In December 1941 Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, had the first of two meetings with Hitler in Berlin. Pictures of the pair talking amiably later set the seal of damnation on the reputation of the man who was, more than any other, the ­political and religious leader of the Palestinians from 1921-48.

This has not only obscured the preceding decades during which al-Husayni was a relatively sensible, moderate figure; it has also allowed the Palestinians (and, by extension, the Arabs in general) to be painted as Nazi fellow travellers, whose dispossession was thus undeserving of sympathy in the face of what Ilan Pappé calls "the moral vindication of Zionism provided by the Holocaust". To all of the above, Pappé's new book is a most welcome corrective, as well as a restatement of the fact that, as he writes, "Palestine was never an empty territory waiting for a landless people to inhabit it".

The precise boundaries denoted by the name "Palestine" varied over time. For most of the period Pappé covers, the Husaynis should be thought of as Jerusalem rather than Palestinian notables, whose high position was due to their success in navigating the ebb and flow of influence within the Ottoman empire. It was not until the British mandate came into force after the First World War that an entity called Palestine officially existed. By then, it made sense to speak of the Husaynis as national figures - but for both them and the people they led, this was very late in the day. By this point, Arab Palestine faced a threat it was not nearly well-organised enough to counter: Zionism.

Pappé, professor of history at Exeter University, may have written the history of a family, but it is also the tragedy of a nation and, if the Husaynis failed to avert it, it's hard to imagine who could have done. In the interwar years, Britain and France had no intention of allowing Woodrow Wilson's principle of national self-determination to interfere with their plans for the parts of the former Ottoman empire they were carving up; after the Second World War, concludes Pappé, "Europe wished to atone for Nazism at Palestine's expense, and the local political leadership, the Husaynis and almost everyone else did not possess the skills to face this travesty".

Al-Husayni was repeatedly snubbed by the British, so, years later, when he recalled his decision to seek help from Germany, it is perhaps not overly surprising that he did not feel the need to apologise. The last Husayni to lead the Palestinians ended up a fool and a villain, for sure. But Pappé does him, history and truth a service by making it plain that Britain must bear considerable responsibility for driving him to such a fate.

The words of Arthur Balfour, in a memorandum to Lord Curzon, show how keen Britain was to break its pledges to the Arabs, ignore the covenant of the newly formed League of Nations and keep "the promise of one nation to give to another nation the land of a third nation". "In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country," he wrote. Zionism was "of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land". We are still living with the consequences today.

Sholto Byrnes is a contributing editor of the NS