100 books like Generals in the Cabinet Room

In this startling and deeply researched volume, Benny Morris shows why the war of 1948, including Israeli expulsions of Palestinian Arabs during the fighting, was not itself the cause of the Nakba, the “catastrophe,” that resulted in three-quarters of a million Palestinian stateless Palestinians. The real cause, and that which accounts for much of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as it exists today, is the decision taken after the war to bar return of the refugees to their homes. Morris shows, year by year, how that decision was brutally and systematically enforced by barriers, reprisal raids, killing zones, and forcible expulsions. No other book comes close to the detail provided here, about the early 1950s campaign against “infiltration” that doomed Palestinian refugees to generations of exile, about the thinking of the Israeli politicians, officials, and officers who designed and implemented this ruthless effort, and about its unanticipated and costly consequences.

For the first eighteen years of Israel’s existence most Arabs in the country were ruled by a military administration. It was formally abolished only a year before the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 and the establishment of Israeli military rule in those territories. The story of that early military government is not well known, except by specialists. But with the publication of Shira Robinson’s book, based on declassified archival material, we now know the details of how Arab citizens of Israel were subordinated, exploited, and manipulated, under false rationales of security concerns, in order to bolster the political position of the dominant Labor Party, to advance Zionist goals of land acquisition and subsidization of Jewish settlement, and, as the title of the book suggests, to help present Israel as a “liberal” state while concealing its settler colonialist dynamics.

Every nationalist struggle requires effective leaders. Zionism, in particular, faced such long odds and such peculiar circumstances, that success depended not only on effective, but ruthless and single-minded leadership. In this monumental biography of David Ben-Gurion, the single most dominant individual within the Zionist movement and in the first two decades of Israel’s existence, Tom Segev shows that Zionism did have such a leader. Contrary to official hagiography, Ben-Gurion offered no brilliant or innovative ideas about politics, history, or the human condition. What he contributed was a shrewd, consuming, and merciless dedication to wresting as much of Palestine, or the Land of Israel, from its Arab inhabitants as possible without risking the state he wanted by demanding more than the world could be forced to provide. 

Ben-Gurion’s model was Lenin, his modus operandi was Bolshevik. Everything for the cause, and nothing not for the cause, at least insofar as those… show more.

Gershon Shafir’s book on the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a crucial text for all those seeking to reconstruct a history of Israel, the Zionist movement, and the encounter between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. He did the unprecedented act of actually reading and studying virtually all the diaries and journals kept, over decades, by the small but extraordinarily dedicated and articulate group of early Zionist settlers. Contrary to official myths about a visionary Zionist blueprint for building the institutions we associate with Israel, Shafir shows that the kibbutz, the Jewish National Fund, the principle of Jewish labor, and, ultimately, the idea of the kind of “Jewish state” that actually emerged, were not the cause of the confrontation with the Arabs, but a product of it. 

This brings Palestinian Arabs into the story of Zionism in the best and most responsible way—by showing how real people, confronting desperate personal… show more.

This collection of poetry by a revered Palestinian poet illuminates his people’s emotional and historic connection to the land that is now the state of Israel.

His poems, many of which were set to music, are credited with solidifying a Palestinian national consciousness. His family was displaced from their home by the Israeli army; when they returned, they lived as second-class citizens.

The work achingly describes an abiding sense of love and loss.

Joe Saccos’ work has had such an impression on me.

In 1991-1992, Sacco spent two months in the occupied territories, collecting stories for this masterpiece of journalism and comics. He was breaking new ground; Comics Journalism as a form did not really exist before this book.

On the ground, Sacco found that as a cartoonist, he could delve deeper into the experiences of the Palestinians he interviewed; all knew their identities were safe as the book would be drawn, with no identifying photos, no names. Their stories and pain pour forth. 

Looking back on this publication thirty years later, the situation has become far, far worse for Palestinians. This book is an excellent primer to understand the atrocities of the present and the context of their past.

The perilous distances traveled in this intense, genre-bending novel are likewise abbreviated – sometimes measured in meters, between Israel and Palestine, but they are as fraught with peril as any thousand-mile survival trek. Based on the author-embellished experiences of two men, one of whom is Israeli, the other Palestinian, who also appear as themselves in factual passages, the book mixes fiction and nonfiction to magnify the drama of traveling back and forth between two adjacent, lethally fractious zones. An unexpected friendship develops between the two men after each loses a daughter to terror violence perpetrated by the other side, which alters their views as they repeatedly crisscross the boundary line.

Despite the book’s comparatively confined settings, the effect is of near-constant, life-changing motion as the two struggle to bridge a seemingly impassible gap in search of the truth. It works. Words of praise like “staggering” and “transformative” barely hint at… show more.

Azem takes a premise here and runs with it. How about, she asks, if all the Palestinians just disappeared, what would the reaction be?

The heart of the novel is the grandmother character, who dies as the book opens and the other Palestinians vanish and I wanted more recollections of her, more of her dialogue. Set mainly between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, the fusing of the two names irritates the grandmother, who says it’s "just like someone being up your ass. You don’t see them, and they never let go."

There are sharp cameos here of Israeli-Palestinian relations, from buyers and sellers to torturers and prisoners, pimps and sex workers. I found the conclusion to be too bleak, but the writing is good, and the observations are sharp.