The most recommended books on Israel and Palestine

I’m a historian who loves therapy! I think the most interesting discoveries we make in life are about ourselves. I love the process of shining a light into our subconscious minds to discover the roots of how we think, feel, and act. I find inner child work especially exciting. 

So when I heard that one of my favorite historians, Martha Hodes, had broken with academic tradition and published a personal history weaving together memory, family, trauma, and childhood to figure out “what really happened” to herself decades ago, I ran to pick up a copy from my local bookstore, and whew, I’m glad I did!

This book was by far my favorite non-fiction read of the year. As a 12-year-old child, Hodes traveled on a plane in 1970 that was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. I found it incredibly gripping that even though… show more.

It is impossible to grasp the hold that Jerusalem has on billions of people on the planet—Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—without understanding what Armstrong, a religious scholar but a popular writer, calls its sacred geography.

This is a great one-stop shop to appreciate the religious pull that the Holy City has had on so many for so many generations—and how that pull has launched bloody wars as well as dramatic innovations of faith.

I have been teaching from this book for many years. Books about Israel are fraught with bias. Many are post or anti-Zionist. They do not represent Israeli mainstream and the Israeli perception of history. Anita Shapira is Israel’s foremost historian of Zionism who received the Israel Prize, the highest prize Israel confers on its leaders. She describes and explains the emergence of Zionism in Europe against the backdrop of relations among Jews, Arabs, and Turks. Shapira describes the challenges that Zionists had to face in Palestine and from 1948 onwards in the newly established state. Much of her research is based on primary sources: archival sources, including diaries, memoirs, and other documents. This book does an excellent work of explaining Israeli history, politics, and society.

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. 

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.

Canon is the executive director of Churches for Middle East Peace based in Washington D.C. and a person with wide academic and personal experience with the churches in Israel/Palestine.

Here she has edited a collection of 29 chapters written by a vast array of Christian leaders from around the world, from Desmond Tutu to Shane Claiborne. Each is reflecting on the conflict in Israel/Palestine and Christian responses to it.

It is the diversity of views that gives this book its strength and quickly you’ll see that there is hope for the Middle East if we are simply honest about the origin and nature of the struggle.

If you only ever read one Palestinian memoirist, it should be Fawaz Turki.

He published three book-length memoirs, all excellent, but this is his most comprehensive autobiography and as such the must-read of all his works. It covers his early years in Haifa, his family’s displacement to Lebanon in 1948, and his subsequent adolescence in Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp; as well as his later studies and career in the US.

Exile’s Return is organized around his first return visit to Palestine in the 1990s, where he comes face-to-face with the realities of the Israeli occupation and continuing Palestinian dispossession. There are now many brilliant memoirs and autobiographies by Palestinian refugees, but Turki remains the memoirist par excellence in this genre. 

If McWhorter focuses on how woke ideology harms Blacks, Bernstein shows how it harms Jews and inevitably fosters antisemitism.

Like McWhorter, Bernstein provides very specific examples of wokeness in action, both on and off campus. Jews were asked to leave an LGBT Pride event because their flag – a Pride flag with a Star of David on it – “made people feel unsafe”; a Jewish organization that issued a public statement condemning George Floyd’s murder was lambasted because the statement had not been drafted by a person of color; and more.

Bernstein and I are both liberal Jews, but we both fear the consequences of an ideology that divides the world into the non-privileged oppressed and the privileged oppressors – Jews, by virtue of their current success, are automatically considered privileged oppressors despite the long worldwide history of antisemitism.

I surprised myself by reading a book about the Third Crusade in the 11th Century. So much to learn that I didn't know! The main characters are Richard the Lionheart, who leads the crusade, and Saladin, the great leader who defends against the Crusaders. You come away with enormous respect for both men and the struggles they endured. Richard the Lionheart was the son of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who is the subject of her many biographies and maybe I'll read those next.