100 books like One Palestine, Complete

A complete history of the Zionist-Arab conflict, starting with the first wave of Zionist emigration. Benny Morris is one of the leading historians of Israel. Many consider him the historian of Israel.

He has often irritated critics, first on the right and later on the left, with work that failed to flatter their particular political sympathies. But he has always insisted that he goes where the material takes him, and I, for one, believe him. Today he remains uncategorizable and unpredictable.

This book is based on secondary sources - its remit is too wide to be based on primary ones - but it is, in my view, the best one-stop shop for a general history of the conflict. 

Koestler is famous for Darkness at Noon, his 1940 novel of Stalinist totalitarianism. But in 1949, he wrote this remarkably perceptive history of the British Mandate, from its inception to the birth of the State of Israel.

This is not a traditional history backed by myriad footnotes. But it is, to borrow a phrase usually reserved for journalism, the “first draft of history,” as it was written in real-time just as the Jewish state rose to life. Koestler was closely tied to Zionism from the ‘20s on, having spent several years in Palestine as a manual laborer and then a journalist. Later he was even deputy of the right-wing Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky in Berlin, labored intensively on behalf of Israel’s establishment, and reported from the country in its first weeks of existence.

This is a hugely illuminating book from a gifted and insightful observer.

I wrote a book about the Arab Revolt during the British Mandate; this book is about the Jewish Revolt that followed it.

Hoffman’s book is both extremely detailed and hugely engaging, both academically rigorous and a rollicking good read. The Jewish revolt against British rule is an oft-forgotten topic, perhaps because it flatters neither pro-Israel nor anti-Israel prejudices.

Israel’s defenders are not often keen to be reminded that Jews are eminently capable of anti-Western terrorism; Israel’s detractors are not keen to be reminded that the country was born in an anti-colonial struggle. It’s almost as if, hear me out here, the Middle East conflict is complicated.

We cannot understand the Middle East conflict without understanding how Israel arose, and we cannot understand Israel without understanding its founding father, David Ben-Gurion.

Shabtai Teveth was a longtime Israeli journalist whom Ben-Gurion chose as his biographer. And, although Teveth is broadly sympathetic to Ben-Gurion, he is never shy about revealing his many flaws as well. Teveth was a journalist rather than a trained historian, but his research was second to none (trust me, I’ve spent many hours with Teveth’s own archive of the leader). And being a journalist, he knows how to tell a story.

This is the best single volume for understanding Ben-Gurion and the road to Israel’s creation.

“The Little Flower” matched his effectiveness in battling Tammany Hall on the stump with his success as the corruption-fighting Fusion mayor of New York. Kessner discusses how this much-loved figure (even the subject of a posthumous Pulitzer Prize-winning musical) initially frustrated O’Dwyer’s brother Bill (his Democratic successor in 1946) by winning for a third time in a row in 1941.

Kessner shows how he was integral to the making of modern New York. In death, New York’s most outstanding leader took on new luster among good-government advocates and many others when Bill’s time in Gracie Mansion was short-circuited by the Bronx Democratic boss amid a pervasive police department scandal.

A suspenseful account of the corrupt underworld centered on the harbor where Paul O’Dwyer worked on the docks as a law student at St. John’s and in the criminal courthouse as a young attorney cutting his teeth during the Great Depression.

It shows the often claustrophobic social and political world from which Paul soon made his escape to the more cosmopolitan Manhattan, beginning his career as a lawyer known in part for defending union leaders, lawyers, and activists targeted for exercising their First Amendment rights in the reactionary Cold War and Vietnam War eras to come.

One of O’Dwyer’s early prominent battles for the First Amendment and civil rights occurred when he represented families evicted for opposing a racial color line in the selection of tenants of MetLife’s Stuyvesant Town in lower Manhattan, built with assistance from the La Guardia administration.

Through Bagli’s carefully researched history of this watershed battle over the authority of a private landlord to bar African Americans, he explains that O’Dwyer’s involvement in the case on behalf of progressive tenants helped pave the way for Metlife to build the smaller Riverton housing development in Harlem as a concession to critics. Over time, city and state laws would make housing discrimination illegal.

A richly detailed and often riveting narrative on the 1960s, particularly the divisive and tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the enormous antiwar movement (both events in which O’Dwyer played a leading role as a Senate candidate and anti-Vietnam War ally of Eugene McCarthy).

Accounts of urban riots drawn in part from court records bring the decade’s harsh and even brutal edge to life.

I was excited to discover this book after teaching the history of Zionism for several years. What makes this anthology unusual is the inclusion of sources that illustrate the social and cultural history of the new Yishuv, the modern Jewish community of Palestine.

Of special interest are letters and diaries of women in the new Yishuv; these writings show the striking differences between the earliest, rather conservative colonists, and the young radicals of the Second Aliya (1904-1914). Other texts I have found most useful as an instructor analyze Zionist relations with the native Arab population, anticipating and explicating the impossibility of making Zionism acceptable to the Palestinian people.

I own the Fifth Edition of this book, which was inscribed for me by the author, Charles Smith. This book is different from the four noted above because it is a detailed chronicle and critical analysis of the Arab/Palestinian conflict with Israel by a single author, the documents supplementing rather than constituting the text.

Among the books I know of that purport to be balanced and comprehensive studies of this subject, I think this one has the best claim to those descriptors. The book is in its tenth edition, so the author has obviously successfully presented the subject's history in a way that has gained a substantial and appreciative audience. One of its merits from an instructional standpoint is the inclusion of numerous maps, chronologies, photographs, and a glossary.

I like the fact that it has been continually updated. The transition of the PLO “from pariah to partner” in the… show more.