If you were to stop a Palestinian on the street in Jerusalem or Gaza and ask them how Israel became its own worst enemy, they'd probably tell you that establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was a pretty good start.

More than 70 years after al-Nakbah, the "catastrophe" which saw hundreds of thousands of people expelled from their ancestral lands, Palestinians are still traumatised by the events of 1948. And who can blame them?

The Zionist settlers expropriated the fleeing Palestinians' stone houses, seized their abandoned olive groves, and renamed the few villages they didn't bulldoze, all the while denying them any "right of return".

In Friendly Fire, Ayalon doesn't identify the expulsion of between 700,000 and 800,000 people from their homeland as Israel's most shameful own goal, but rather its mishandling of Palestinian terror.

As head of Shin Bet, Ayalon claims that he had to move beyond the "us-versus-them thinking" that had served him well during his storied career in the Navy.

"Learning to view Palestinians as human beings with rights alerted me to a basic flaw in our approach to our security: Our absence of empathy corrupted our ability to assess dangers and opportunities.

"Fear made us overreact", he writes.

It's astonishing to read that Ayalon, an educated and urbane member of the elite, didn't always view Palestinians as "human beings with rights", but not altogether surprising.

After all, in 1969, when Ayalon was busy sinking Egyptian ships ferrying arms and fighters across the Red Sea, Golda Meir was proclaiming, "There were no such thing as Palestinians.... They did not exist".

Hard to imagine Palestinians having rights when your prime minister doesn't even acknowledge their existence.

Friendly Fire is full of fascinating anecdotes from a life lived on the sidelines of some of the most momentous events in the recent history of the Middle East: the Six-Day War, the first and second intifadas, the Oslo Accords.

It's also peppered with phraseology that casts doubt on Ayalon's sincerity.

Why else refer to the Temple Mount as, "the holiest spot on earth for Jews and number three for Muslims", if not to suggest that Jews have a more legitimate claim to the site?

In the end, however, Ayalon does come across as someone who's genuinely interested in peace.

It's just a shame there aren't more who think the same way.