Lawrence Wright likes Big Subjects. Whether in nonfiction or novels, he tackles the 300-pounder fearlessly.

That was true in his excellent “Going Clear,” an exhaustively reported takedown of L. Ron Hubbard and his Church of Scientology. (Read it — you will never be able to enjoy Tom Cruise in a movie again.) “The End of October” is his 2021 novel about a global pandemic. And he tackles 9/11 in 2006’s “The Looming Tower,” which won a Pulitzer Prize.

With Big Subjects come Big Risks, perhaps none more polarizing than those surrounding the devastating conflict between Israel and Palestine. In “The Human Scale,” Wright delivers a page-turning narrative about events so recent they were covered in yesterday’s newspapers.

His intent, as the title suggests, is to wade into the complexities of the Jewish-Arab wars at the level of individual people. In this he largely succeeds. We come to care about American FBI agent Tony Malik, Israeli cops Jacob Weingarten and Yossi Ben-Gal, pro-peace Palestinian Jamal, West Bank settlers and their fellow hardliners, intellectual Sara and beautiful young Palestinian bride-to-be Dina.

In lengthy authorial expositions, Wright relates the tragic history of the region — wars, massacres, occupation, suicide bombings, kidnappings, broken peace accords — from multiple perspectives. These explainers often go clunkety-clunk, sometimes making dialogue sound more Wiki than actual, but they deepen and seem essential to the sweeping story, one in which memories are long and fuses short.

The hero worship of so-called martyrs shrinks time; a mass shooting that happened 20 years earlier remains an open wound, worthy of violent revenge in the present day.

At the heart of the story is a fraught relationship between Malik and Yossi. Malik was born in the United States to a white mother and a Palestinian émigré father. Yossi is an Arab-hating veteran of the Israeli military now working as a police inspector in the partitioned West Bank city of Hebron. After surviving severe injuries from a terrorist bomb blast in Jordan, Malik travels to Israel for a cousin’s wedding. His FBI handlers ask him to check out a mysterious request for a meeting from Weingarten, Hebron’s chief of police.

When Weingarten is killed in an apparent terrorist attack, Malik and Yossi work to find the killers. If it was Hamas, why hasn’t the group claimed credit? Might drug traffickers be involved? The notorious Israeli internal security branch Shabak seeks to charge the crime quickly, facts be damned. Suspicion is everywhere, heightening the suspense.

A virtue of “The Human Scale” is its refusal to simplify. On both sides are moderates, realists, cynics, religious extremists, peaceniks and hybrids of all those points on the spectrum. “Whether I agree with them or not, I have probed to find the truth upon which their argument rests,” Wright says in an afterword.

As an American-born Arab, Malik tends to view Palestinians sympathetically, up to a point. “He despised the violent aggression of the [Jewish] settlers, especially the Kahanists, but he also recognized the threat posed by jihadist groups. He didn’t see a moral difference between them, only a power imbalance.”

Yossi’s daughter Sara is a Jew who loves but despairs of modern-day Israel, which she calls “the world capital of hatred.” From the safe distance of grad school in Paris, Sara dreams of a more tolerant, peaceful and secular state. Her arguments with her father underscore a generational divide.

Will Israelis her age turn things in a more hopeful direction? That glimmer of optimism is snuffed out by the bloody events of October 2023 and their even bloodier aftermath.

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The Human Scale

By: Lawrence Wright

Publisher: Knopf, 429 pages, $30.

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