There are two Israels: one inside the Green Line, the 1967 border, the other an occupying power extending beyond it. The first is a vibrant democracy, with Arab members of Parliament, university professors and lawyers, beauty queens and soldiers, and even a Muslim cabinet minister. There are no separate roads for Arabs and Jews in the name of that all-purpose explanation “security,” no villages made inaccessible because their roads have been dug up by army bulldozers, no checkpoints and no security fence cleaving farmers from their land and schoolchildren from their playgrounds.

Across the Green Line, the West Bank, captured in 1967, is another country, neither Israel nor Palestine, but a lawless place, where the Jewish settler, rifle in one hand and prayer book in the other, is undisputed king. The settlers have their own roads, guarded by the Israeli Army, water, electricity, supplies and — occasional if well-publicized crackdowns aside — substantial impunity from the law. Much of the land on which their settlements stand, was, as Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar detail in this important book, simply stolen. The settlements are illegal, in contravention of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to occupied territories. But for those who claim a divine mandate, the Geneva Conventions count for nothing. According to the United Nations, more than a third of the West Bank is now off limits to Palestinians. A web of Israeli Army checkpoints and obstacles further atomizes what is left of Palestinian society.

“Lords of the Land” is the first complete history of the settlement project. It provides a detailed narrative of injustice, and is profoundly depressing for anyone still hoping for a fair resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or even hoping that Jews and Arabs will be seen as equal in the eyes of Israeli law. In a chapter entitled “Everything Is Legal in the Land of Israel” Zertal and Eldar chronicle the paltry punishments given to settlers who kill Arabs, like the settlement leader Pinchas Wallerstein, who in 1988 shot two young Arabs in the back after he saw them burning a tire on the road. One died. Wallerstein was sentenced to four months community service.

If Palestinian lives are cheap, much Palestinian land is even cheaper — that is, free, at least to the settlers and Israeli authorities. The security fence that snakes through the West Bank is, according to Zertal and Eldar, an unparalleled land grab. They write that it was “constructed with no reckoning and no logic other than the purpose of enclosing as many settlements as possible on the western, Israeli, side and dividing up and seizing Palestinian lands.”

This may be an angry, embittered book, but the two authors are well-informed experts. Zertal is a noted Israeli historian, who now teaches at the University of Basel, and Eldar is an influential columnist for the left-wing daily, Ha’aretz. They are especially good on Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful, the religious Zionists driving the settlement project and the compromises with them made by a weak secular Israeli establishment.

“Lords of the Land” is richly detailed. Nonetheless, it would have benefited from wider context and discussion. There is a case for the defense, not made here. Are the settlements an inevitable consequence of Zionism, for example, or an aberration, spawned by the specific circumstances of 1967? Or something of both? Israel then was a long way from being today’s military powerhouse. It fought a war for survival in which victory was not assured: mass graves were prepared in public parks; hotels were turned into first-aid stations. Post-1967 triumphalism may have had tragic consequences, but it was probably also inevitable. Any state surrounded by enemies will seek strategic depth.

It is also curious, especially considering the authors’ leftist perspective, that the Palestinians barely feature in their book, other than as passive victims of rapacious Zionist settlers and expansionist Israeli governments. The Palestinians have been greatly wronged, but they have also had choices available to them and too often chose badly. Land grab aside, the security fence was built after a spate of barbarous suicide bombings and continues to prevent further attacks. When Yassir Arafat rejected Ehud Barak’s offer at Camp David in 2000 he turned down what was probably the best chance of meaningful statehood.

Indeed, the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of missed opportunities. Zertal and Eldar recount how in June 1967, immediately after the war, Mossad agents surveyed Palestinian public opinion in the newly conquered territories. They recommended that a demilitarized independent Palestinian state be established as quickly as possible, in agreement with the Palestinian leadership. Tragically for Israel, for the Palestinians and for the rest of us, this recommendation never stood a chance. And thanks in large part to the settlement project, such an opportunity may never arise again. “Lords of the Land” helps explain why.