What does Israel hope to achieve with its recent withdrawal from Gaza and the building of a 700km wall around the West Bank? Jonathan Cook, who has reported on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the Second Intifada, presents a lucid account of the Jewish state’s motives. The heart of the issue, he argues, is demography. Israel fears the moment when the region’s Palestinians – Israel’s own Palestinian citizens and those in the Occupied Territories – become a majority. Inevitable comparisons with apartheid in South Africa will be drawn. The book charts Israel’s increasingly desperate responses to its predicament including military repression of Palestinian dissent on both sides of the Green Line; accusations that Israel’s Palestinian citizens and the Palestinian Authority are secretly conspiring to subvert the Jewish state from within; a ban on marriages between Israel’s Palestinian population and Palestinians living under occupation to prevent a right of return ‘through the back door’; the redrawing of the Green Line to create an expanded, fortress state where only Jewish blood and Jewish religion count.