Early in this century Jerusalem had sunk into being a provincial city in the moribund Ottoman Empire, and when General Allenby entered it at the head of his British troops in 1917, he was popularly supposed to be the first white man to have done so since the Crusades. By contrast, between the two world wars Jerusalem was an uneasy and divided place, while Zionism began to grow as an ideological and political factor, and the postwar years saw the assassination of Count Bernadotte and a wave of violence just before the state of Israel emerged to the light of day and of history. Martin Gilbert ends his eventful chronicle with the assassination of Premier Rabin, which seems to mark yet another historical watershed. B.F.