Palestine: A personal history, by Karl Sabbagh<br/>The Divided Self, by David J Goldberg

It's the old Talmudic conundrum. Two people lay hold of a prayer shawl. One says, "It is all mine"; the other says, "It is all mine." Except that this is not a matter of erudite study by ancient scholars, but the burning bush of the conflict over Israel and Palestine. David Goldberg is a London-based Reform rabbi long known as a gentle, if firm, critic of Israeli right-wing policies. Karl Sabbagh is a writer, journalist and TV producer of mixed British and Palestinian origin. Each has written a deeply felt polemic.

Sabbagh has opted to combine his own family story with a historical outline of the Palestinian case against the Zionist project. He has traced the Sabbagh clan, a Christian Palestinian family, back to the Ottoman era mini-kingdom of the Palestinian sheikh Daher al-Omar al-Zaydani, to whom Karl's ancestor, Ibrahim Sabbagh, was a kind of vizier in the mid-18th century. The aim is to demonstrate the continuity and richness of the Palestinian Arab presence, Christian and Muslim, in the "Holy Land", in contrast to the old Zionist dictum of "a land without people for a people without land".

The book is lucidly written and constructed using, where possible, Jewish and Israeli sources. An ironically defensive posture is assumed: "I am the son of a Palestinian father, but... I am not poor, unshaven or a speaker of broken English. I do not know how to use a gun or manufacture a bomb. I have little to do with camels, sand or palm trees. But I both sympathise and identify with the Palestinian people."

Sabbagh's father, Issa, was a long-term broadcaster for the BBC Arabic Service during the fateful years of world war and civil strife in Palestine. But Sabbagh soon diverges from his poignant personal narrative and hurls himself into the ins and outs of perfidious Albion's machinations in Palestine between the wars. He scours the eyeballs with the Balfour Declaration, the Peel Commission, the King-Crane Commission, UNSCOP and the whole whirl of skulduggery by which the "Zionists" swindled the Palestinian Arabs out of their natural patrimony.

David Goldberg, tugging the other end of the prayer shawl, provides a quick canter through two thousand years of Jewish history. He is concerned with two diverging communities that are assumed to be inextricably linked: the Jews in Israel and the Jews of the "diaspora" - in Zionist eyes, the Jews who have yet to "ascend" to the ancestral land of the Bible. His project is eventually to argue that this linkage has been ruptured by the "particularism" of Zionist Israel, by the corrupting nature of statehood, and by the increasingly brutal occupation that followed the 1967 Six Day War.

Zionism, in Goldberg's narrative, arises naturally from the cultural mulch of the Enlightenment and secular nationalisms, combined with the long memory of anti-Jewish repression and the central "promised land" theme of Jewish religion. This is, more or less, the standard analysis. Sabbagh takes a very different position. "To me," he states, "and, I suspect, to many uncommitted people, using the map of the world as it might have been three or four thousand years ago is not a very appropriate basis for granting sovereignty in the modern world."

So far, so good, and I suspect that Goldberg would agree with him. But then Sabbagh goes off on what has long become a rival standard analysis on the other side. He argues that archaeological and historical evidence barely supports the Bible's account of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and there are doubts about "whether there is any ethnic continuity between most Jews today and the Hebrews of the Old Testament". Perhaps, but this is to misunderstand the essential lure of Zionism for the Jews of eastern Europe in particular at the turn of the 20th century.

Haven't we been here many times before? I wonder, passing from one of these books to the other, which public they intend to educate? Sabbagh seems to be arguing with an extreme denial of Palestinian history - exemplified by Joan Peter's book, From Time Immemorial - which endures only in the most right-wing Jewish circles, and is dismissed by all serious scholars as piffle.

In my opinion, a great weakness of Sabbagh's account is the flattening of internal Jewish division. Vladimir Jabotinsky is "an outspoken Zionist". Yes, but so was David Ben Gurion, yet the political parties spawned by each of them derided the other as "communists" or "fascists" for decades. The sad fact is that almost all Palestinian writers, Edward Said included, have tended to gloss over the internal dynamics of Jewish politics both before and after the "birth" of the Israeli state, and before and after the Holocaust. This, just like the denial of the Palestinian narrative, is bad history.

Ultimately, this conflict was fuelled by charnel houses. Sabbagh vividly portrays the Palestinian nakba, the catastrophe of 1948, in all its harsh and terrible witness of ethnic cleansing by Jewish armed forces. Goldberg, on the other hand, rushes past much of this, concerned with highlighting neglected figures of Jewish moderation like the rabbi Judah Magnes, who advocated a Jewish-Arab state amid the fires of war.

I cannot fault a rabbi for providing a sermon, but a sermon addresses a congregation which, by and large, is converted already. We gave at the door. Today, Goldberg concludes in some measure of wishful thinking that the Jewish Diaspora "looks on with increased scepticism, mounting embarrassment at trying to defend nearly four decades of Jewish colonisation of another people's land and weary despair at every fresh revelation of army brutality towards Palestinian civilians".

One feels that, as good British liberals, Goldberg and Sabbagh might sit down and sort out their differences in the Patisserie Valerie in about two and a half hours. I myself have done this with Palestinian friends in less than two. The problem is that the conflict is no longer fought on the ground by liberals of any stripe, on either side. Once a secular clash of competing nationalisms, it has reverted to a tribal, and increasingly religious war, entangled in the larger canvas of Bush vs Bin Laden and co.

Goldberg's book is imbued with the universalist values that he and I, in our own stubborn and perhaps traditional form, still cling to like straws in the wind. People who agree with him will like it. Sabbagh's book lucidly portrays a stubborn humanity in the face of terrible odds. People who agree with him will applaud. But despite the equivalence of their sympathies, their narratives do not converge. "Liberal" or not, still they collide, and still they fall short of the impossible necessity of seeing things through each other's eyes.

Simon Louvish's 'Mae West: It ain't no sin' is published by Faber