The most recommended Zionism books

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.

Anyone wishing to understand the history of modern Israel will find all questions answered in this beautifully written account beginning in the 19th century and continuing to the end of the 20th.

Sachar’s eloquence is stunning, and his attention to detail means that nothing is left undefined or ambiguous. There are quite a few histories of Israel on bookshelves, but none of them comes near Sachar’s work in perceptiveness or reach.

If only all histories were written as well!

An astonishing well-researched and detailed analysis of the arms trade and the omnipresence of guns in the world today. Full of startling and worrying statistics, for example, that there are 12 billion bullets produced every year which kill at least 500,000 people. The book reveals how in some places it is easier to get a gun than to get a glass of water. Solo killers, the military, the hunters, the paranoid suburban Americans, they are all here, and it is not a pretty picture.

Radosh and Radosh offer a compelling and dramatic history of Truman’s decision to support Jewish emigration to Palestine in 1947, and to recognize the state of Israel in 1948. They examine Truman’s dilemmas as he made the recognition decision against the advice of the leaders of his own State Department, including his own Secretary of State George Marshall. A Safe Haven offers a careful and essential guide to American politics regarding the Zionist issue, and to the combination of political and religious arguments that were decisive in Truman’s decision making. 

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.

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 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.

My Promised Land is beautifully written, a story deeply informed by the author’s family history and the body of knowledge he built as an influential Israeli journalist.

Shavit loves the place of his birth but doesn’t retreat from hard questions. He tells a powerful, poignant story of a state-created out of tragedy and the brutal reality of what Jewish statehood has wrought for yet another disinherited group.

There are no easy answers, and Shavit offers none. But he presents the complexities and frustrations with intellectual rigor and literary grace.

When I first started reading this book, I could not put it aside. I read it again recently, in the wake of the October 2023 Hamas attack, and found it as relevant as when it was first published.

Scholarly and accessible at the same time, it showed me why Israel’s overwhelming military power has failed to bring peace to the Holy Land. While much of the literature on this controversial subject looks like militant propaganda, I like the tone of Shlaim’s book: serene, compassionate, and not at all polemical. 

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.