Palestine: A Novel. By Jonathan Bloomfield. Chicago: Silverlane Publishing House, 201 1. 463 pp. $14.95,paper.

Palestine: A Novel, attempts to be a nonstop action thriller while instructing the reader in the rudiments of Middle East history. It also seems to have been written with the aim of earning the author some fancy royalties on any film version.

To give the novel a feel of authenticity, Bloomfield adds long "historic appendices" to the book, consisting largely of citations from documents or from anecdotal dialogues that have appeared in the press, and presenting a potted history of the Middle East conflict for a generation that has little patience for reading actual history books.

While largely pro-Israel in tone, Bloomfield, who once served in the Israel Defense Forces, tries throughout the book to be superficially neutral, with acts of Palestinian terrorism portrayed as pretty much the moral equivalent of Israelis trying to defend their population from terror attacks.

The action revolves around two main characters: a Palestinian terrorist from Hamas named Anid al-Husseini and an imaginary Israeli general, Yigal Navon, later to become prime minister. …