Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, was walking towards his office on 18 January 1984 when he was shot in the back by two gunmen, who escaped from the scene. Amid the chaos of war-torn Lebanon his death was barely investigated and no one in Ronald Reagan’s administration bothered to tell Kerr’s wife, Ann, and their four children that the US National Security Agency had intercepted a telephone call from the killers boasting about their deed. Yet this was the first high-profile targeted assassination carried out by the nascent terrorist organisation Hezbollah. And the victim was a liberal-minded scholar dedicated to the wellbeing of Lebanon, one who believed that Israel was vital as a safe haven for Jews but dwelt much on the injustice of Palestinian dispossession, which called into question ‘the whole basis on which Israel came into being’. Kerr’s moderate stance had earlier provoked members of Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defence League to torch his car in Los Angeles. His murder symbolised the triumph of extremism and in this absorbing book Kim Ghattas uses it as a prism through which to view the tragic recent history of Lebanon and the Middle East.

She traces this history back as far as the Balfour Declaration (1917), which favoured ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’, while adding the antithetical proviso that this should not ‘prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities’. But a longer perspective is necessary since the origins of today’s perpetual warfare are embedded in myth and antiquity. After God promised Canaan to his Chosen People, wrote Edward Gibbon, they conquered it in such bloody and miraculous circumstances that ‘the victorious Jews were left in a state of irreconcilable hostility with all their neighbours’. Rome destroyed the Second Temple and scattered the children of Israel to face millennia of persecution. In the Holy Land Christian churches rose on the ruins of Jewish synagogues, only to be effaced by mosques. As the cradle of three world faiths, Jerusalem was, to quote the psalmist, ‘the joy of the whole earth’. It was also a crucible of conflict, famously described as ‘a golden bowl full of scorpions’.

The conflict was exacerbated by the Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War, which, says Ghattas, ‘unlocked messianic forces in Israel’ bent on keeping the West Bank, which Zionists regarded as the scriptural bequest of Judaea and Samaria. Surrounded by foes and forever mindful of Jewish security in the wake