Why am I passionate about this?
I am a journalist, think-tanker, and analyst based in Tel Aviv and formerly in Washington and London. I have a BA in History from the University of Toronto and an MA in Diplomacy and Conflict Studies from Reichman University in Israel, and I was previously deputy director for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. My first book, Palestine 1936, was named one of the Top Ten Books of 2023 by the Wall Street Journal. Throughout my whole life, I’ve written about the Middle East, the Israeli-Arab conflict, and so on and so forth. I love to travel and to read. And to write.
Oren's book list on learning the roots of the Israeli-Arab conflict
Why did Oren love this book?
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.
1 author picked Ben-Gurion as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
English, Hebrew (translation)