Rodgers immediately confronts us with the vexatious matter of oil. Ninety-five per cent of what we in the developed countries eat and how we communicate with each other depends on this fuel, with close on sixty-five per cent of known oil reserves found in the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran and Saudi Arabia. For all the talk of ‘energy independence’, the United States relies on Middle Eastern oil for twenty per cent of its consumption, a figure predicted to rise dramatically. No other place will produce enough oil to meet the developed world’s needs, let alone those of the emerging economies. Moreover, Rodgers reminds us, Middle Eastern oil is running out. There is debate over when production will peak (in 2010 or 2030–40), but peak it will.

These are the facts that have shaped our world and that have, according to Rodgers, a former Australian ambassador to Israel, undone any prospect of that ‘just and lasting peace’ that American officials of one persuasion or another claim to be seeking in the region. For as long as the United States is willing to overlook repressive régimes when there is oil to consider, the likelihood of peace will be little more than fantasy. The problem seems so intractable that, all the while I was reading, I found myself bizarrely giving thanks for the economic crisis which is likely to reduce demand, and hoping that new US climate change policies will help Americans kick their oil habit – the monkey on all our backs.

There is also the question of US support for Israel. In 2002–07 the United States delivered some $17 billion in aid to Israel, forty-three times as much as the Palestinian Authority received over roughly the same period. (The Authority received $20 million annually from 2004 to 2006; it was cut off when Hamas was elected, but revived when Mahmoud Abbas was restored to power.) Like most Middle East commentators, Rodgers believes the Israeli–Palestinian conflict lies at the core of the region’s tensions, but with a twist. Yes, Arabs point to Israel as their chief dissatisfaction, but Rodgers sees this less as a genuine grievance than as an excuse for Arab inaction. ‘Individual Arab régimes are often indifferent to the fate of Palestinians while very much alive to the cause of Palestine as a means of diverting attention to their own shortcomings.’ As long as countries such as Syria or Saudi Arabia can point to Israel’s behaviour in Palestine, they don’t have to bother ending their own human rights abuses. It is also Rodgers’s contention that anxiety about Iran serves a similar purpose in entrenching authoritarianism in the region.

Nobody was fooled when the United States went into Iraq. Most people knew it was chiefly about oil. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, ‘spreading democracy’ became the convenient justification. Six years and many thousand dead later, there is ample cause to be sceptical, although the recent provincial elections are reported to have gone well. But democracy, as Rodgers writes, has a very light footprint in the region and, indeed, in 2006 when Palestinians chose Hamas in a fair election, the United States and Israel succeeded in dismantling its government. And Israel, though open to a degree unthinkable in its neighbours, has been anything but democratic with respect to its Arab citizens and those of its occupied territories.

Democracy and demography have been Israel’s twin woes. Since the late 1970s there has been a steady move to the right in Israel, paralleling a demographic shift from Labour Ashkenazi to Likud-supporting Sephardim. Further, Israeli Arabs constitute a fifth of the population, a proportion that Jews fear is destined to grow. Israel’s refusal of the Palestinian demand for the right of return and the periodic calls for ‘transfer’ throughout its history are driven by this fear.  It is demography, then, that has been behind Israel’s grudging public acceptance of a Palestinian state – so long as it can be ruthlessly contained.

For Rodgers, however, the two-state solution is dead, killed by this very dissembling. The attachment to ‘Greater Israel’ is far too influential to allow the Palestinian state to go ahead in any viable form. Jewish settlement on the West Bank has proceeded by leaps and bounds right through the ‘peace process’; Rodgers notes that the periods of greatest growth have occurred when hopes for peace have been strongest. A binational state (more properly, multi-ethnic) is as unacceptable to most Jews as it ever was: Jews would be significantly outnumbered and the state’s exclusively Jewish character would be lost. Unlike Rodgers, I would welcome this outcome, admittedly highly improbable just now. But with Israel’s current intransigence, what other option has it except to shoot its way out? Thanks to American, European and Asian arms dealers, the Middle East is now the world’s most militarised region; among its nations Israel is the most heavily armed. That it is trigger-happy is an understatement, seemingly poised as it is to bomb Iran’s nuclear reactor as it once bombed Iraq’s.

It has to be said that Arabian Plights is the most sobering, if not the most depressing, book I have read in a while. If Rodgers is correct (and his arguments are nuanced and persuasive), we can expect more war and a build-up of nuclear weapons in the area. Where this will lead is anybody’s guess. If there is hope at all, it resides with the Obama administration. On the surface, US policy is unchanged: both the president and his secretary of state stressed their unwavering support for Israel during the election campaign, and Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, has strong Israeli ties. But it may still be that a more intelligent approach, if not openly articulated, can be expected.

Rodgers’s plea for change in the region is for less hypocrisy and for a genuine attempt on all sides to reduce the gap between poor and rich, to eliminate illiteracy, to diversify economies and to expand opportunities for women. Maybe, this accomplished, the hatred would begin to dissipate, as hatred, given enough justice and prosperity, can, over time. Then, who knows, the sun may again rise on the Levant.