"But the inescapable fact is that the Arabs of Palestine never got the state the UN promised them, and those in the West Bank and (until recently) Gaza have spent the past 40 years under Israeli military occupation, with no citizenship rights at all. That, the authors imply, is another story, separate from the one that interests them: the internal quality of Israeli democracy and the rights of Israel’s own Arabs. In logic, maybe. But in the eyes of the Palestinians, and others, it is hardly surprising, after all the stateless decades, that the two stories have merged."