The tragic and intractable conflict in the Middle East has been under way for so long that Martin Gilbert's atlas of it has gone through nine editions, three publishers, and three titles since 1974. It is a conflict which in many aspects lends itself to presentation in maps, 205 of which appear in this edition, with very little text; unsurprisingly, there is neither a bibliography nor an index. The maps, all in monochrome, are generally drawn in as simple a manner as their subjects will allow, so that (for instance) even those of the Golan Heights give no indication of altitude. The text, apart from that appearing on the maps themselves, is confined to small boxes; even the Balfour Declaration, that brief document pregnant with consequences for the history of the world, appears in one. This cartographic treatment means that the conflict is for the most part described rather than analysed. For instance, a summary of the Suez Crisis of 1956 in 40 words can hardly do justice to it.
In dealing with such a subject as this, it is not surprising that controversial issues appear from the first page. Do we really know what the boundaries of Solomon's empire were? If so, are they relevant to political negotiations 3,000 years later? What is excluded may also be significant. Thus there are numerous maps pinpointing the locations of acts of Palestinian terrorism against Israel in recent years, but none showing acts of violence by Jewish extremists against the British Mandate in Palestine (though later there are several illustrating targeted Israeli assassinations of Palestinian militants).
Nevertheless, the careful reader will learn a great deal about the Arab‐Israeli conflict from these pages. It is salutary to be reminded that Jewish immigration to Palestine had begun many years before the start of the official Zionist movement; the immigrants believed they would be better off under Muslim rule than in the Christian countries they had fled from. The growth in numbers and extent of the Jewish population is demonstrated in several maps. When a Jewish state eventually became a realistic possibility, the United Nations peace proposal of 1947 would have produced one considerably smaller than that which emerged from the war of 1948‐1949; it and the succeeding wars, with various extensions of Israeli occupation, are all shown, together with several of the, so far abortive, recent peace proposals which might one day reduce that area again. While the sufferings of the Palestinians are perhaps less easy to illustrate in maps than the vicissitudes of Israel, the maps of the Separation Wall and of the numerous Israeli checkpoints and closed areas on the West Bank will give an idea of them.
Most of the maps in the Atlas are provided with a copyright date, and so it is easy to ascertain what has been added in this edition. Besides the map of checkpoints already referred to, the 18 new maps cover such matters as the extension of the West Bank settlements from 1996 to 2005; political and ethnic divisions in Jerusalem; the Israeli‐Lebanese War of 2006; the location and population of current Palestinian refugee camps; and several maps devoted to the somewhat vague proposals of the Annapolis Peace Conference of 2007, the latest in a long line. At the time when this edition was being compiled, the Conference aspired to bring about a final settlement by the end of 2008; at the time when this review is being written, it appears unlikely that that will be the case. I am sure that the author would agree with the reviewer in expressing the hope that the next edition of this useful atlas might be the last.
