Thanks Gutcher
I saw the book in Dublin a few months ago and didn't buy it - I will next time we're there
I'd never heard of him before so I've just looked him up
An attack on him in a blog from the Jerusalem post headed
"Avi Shlaim’s Anti-Israel Slime "
quotes him as saying:
"Benjamin Netanyahu is “a bellicose, right-wing Israeli nationalist, a rejectionist… and a reactionary.” His government is “the most aggressively right-wing, diplomatically intransigent, and overtly racist government in Israel’s history.” It is a government of “militant nationalists.” It “is in danger of drifting towards fascism.” He is “a jimcrack politician.” He is “the war-monger in chief.”
In the Independent op-ed, he said “He (Netanyahu) is like a man who pretends to negotiate the division of a pizza while continuing to gobble it.”

and Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, according to Shlaim,

“regards diplomacy as the extension of war by other means.” Moreover, he is a “bitkhonist, a security-ist who wants 100 percent security for Israel which means zero security for the Palestinians.”

He certainly has a way with words - something to look forward to
Jim Carroll