The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel. By Ilan Pappé. Yale University Press; 320 pages; $30 and £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

Israel's Palestinians: The Conflict Within. By Ilan Peleg and Dov Waxman. Cambridge University Press; 280 pages; $85 and £50. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

TWO states, one Jewish, one Palestinian, living peacefully side by side is the peacemakers’ hope. But one of the many perplexities about this ideal is that about 20% of the population of the Jewish state would be Palestinian. Though relations between Israel’s Palestinian minority and the Jewish majority present a surface calm, the former is marked by alienation and a sense of discrimination, whereas the Jewish side is increasingly alarmed that their state may be harbouring a demographic time bomb.

The 160,000 Palestinians who survived the 1948 war and stayed in what became Israel in order to remain close to their ancestral homes now number 1.3m. Long marginalised as a rather stranded little community, they have seldom received much international attention compared with the 4.1m Palestinians who live in the occupied territories. Now two books about them have appeared simultaneously, complementing one another. The first, by Ilan Pappé, is an authoritative history of the group’s 60 years or so of existence; the second, by Ilan Peleg and Dov Waxman, is an analytical study that includes radical proposals for turning Israel into a state for all its citizens while still preserving its special Jewish identity.

Mr Pappé is a Jewish Israeli historian who writes that his empathy for the Palestinians led to him being so ostracised in his own country that he chose to leave and now teaches in Britain. In his book he shows how Israeli policy towards its own Palestinians was formulated in the early years under David Ben-Gurion. The rulers of the new state dearly wished to be rid of their non-Jews. Since this was not politically possible, they tried, without success, to encourage their departure by restricting job opportunities and squeezing living space (though 20% of the population, the Arabs own only about 3% of the land).

Mr Pappé traces the community’s progress from the first cruel years of military rule and ghettoisation, through bad times and more enlightened ones to the present day when Israel’s hard-right parties search ever more openly for ways to slow down the growth of what many consider the enemy within, including proposals for a land-and-population transfer between Israel and the West Bank. He explores the rights given the Palestinians under Israeli law—and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which these rights have been sidestepped. At the same time he does not ignore the positive sides to life in Israel, a life that has provided Palestinians with health care, education and votes, given women more independence and, from the start, included Arab Israelis as elected members of the Knesset.

Mr Pappé also describes the Palestinians’ growing self-assertiveness, their cultural flowering in films, novels and poems, and their invented Hebrew-Arabic language, Arabrabiya. Opinion polls show that, despite the strong kinship that Palestinians in Israel feel for Palestinians outside, few would voluntarily join a Palestinian state if one were formed. They want a fairer home for themselves in Israel, not to take off for a poorer Arab alternative.

The Palestinians in Israel compare their condition not with Arabs outside but with their Jewish fellow-citizens. Mr Peleg and Mr Waxman, both professors at American universities, provide the socioeconomic evidence to show just how badly the Palestinians fare compared with Jewish Israelis. In summary, the Palestinians “suffer from numerous inequities, tacit discrimination, government neglect and social prejudice. They are largely excluded from the country’s public life, they have not been integrated socially or economically, and they are generally treated with suspicion by the state and by Israeli Jewish society. As such, collectively, Arabs are very much second-class citizens in Israel.”

The authors go on. The rift between Jewish and Arab Israelis, always wide, is growing dangerous. Though there is no evidence that the general Palestinian mood is becoming violent, they discern a distinct rise in radicalism. Liberal-minded Jewish Israelis are broadly accommodating and supportive, but many right-wing Israelis are discomfited by estimates that by 2050 about one-third of the country’s population will be Arab.

To continue along present lines, the two authors conclude, would be to invite a collision. So they have come up with a set of proposals that they describe as a compromise between doing nothing (or tinkering with cosmetic change) and the binational state that many Palestinians, inside and outside Israel, advocate.

A binational state, they believe, is a non-starter, given Israel’s raison d’être as the homeland for world Jewry. The authors also question Israel’s self-description as “Jewish and democratic”, arguing that “the Jewishness of the state has been maintained more forcefully than its democratic character.” They suggest policies that would enhance both the collective and individual rights of the country’s hefty minority, arguing that Israel’s Palestinians should not only be recognised as a fully fledged national group, but should exercise autonomy in certain cultural areas. Palestinian citizens should be nominated to positions of responsibility in all parts of the government bureaucracy. And their overall economic conditions should be improved through long-term development plans and fairer financial allocations to Arab municipalities.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, says he recognises that Arab Israelis need to succeed if the economy is to thrive. To ignore the importance of this is to risk a wider collision in which Jewish Israelis see a potential enemy in each new Palestinian baby and Arab Israelis grow ever more militant with each new humiliation.