Textbook Claim: "... in all cases it is the electrostatic force acting between charged particles that is responsible for all the forms of bonding."
You ask how bonding between two neutral atoms can be electrostatic. In the case of covalent and van der waals the electrostatic basis is not so obvious as it is for ionic compounds. A covalent bond forms when two neutral atoms establish a shared molecular orbital which is much larger than the separate atomic orbitals that the bonding electrons contributed by each atom formerly occupied. Electrostatic repulsion favors electron pairs being in larger orbitals, because this increases average distance between the electrons. In the case of Van der Waals attraction, the neutral atoms are electrostatically attracted because when their electrons are not symmetrically distributed, there is a partial positive charge at one end of a molecule and a partial negative at the other, even though overall charge is zero. Electrons in adjoining molecules will tend to synchronize their movements so that the positive end of one molecule will be near the negative end of the adjoining molecule; this is called induced charge.