Fans pick 100 books like Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956

Yoram Peri’s expertise on the historical entanglements of the military and political sectors in Israel is unrivaled.  Based on personal interviews with all major players Peri goes behind the scenes to show the real meaning of the standard Israeli formula that the “Arab problem” should be seen “through the gunsight.” He describes how different generals, even those open to an accommodation with the Palestinians and opposed to settlers, were either stymied or transformed into saboteurs of the Oslo peace process. This pattern he attributes to the hegemonic psychology, standard operating procedures, processes of socialization, and political demands, associated with the way the Israel Defense Forces are organized and integrated into Israeli politics. Particularly vivid is his portrayal of upper-echelon Israeli military frustration at its forced withdrawal from Lebanon and how that resulted in the IDF’s extraordinarily violent and destructive treatment of the Gaza Strip.

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.

The book that has come closest to making me think it may really all be about oil after all! Or energy at least. Although written before the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine, Thompson shows that the origins of the war go back far beyond 2014 or even 1991, but rather lie in the 1950s – when Anglo-French power in the MENA region was broken, first by the 1956 Suez War and then by Algeria’s secession from France in 1962, which in turn would lead to West Germany becoming dependent on the USSR for energy – a dependence that lasts to this day. Her account of the geopolitical consequences of the US fracking revolution is superb – prompting me to think that the Ukraine war can be seen as a battle over who will supply the European energy market. Once the LNG terminals in northern Europe are built, the US has… 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.

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.