You Can't Hide the Sun: A Journey through Israel and Palestine by John McCarthy: review It is hard to read this book, about the Palestinians who live in Israel, without thinking what Auden thought when he wrote: "Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return." However well disposed one is to the state of Israel, and sympathetic to the idea that it should make itself secure, there is more than enough in John McCarthy's account of his travels to make any reader worry that the government can protect itself with a rigour, or even relish, that is disturbing. What McCarthy does best is to weave the subsequent history around the interviews he conducts. There is some dutiful colour writing, of the From Our Own Correspondent sort, with notes on the strong coffees or cool beers he drinks along the way, but lots of the colour begins to accumulate symbolism. Forested areas sound lovely enough in his description, and are a tribute to the government's environmental policy, but they are also covering settlements that Palestinians deserted, and Israelis destroyed. Israel is peppered with these spots, snappily called URVs - unrecognised villages - such as those in the Negev desert, where Bedouins can try living, so long as they are not expecting any water. But, we are told, had they been Jewish settlers... In response, the cactus becomes a symbol, too, of Palestinian rootedness and toughness, as if to say, however little water you give us, we're staying. The author registers the brutality that Israeli forces have meted out, while bringing out the consolatory argument that at least Israel is a democracy - at least Israel holds inquiries into these things, and condemns those wayward soldiers who shoot civilians. But the sentences, such as those passed on the troops who shot 49 civilians at Kafr Qassem in 1956, can go down with a ministerial fiat. And anyway, McCarthy shows that the oppression Palestinians feel comes from not only fear, but also bureaucracy: the regulations that prescribe who really owns, or owned, what land; who can live where; who can marry whom; who is really a citizen of Israel. You Can't Hide the Sun: a Journey through Israel and Palestine by John McCarthy 308pp, Bantam Press t £20 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £18, ebook £17.91)