Put another way, each has its own version of the events that have locked them together for so long, and as every journalist who has covered this story knows only too well, if one side applauds you for telling the truth, the other will accuse you of lying.

Pratt cites his conviction that the Palestinian people have been and are still victims of “a great injustice”, and that responsibility for the extreme suffering they endure lies unequivocally with the state of Israel, as grounds for abandoning the reporter’s tradition of impartiality.

His view, like mine, is that nobody who has spent time on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza could fail to conclude that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is anything less than barbaric. What better reflection of this is there than the stream of young men, and some young women, whose rage and despair drives them to become suicide bombers?

Intifada covers the eventful, many would say fateful, years that saw the Palestinian resistance develop from children armed only with stones confronting the might of the Israeli army troops to the uprising provoked by Ariel Sharon’s inflammatory visit to the al-Aqsa mosque and the subsequent emergence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as fully-fledged guerrilla organisations.

Part reportage, part analysis, it draws heavily on Pratt’s extensive time in the field, constantly ducking and diving in riot-torn Palestinian towns and counting the bodies after bomb attacks on “soft” targets in Israel. He’s very good at conveying the adrenaline fuelled and addictive business of covering the front line, though perhaps rather too fond of mentioning how dangerous this was – you chose to be there, David.

The shocking conduct of Israeli troops towards ordinary Palestinians is vividly portrayed: pregnant women aborting because roadblocks prevent them from reaching hospital, babies suffocating after tear gas is fired into houses, savage beatings in full view of the media. Pratt wonders aloud how the average Israeli can live with this and concludes that it is a case of wilful self-deception: the worst abuses occur in the occupied territories where relatively few have ever set foot.

Of course, there are those who refuse to turn a blind eye to the repression and injustice done in their name: the middle class Jewish women who monitor checkpoints, human rights groups like B’Tselem, the courageous newspaper Ha’aretz. Pratt might usefully have included something about the Israeli soldiers, many of them combat veterans, who found duty in the territories so abhorrent to their personal morality that they preferred to go to jail rather than serve there ever again.

The inexorable rise of Hamas as the most potent Palestinian force is examined in depth, and Pratt enjoys reminding us that Israeli military intelligence chiefs once backed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Islamic fundamentalists as – to quote one general – “a healthy phenomenon that could counter the PLO” (not long before he was assassinated, Yassin joked to me that he was “Made in Israel”).

As Pratt notes, while the electoral triumph of Hamas last year hardly surprised seasoned observers of the intifada, the margin of its victory did: it is a gauge of the panic this created within the Israeli government that within a few months it discreetly approved a shipment of arms to the beleaguered Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. The potential for a disastrous civil war is reflected in the repeated clashes between opposing factions in Gaza, raising the nightmare possibility of sectarian violence spreading throughout the West Bank.

In an afterword that will chime with all Middle East correspondents, past and present, Pratt observes that war in this afflicted region “is like a malevolent wind that blows, disappears, then returns.” It is hard to believe that this will change until the Palestinians have a homeland of their own in which to dream of peace.

Intifada: The Long Day of Rage by David Pratt

Sunday Herald Books £7.99

I was crouched by a cinder block wall around five feet high, surrounded by Palestinian youths making petrol bombs. Behind the wall was a warehouse and then a half constructed five story block, once intended to be apartments or offices. In front of the wall, about 50 metres away, was a crossroads guarded by an Israeli army bunker surrounded by a high, wire fence and dirt ramparts. The road to the right led down to the Israeli settlement of Netzarim. The road behind me led between olive groves, scruffy fields and small villages to the famous Erez checkpoint and ‘Israel proper’.

The road on the other side of the crossroads led further into the Gaza strip. All afternoon I had watched the same thing happening. The cycle was simple. It took half an hour for the youths around me to work themselves up to charge. Then half would run out into the road hurling stones and petrol bombs at the bunker. A single shot would ring out, dropping one of the demonstrators, a shout of ‘allahu akbar’ would go up from the others and the wounded youth would be carried by his peers back to the Red Crescent first aid teams and taken to hospital.

It was October 2000 and for the next two weeks and on through the next months I watched the same scene, almost a ritual, repeated again and again as the ‘al-Aqsa’ Intifada continued. The word intifada, as David Pratt, another witness to these same events, explains in his comprehensive and highly readable book, derives from the Arabic word nefada and means ‘shaking off’ as a verb and a ‘shudder, awakening, uprising’ as a noun. Few who witnessed the events of 2000 can have failed to grasp why.

In the opening chapter of ‘A Long Day of Rage’ Pratt vividly describes the scene at the West bank town of Ramallah, the seat of Yasser Arafat’s incompetent and corrupt Palestinian Authority where the demonstrations on the same stretch of road on the outskirts of town always followed an identical course. Pratt describes Israeli soldiers or border police watching them firing tear gas and ‘rubber bullets’, steel balls wrapped in a thin layer of rubber at the stone throwing demonstrators. The bullets were not unlike, as Pratt points out in a perceptive aside, musket balls of the 18th century. They were also, in a tragic ironic twist typical of the region, similar to the over-sized ball bearings that some of those behind the suicide bombers who attacked Israeli teenagers in nightclubs and bars at the time used to boost the destructive power of their blasts.

The violence at the checkpoints or in Ramallah had a bizarrely formulaic, demonstrative quality. If you did not have a profound understanding of local cultures and politics, it was difficult to comprehend what was happening or understand the complex messages that the two sides were sending to each other and to the international community. Luckily for the reader, Pratt has both the knowledge and the perception to understand and describe what was happening in 2000 and 2001, what happens today and what is likely to happen in the future. And though his writing occasionally slips into the classic ‘war correspondent’ narrative, Pratt is too much of a journalist to forget that it is the people who live the story every day, not the foreigners who chose to cover their plight, who are important and the book is crammed with revealing vignettes and well-observed dialogue.

Pratt is also honest enough to admit that he has a view and that ‘impartiality’, though often claimed, is far from common among reporters working in the region or commentators on the issue. ‘The state of Israel has a case to answer for in its appalling treatment of the Palestinian people’, Pratt says in his introduction. This is true as is the fact that both sides consider themselves victims and, in a sense, are write to do so. However I would contest the existence of a ‘Jewish lobby’ in America, arguing that there is a powerful ‘Zionist lobby’ instead. Such distinctions are important. The market is crammed with books on Israel, Palestine and the continuing and tragic conflict. However there is always room for another one by a conscientious journalist who takes time to get things right. This is an accessible, colourful and informed addition to the literature.

Jason Burke is the chief reporter of the Observer and author of Al’Qaeda:the True Story of Radical Islam and The Road to Kandahar (both published by Penguin)