Bibliography of Recommended Books on Palestine/Israel
The World after Gaza: a History, by Pankaj Mishra, is a beautifully written and brilliantly insightful book that places the Palestinian People's struggle for freedom within a global, anti-colonialist geographic and historic framework.
Phyllis Bennis's Understanding Palestine and Israel is the perfect book for someone who is already in sympathy with the Palestinian cause but who seeks a much more thorough understanding of the current state of the Israel-Palestine conflict and of the history that led up to what is happening now. Phyllis Bennis has an incredible grasp of all of this, she writes very clearly, and she addresses all of the key questions.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe, is an illusion-shattering book by an eminent, exceedingly knowledgeable and fair-minded Jewish historian and public intellectual. The central focus of the book is an extremely well-planned and horribly violent (including many massacres) campaign of ethnic cleansing perpetrated against Palestinians by Israeli forces in 1948. By explaining what led up to this crime against humanity and how it was largely intentionally covered up afterwards, Pappe exposes the true nature of the Zionist project.
In Ten Myths about Israel, eminent historian and public intellectual Ilan Pappe clears away 10 very influential misunderstandings (and in some cases outright lies) that have kept people from understanding how settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and ultimately genocide have characterized the Zionist project in Palestine/Israel.
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It masterfully chronicles the desperate journey of a Palestinian father to find his young son who may have been killed or injured in a school bus accident. The New Yorker Magazine called it “a powerful evocation of a two-tiered society”, filled with physical, bureaucratic, and emotional obstacles that only Palestinians must navigate in the State of Israel.
One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, the first nonfiction book by novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad is “a powerful indictment of Western complicity in the genocide of Palestinians”, according to author Isabella Hammond, who continues “El Akkad asks: How are we supposed to go on living in this world?” In deeply moving and poetic prose the author probes his heart and mind to reckon with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values.
The Hundred Year War on Palestine, A History of Settler Colonialism by historian and professor Rashid Khalidi, is both a personal and scholarly telling of the history of the Palestinian people from the late 1800’s through modern times. Required reading for those who want a deeper and more complete understanding the Israel/Palestine situation today.
Enter Ghost is a 2024 novel by Isabella Hammad. It was the winner of the 2024 Royal Society for Literature Award for Best Second Novel. The plot concerns two Palestinian sisters, one of whom (Sonia) had moved to London to become a successful actress some eleven years earlier and has now returned to Haifa to visit her sister Haneem, a professor at Tel Aviv University. Haneem's best friend is the director of a Palestinian theater company, which Sonia eventually joins to help put on a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. As it turns out, in addition to being great theater, Hamlet also functions as an allegory for the Palestinian situation under occupation. The Israeli government tries in various ways to stop the production. The novel gives an excellent picture of life under occupation.
Edward W. Said, THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE (Vintage Books, 1980). Publisher's blurb: Edward Said, the distinguished author of ORIENTALISM, writes a powerfully moving account of ... the emergence of the modern Palestinian nation and its confrontation with Zionism and Israel. Himself a Palestinian by birth and [later] a member of the Palestine National Council, Said "logically and eloquently" (Christopher Lehman-Haupt, New York Times) argues the plight of the four million scattered Muslim and Christian Arabs known as Palestinians, who have been disenfranchised and deprived of their homeland, which is currently under Israeli control.
MAPPING MY RETURN: A PALESTINIAN MEMOIR, by Salman Abu Sitta, (American University in Cairo, 2016) is the only memoir in English by a Palestinian Arab who grew up in the Beersheba district prior to 1948, now with a new afterword. Abu Sitta vividly evokes the vanished world of his family and home on the eve of the Nakba, giving a personal and very human face to the dramatic events of 1930s and 1940s Palestine, as Zionist ambitions and militarization expanded under the British mandate. He chronicles his life in exile, from his family’s flight to Gaza, his teenage years as a student in Nasser’s Egypt, his formative years in 1960s London, his life as a family man and academic in Canada, to several sojourns in Kuwait. Abu Sitta’s long and winding journey has taken him through many of the seismic events of the era, from the 1956 Suez War to the 1991 Gulf War.