The historic handshake between Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat in September 1993 marked a decisive moment in the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was an event which many had thought as unlikely as the fall of the Berlin Wall or the end of apartheid. Since 1945, the struggle between Arab and Jew over the same piece of land in the Middle East seemed one of the most entrenched problems in the world: on five occasions - in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982 - it erupted into war.

That it involved two tragedies makes the conflict no easier. For the Jews the events of Hitler's Holocaust, an event in the history of civilised Europe barely imaginable even today, stirred what became an irresistible urge to secure their own state. For the Arabs, the creation of that state, Israel, meant the destruction of a way of life they had known for centuries, and their own hopes of a state - Palestine.

For over four decades there seemed scant prospect of reconciling these two tragic, and increasingly embittered, legacies. Professor Fraser's clear and concise text sets out the basic arguments on each side and traces their complex, and often bloody, path towards the moves leading to the Israeli-PLO accord.