In 1991, the Israeli writer Ari Shavit, who was then 34, reported for his annual stint as a reserve soldier. When told that he was to serve as a jailer in a Gaza detention camp, Shavit considered refusing. He decided instead to write about what he saw.

What he wrote, in Hebrew, was a calm, clear essay published first in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and then, in an English translation, in the New York Review of Books. He described how “Palestinian prisoners are assigned to scrub the Israeli soldiers’ toilets three or four times a day”. How his fellow guards grumbled “that the place resembles a concentration camp”.

How “on your way from the tent to the shower, you sometimes hear horrible screams”. How children of 15 or 16 were snatched from Gaza city at night and taken into the camp to be beaten and “broken” until they gave up names of their friends who would in turn be snatched the next night. How even one of his colleagues “who owns a plant in the occupied territories, can’t believe his eyes. Have we come to this? he asks”.

Shavit was and remains, as he explained in his brilliant book, My Promised Land, a passionately committed Zionist – his great-grandfather, Herbert Bentwich, was a leading figure in the creation of the Zionist project.

But looking down on Gaza from the prison watchtower, Shavit reflected: “Gaza is a city with no hope, no cure. It is the city of the people whose........

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