Glover wrote a new prologue to address some of this. Not robust to begin with, his hope is now more fragile, but he does not believe he should revise the arguments of his book. To the contrary: Hamas’ attack and the war that followed are prime examples of where we can be taken by backlash, its sustaining illusions and the corruptions to which religious and national identities are always vulnerable.

Glover laments that many people are not acquainted with the work of experts in philosophy, psychology, history and other fields, but he cites few experts in his analysis of the “deep psychology” of the “fault lines” he identifies. Apart from a nod in the direction of neuroscience and evolutionary theory his book does not offer a psychological theory.

I suspect he would especially want to avoid one of the kind called (ironically) “depth psychology” that emphasises the motivational importance of the unconscious and develops a theory of its interpretation. Adam Schatz puts such a psychology to work to understand the pathology of revenge and the compulsion to humiliate that showed itself in what was distinctively morally horrible about the crimes committed on October 7 (London Review of Books, October 19, 2023).

But that is not Glover’s project: his is a book of reminders of things most people already know about the causes of the distortions of mind and heart that we readily identify in others, but seldom in ourselves and against which we seldom even desire to protect ourselves. That is an important achievement.

Politicians, combatants and their supporters on both sides have accused each other of not knowing enough relevant history. There is not much history in Glover’s book.

Instead, he gives us provocative, inspiring, depressing, heartrending and hair-raising stories, conversations and reports of friendships and enmities between Israelis and Palestinians, some of whom broke entirely or partially from the cycle of violence, while others, still tapped in it, did their best to strengthen it.

The form of his book enacts its content and primary message, inviting readers to be open to the humanising possibilities of those conversation and narratives. One could think of it as inspired by the Palestinian proverb he quotes: “Don’t curse at the darkness - light a candle.”

Anyone who accepts his invitation will become sceptical of what is becoming progressive orthodoxy: that what we are now witnessing in Gaza is the inevitable result of the establishment of Israel as a white, settler colonial state.

The history is, anyhow, deeply, contentious. You can’t swot it up to decide whether to join a demonstration or sign a petition. Yet, how much history does one need to understand that whatever reasons Hamas might have for sending fighters into Israel, there could never be a morally decent reason to shoot into a soldier’s vagina, to hammer dozens of nails into a woman’s thigh and groin or to cut off a woman’s breasts while raping her – all exultant expressions of Jew-hatred. Perpetrators of such acts do not deserve to be called resistance fighters.

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And how much history do you need to have eyes to see that the obligation on a state to prevent such acts from occurring does not yield even a lookalike of a morally decent reason for killing almost 30,000 people, most of them women and children, for denying a population adequate water, food and medical treatment while destroying the material conditions of a way of living in cities and homes they love.

Could someone vulnerable to such attacks plead, morally clear-sightedly, without shame, that to protect them and the people they love, their government should be prepared to kill and main a few thousand more Gazans? Only with scales made in hell could one try to estimate the relative moral weight of the horrors of October 7 and those of Gaza where entire families are blown to pieces, identifiable only by the texta-colour markings on their scattered body parts, inscribed there in fearful anticipation of the probable need for them.

That there are no morally decent reasons for certain actions does not mean that no decent person could try to offer some. For the sake of national and religious allegiances that have become fundamental to their identities, good people have for centuries done and tried to justify morally terrible deeds and their supporters have defended them or remained silent when they should have condemned them.