permanent legitimacy.

Kimmerling and Migdal also fail to address adequately the issue of the "right of return," which is central, I think, to a proper understanding of Palestinian politics and purposes. Through Oslo and the negotiations of 2000, publicly and privately all Palestinian spokesmen insisted on Israeli acceptance of the "right of return" - meaning the right of the refugees and their descendants to return to their places in the territory that became the state of Israel in 1948. Some 700,000 Palestinians were displaced in 1948, and the United Nations has more than 3.5 million Palestinian refugees on its rosters (comprising those still living from among the 700,000 and their descendants). The Palestinians claim that the true number is closer to five million.

Israeli spokesmen, equally adamantly, insist that there can be no return of refugees from 1948. The concession of such a "right" would inevitably lead to the creation of an Arab majority in Israel. Israel would cease to be a Jewish state. Most Israelis, including Ehud Barak, regard the Palestinian insistence on the "right of return" as a euphemism for the desire to destroy Israel. So long as Arafat and his colleagues insist on a "right of return" as a necessary component of a peace settlement, there will be no peace settlement - because, as Barak put it, Israel is unwilling "to commit suicide."

Kimmerling and Migdal are aware of the centrality of the "right of return" in the Palestinian ethos. They write that "[the right of return] has been the fundamental building block of Palestinism." A full return to "the Lost Garden" has "continued to be accepted as the basic tenet of Palestinism." The authors cite a study by the Israel/Palestine Centre for Research and Information from 2000 — when Barak and Clinton were offering the historic compromise, before the eruption of the Aqsa Intifada — based on a random sample of 1,600 refugees in the West Bank and Gaza. Of those surveyed, 98.7 percent rejected compensation in place of return. The right and the necessity of return is incessantly drummed into every child and adult by family, school, and the PA.

Kimmerling and Migdal observe that the Oslo accord "unveiled a large majority on each side ready ... to accept two states." But professing a two-state solution while continuing to insist on the "right of return" as an essential component of a settlement is meaningless blather.

This, for example, is what Kimmerling and Migdal say about partition: "Proposals to divide the country between Jews and Arabs had been circulating since the 1937 Peel Commission Report without much success. Neither side liked the idea of splitting the small piece of land." It is certainly true that neither side liked the idea, but in 1937, in 1947, and in 1993-2000 the Zionist leadership and then the Israeli leadership accepted - and in the latter years, even proposed - compromises based on the idea of partition, whereas the Palestinian leadership, under Husseini and again under Arafat, rejected all proposals for partition.

Similarly, Kimmerling and Migdal write of "the retreat [since 2000] from an acceptance by each side of the inevitability and necessity of partitioning Palestine, of a two-state solution." This is accurate with regard to the majority of Palestinians, but it flies in the face of every opinion poll conducted among the Israeli public in the past three years. A majority of Israelis, while supporting Barak’s and then Sharon’s anti-terrorist operations, continue to believe that Israel should in the end withdraw from the bulk of the West Bank and Gaza, and agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state. (Even Sharon now speaks about the eventual establishment of such a state.)

Kimmerling and Migdal’s book is liberally studded with factual errors. Often the mistakes are important; occasionally they merely display the authors’ biases.

But the book’s biggest factual shortcoming lies in omission (subsequently compounded by gross inaccuracy) — the omission of any discussion of what happened in the negotiations of 2000 and January 2001, from Camp David through the Clinton proposals to Taba. In a book that purports to update the reader to 2002, the omission is staggering and irresponsible. There are no descriptions of what Barak offered in July and how Arafat responded, no details about what Clinton offered in December and how the two sides responded. There is nothing about what happened at Taba in January 2001. Only this: "Suffice it to say here that, despite many subsequent recriminations, the two sides settled most of the outstanding issues between them."

This is hogwash; even Palestinian spokesmen don’t make such a claim. In fact, a deep chasm separated the Israelis and the Palestinians on all major issues - at Camp David, in responses to the Clinton proposals, and again at Taba. By the end of the Camp David summit, Barak, at Clinton’s prodding, had agreed to Israeli withdrawal from 100 percent of Gaza and 90 to 91 percent of the West Bank; the uprooting of most of the settlements; and the establishment of a Palestinian state, with Israeli or American troops controlling the Jordan River line, and with some form of Palestinian functional control over most of the Arab districts of East Jerusalem. The Palestinians responded to these proposals by unleashing a new intifada and by stating that they were willing to settle for nothing less than the entirety of the territories and the uprooting of all the settlements, full sovereignty over Arab East Jerusalem including the Old City, sole Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount, and the "right of return" to Israel for all of the Palestinian refugees.

In December, Clinton submitted-and then published-his proposals: Israeli withdrawal from 100 percent of the Gaza Strip and 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank (with substantial territorial compensation for the Palestinians from Israeli territory); the uprooting of most of the settlements (with the settlers remaining in the 4 to 6 percent of the West Bank that was to remain in Israeli hands or moving to Israel proper); Palestinian sovereignty over the Arab-populated districts of East Jerusalem and over half or three-quarters of the Old City, and sovereignty over the surface area of the Temple Mount (with, implicitly, Israeli sovereignty over the earth underneath, which presumably contains the remains of the First and Second Temples); and a "right of return" for the refugees limited to the Palestinian state and massive funding for the refugees’ rehabilitation. Barak and his Cabinet accepted these parameters within forty-eight hours; the Palestinian Authority procrastinated and then rejected them, insisting on complete Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount and sovereignty over the whole of the West Bank, and the "right of return" to Israel.

The subsequent discussions in Taba were held a fortnight before the Israeli general elections in which Sharon trounced Barak. Both sides understood that the negotiations could not be successfully concluded. At the press conference at the end of Taba, Israel’s chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, putting his best face on things, declared that the two sides had never been closer to an agreement. But Abu Ala, the chief Palestinian negotiator, when asked about the refugees, flatly declared that the Palestinians continue to insist on the right of return.

All this diplomatic disagreement Kimmerling and Migdal weirdly summarise by observing that the "two sides [had] settled most of the outstanding issues between them."

In December 2000, Clinton set out the guidelines for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement. Those guidelines, whether or not Yasser Arafat or Ariel Sharon like them, remain the only basis for a reasonable peace. But the Palestinians will first have to give up their dream of destroying Israel and discard their insistence on the "right of return." Their leaders will have to tell their people-in the camps outside Tyre and Beirut and Damascus and Gaza and Nablus and Amman-that there will be no return to the garden, that the price of that dream is too high. And Sharon, or his successor, will have to give up the dream of a Greater Israel. But I do not see these happy developments happening anytime soon. I fear that we are in for a long and bloody haul.