Fans pick 100 books like Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

I was assigned this book in the first class I took that dealt with the Arab-Israeli conflict, and I found it to be a thought-provoking anthology of writings produced by Zionists, going back to rabbis and intellectuals of the mid-1800s and forward to Zionist activists, like David Ben-Gurion, in the 1950s. (One should perhaps be aware that Hertzberg published the original edition of this volume in 1959; it was reissued by JPS in 1997 with all the original source texts but with the addition of a reflective afterword by Hertzberg, who died in 2006.)

As a teacher, I appreciate that Hertzberg offers representative sections of longer texts, like those by Pinsker and Herzl. My personal favorites are Ahad Ha’am, the “agnostic rabbi” and critic of Herzl, and Judah Magnes, an American rabbi seeking to reconcile Zionism with Judaism's spiritual and ethical heritage.

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.

This anthology is heavily weighted toward the political and diplomatic dimensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict. I find the point-counterpoint of debates between representatives of Arab and Israeli governments stimulating: whatever one’s natural inclination, one has to take into account how political realities appear to someone from a totally different perspective.

I have found it valuable as a resource because it focuses on the conflict between Israel and the Arabs/Palestinians after 1948. The book is a mine of political speeches, summit declarations, newspaper editorials, organizational manifestoes, interstate treaties, and assorted other texts related to wars, negotiations, and peacemaking between Israel and the Arabs.

I was excited to discover Dowty’s anthology because I appreciated his translation/publication of certain Hebrew texts from two early Zionists, i.e., Ahad Ha’am and Yitzhak Epstein. As indicated by the title, this volume, while representing Jewish and Arab voices going back to the 1800s, foregrounds the contradictory viewpoints of, specifically, Israelis and Palestinians and brings the story of the conflict of these two ethnonational groups down to about 2015.

Since my students are mostly political science majors, they are aware that a major debate at present is whether Israel/Palestine should be one state or two. The last section of the Dowty book contains texts that advocate for a "one-state solution" vs. others that propose a "two-state solution."

As the Israel-Hamas conflict rages in 2024, Palestinian writers shed light on the trauma and violence of dispossession and colonization in this anthology translated from Arabic to English.

Through the controlled, curated form of poetry, eminent authors Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, and Fadwa Tuqan join emerging writers, several of them women, in narrating the Palestinian experience from 1948, the beginning of the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) to today.

This book is about geography and identity, the ground beneath one’s feet and belonging, origins and history, displacement, and diaspora. There is longing everywhere in the book for what was lost—home, family, tribe, community, and culture. There is also the plight of powerlessness, occupation, and enslavement. The words that express the loss and mourning of the Palestinian people are haunting and memorable, perhaps because they are translated from Arabic, a flowery and lyrical language.

When we hear about 33,000 dead Palestinian civilians,… show more.

This book has never been far from my mind since I first read it. I love it because of its incredible thoughtfulness about place, its honest, personal, and political connection to land, and its exquisite storytelling of the embodied and culture-making experience of walking. 

This isn’t a book that tells you what to think; it lets you find your way. Raja Shehadeh eloquently focuses on the personal, the physical, the beautiful, and the loved. Following his stories, following his walks, helped me understand one of the most complex and brutalized places on the planet. 

To read Shehadeh’s walks and his fears for the lands where he walks is to feel this place very personally. The way his walks become increasingly circumscribed over time as the book progresses broke my heart and made Palestine clear to me as a beloved and embodied place in a way no news report ever could. 

This history traces some of the ties between Irish revolutionaries and Jewish ones in Palestine and provides an unvarnished history of the events and personalities leading to the establishment of the Jewish state.

For Paul O’Dwyer, his own activism as an “Irish Zionist” in New York after WWII was motivated by his antagonism towards the British, viewing the British Mandate in what was then Palestine as the chief obstacle to a lasting arrangement beneficial to Jews and Arabs. He supported Jewish militant groups seeking to evict the British and open Palestine’s ports much wider to Holocaust survivors in Europe.

As a scholar of contemporary Jewish history and a practicing Jew, I used to deal mostly with books written by Jews. This book is one of the first I read that would be written by a Palestinian. Albeit born and bred in New York City, the author has a strong connection with Palestine, and one of his ancestors, the mayor of Jerusalem, wrote to Theodor Herzl as early as 1899 that the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine would encounter opposition from local population.

Khalidi leaves behind the often-confusing narrative of a conflict between two nations in favor of a history of colonial settlement and indigenous resistance to it. 

At a time of death and destruction in Gaza, this book is one of the only volumes that brings to the English language reader some of the voices from inside a small strip of land that has been under siege by land, sea, and air for sixteen years.

Although the quality of the writing is variable, I found that the rawness of the collection made the writers seem more intimate. With some gutsy writing by women and tender pieces by men, the anthology subverts assumptions and provides a wide heterogeneity of voices to the fore. 

Few conflicts have received more global attention than the struggle between Palestinians and Israelis. Media commenters frequently ask “Why has there been no Palestinian Gandhi?" Wendy Pearlman shows why this is the wrong question.

Despite difficult structural conditions, and in the face of heavy repression, she shows that there has been widespread use of nonviolent methods by Palestinians. When campaigns have turned violent, she shows that it is often the result of fragmentation within the movement that makes it difficult to ensure discipline and creates incentives to embrace more extreme tactics.

She provides a valuable lesson on the need to pay less attention to high-profile leaders and more attention to the organizations that underpin movements.