President Obama’s one year deadline to reach a peace accord between the Israelis and the Palestinians underscores the fallacy not only that the United States is an honest broker between the two sides, but also what the underlying forces are that drive the conflict.

There’s the aid – over 100 billion dollars since 1974 alone, according to the Jewish Virtual Library. Washington’s vetoing UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israel’s war crimes and illegal acts of aggression is legendary; according to Mearsheimer and Walt’s “The Israel Lobby And U.S. Foreign Policy,” “since 1982, the U.S. has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members.”

And of course, all of this continues under Obama – as Alon Pinkas put it in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahranoth last March, “when it comes to all the parameters that count, Obama is pro-Israel.” And so it is that another pro-Israel administration continues on the path laid down a long time ago that will continue for a long time to come.

Superpower support is as much a part of the Israeli narrative as European anti-Semitism or Zionist ideology; without it, there would be no Israel at all. Before American patronage, Great Britain – as the most powerful nation in the world at one time – enabled Israel’s emergence through the Balfour Declaration and subsequently during 30 years of mandate rule.

It’s the promises made to the Zionist movement — along with seemingly contradictory promises made to Arab nationalists looking to throw off the yoke of Ottoman oppression — that are considered the starting point for the Arab-Israeli conflict. It’s these events that are explored in a new book by Jonathan Schneer, simply titled “The Balfour Declaration: The Origins Of The Arab-Israeli Conflict.”

In a well written and readable format, Professor Schneer takes the reader on a minute-by-minute drama of the many key players in British policymaking, Zionist lobbying and the Grand Sharif Hussein of Mecca as they jockeyed for power. But the book has a number of faults that mar an otherwise decent work.

Schneer describes the attitudes Palestinian Arabs and Jewish settlers had towards each other in pre-1914 Palestine in terms that can almost be described as Orientalist. In addition to land disputes – where absentee landlords sold land to Jewish settlers, who then displaced the Palestinian fellahin or peasants – “other friction points emerged as well, including the religious one,” Schneer writes.

“The Prophet Muhammad had held that Jews had broken their covenant with God, had falsified their scriptures, and consequently were due for terrible chastisement on the day of reckoning.” On the other hand, he describes Jewish attitudes as “contemptuous,” “jarring” and as “disdain”; never as racist.

Palestinian agriculture was described as suffering “typical oriental lack of foresight,” wrote Samuel Tolkowsky and quoted by Schneer as an example of this “disdain.” Yet he describes Palestinian attitudes towards Jews as “anti-Semitism.” And no religious or ideological context is given in regards to Jewish anti-Arab prejudice, even when a Zionist member of the British cabinet – Herbert Samuel – told Israel’s future first president Chaim Weizmann that “we would rebuild the Temple, as a symbol of Jewish unity.”

Schneer describes the motives of Zionism purely in terms of European anti-Semitism and not also as a movement of colonization and conquest. While going into great detail of Russian anti-Semitism – Czar Alexander II’s advisor, Constantin Pobiedonostsev, vowed to make one-third of Russian Jews starve to death – no mention is made of Zionism’s founder Theodore Herzl’s plans for the indigenous Palestinian population.

“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country.” This sentence appeared in Herzl’s diary in 1895, but not in Schneer’s book.

Another crucial item left out was the pervasive influence of Christian Zionism within British government circles. “Indeed, there was a long English tradition of Christian Zionism,” wrote Tom Segev in his book “One Palestine, Complete.”

Segev wrote that Prime Minister David Lloyd George referred to Palestine in his memoirs as “Canaan” and that “I was taught in school far more about the history of the Jews than about the history of my own land.” Lord Balfour, author of the infamous declaration of the Jewish state, “also considered Zionism as an inherent part of his Christian faith,” Segev wrote.  Christian Zionism was both a motivating factor for British occupation of Palestine and establishing a Jewish state, something Schneer left out, despite his listing Segev’s book in his bibliography list.

Set in a format easily accessible for the lay reader, Schneer’s “Balfour Declaration” is useful for the novice reader of Middle East history, but only as a jump-off point for farbetter works on the subject.