Palestine - Israel Reading List
(the August/September newsletter is forthcoming)
I’ve had a mostly completed draft of the belated August and September StoneWright Reads newsletter for like a full week now, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to finish it and send it out. First, because of laziness and procrastination (mea culpa), but then because I have been unable to process the reactions to current events in Israel and Palestine, vacillating between extreme depression and generalized anxiety and a bit of rage and a bucketful of discontent over the quality of the discourse I’ve been seeing.
This has been (and will continue to be) a horrifying series of events, built around an incredibly complex situation, without easy answers, and passions are running hot on all sides, and tons of people are saying very ill-conceived and unnuanced things. I’ve lost a lot of respect for some folks over the past several days.
I’m happy to have tough and nuanced conversations with people (including any of you, if you want to) about this, because it is super important, and a single social media post or a single email simply will not cut it. (Is this not one of the reasons we come to love books?)
All I will say here is that, if you are expressing unconditional support for either the Israeli government or Hamas in their actions and reactions, you have not been doing the reading, and it seems to me that you (and I) have got some work to do. See below for some of that work (I can clearly see that I have not kept up with the subject, in book form anyway).
My heart goes out to the Israeli victims and to the Palestinian victims, and I fervently wish for an end to the untenable situation that is causing so many people so much pain.
Books I Have Read on the Subject:
But first, a note: One of the best and toughest classes I took as an undergraduate (back in like 2008 or so) was a History class on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I can’t even really remember why I signed up for it. I am not Jewish and I don’t have any particularly strong ties to Judaism or Israel or Palestine or the Arab world. I’m pretty much just “generic white guy” through and through. But I did sign up for it, and I can’t even remember the professor’s name (oof, bummer), but I absolutely loved that class and his approach to it. There was a pretty straight history of the conflict that we started the course with, and then there was a book by an Israeli critical of the Israeli government and a book by a Palestinian critical of Palestinian leadership. It was a novel approach then, and feels like a novel approach now, and I am deeply grateful to that professor for giving me an example of productive ways to approach difficult subjects.
Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History with Documents (2006) by Charles D. Smith - Nonfiction
This is a main textbook I had for the course mentioned above, and it is written in a fairly objective manner (as much as one can) if I remember right. It has been ages, so it is newly on my To-Read list yet again, though the version I have is surely outdated by now. There are a bunch of updated editions, with the latest being from 2020 it looks like, so if you are interested, I would go to that edition, and I might try to get my hands on it as well. This book lays the contextual historical groundwork for an understanding of the conflict from its inception to present-day (of course, my version ended in 2006, so admittedly, my own understanding is somewhat limited by that fact).
Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy (2007) by Shlomo Ben-Ami - Nonfiction
One of the other books we read in the aforementioned class, and again, potentially dated. Also one that I read ages ago and only have vague memories of the specifics at this point, so I’m seeing I need to refresh. But, Ben-Ami is a former Israeli foreign minister who talks a lot about how peace talks during the Clinton era broke down, with a critical eye on Israeli leaders in particular throughout those negotiations, but with plenty of criticisms to go around as the conflict continued and deepened.
The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (2006) by Rashid Khalidi - Nonfiction
The final book from the History class I took (same deal, very old now, I don’t remember specifics, etc.). Khalidi brings a Palestinian-Lebanese American perspective to the conflict, particularly the roles that colonial powers plaid in the initial years, but also the failures of leadership at critical moments, both within Palestine and without, to forge a lasting solution.
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2015) by Angela Y. Davis - Nonfiction
I reviewed this book from Angela Davis back in February, but didn’t highlight the connections Davis draws between the Palestinian struggle and the ongoing Civil Rights struggles in the U.S. A lot of people I follow have been pointing to the affinity between these movements, the ways in which, during the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests, some of the most robust support and advice came from Palestinians, something that should not get lost in the conversations at present.
Books on My To-Read List on the Subject:
Note: these are largely culled from many many extant lists on the internet, so I cannot claim this list is in any way original or comprehensive—these are just some of the titles that stood out to me. Blurbs are taken from publishers’ websites.
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020) by Rashid Khalidi
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.
Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.
Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.Prophets Without Honor: the 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-State Solution (2022) by Shlomo Ben-Ami
The clash between Israel and Palestine has been one of the most emotionally engaging causes of modern times. Prophets without Honor tells the story of the grueling attempts to solve the conflict and examines the reasons for its resilience. Shlomo Ben-Ami, who participated at a high level in the July 2000 Camp David peace talks that almost led to a historic deal, uses his insider experience to illuminate the specific factors that impede a solution to the conflict. He finds that the occupation's traits of permanence, Israel's insatiable quest for Lebensraum, and a hopelessly fragmented and disoriented Palestinian national movement are to blame.
Ben-Ami challenges the funereal historiography that emerged in the wake of the Camp David process, when--for the first time ever--Israelis and Palestinians engaged in the Sisyphean task of breaking the taboos surrounding the conflict. The Clinton Peace Parameters that emerged out of this process eventually became the litmus test of every serious peace proposal in the future. But ill-conceived perceptions of the other party, all-or-nothing theological fanaticism, and a lack of bold and enlightened leadership have made these attempts at peace-making a defining failure of the two-state concept. Ben-Ami scrutinizes the ominous alternatives to the two-state solution, such as the binational state, a unilateral pullout from much of the West Bank, and Donald Trump's Deal of the Century. He also examines the merits of a Jordanian-Palestinian solution. In discussing Palestine from a comparative perspective, he underlines its singularity while also shedding light on the dilemmas that stand at the center of any peace enterprise. Ultimately, his account is the most non-partisan, comprehensive, and balanced written by an insider representing one of the parties.
We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir (2023) by Raja Shehadeh
Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of bestselling author and activist Raja. In this new and searingly personal memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities of their relationship.
A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resists under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja fails to recognize his father’s courage and, in turn, his father does not appreciate Raja’s own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changes Raja irrevocably.
This is not only the story of the battle against the various oppressors of the Palestinians, but a moving portrait of a particular father and son relationship.My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (2013) by Ari Shavit
Not since Thomas L. Friedman’s groundbreaking From Beirut to Jerusalem has a book captured the essence and the beating heart of the Middle East as keenly and dynamically as My Promised Land. Facing unprecedented internal and external pressures, Israel today is at a moment of existential crisis. Ari Shavit draws on interviews, historical documents, private diaries, and letters, as well as his own family’s story, illuminating the pivotal moments of the Zionist century to tell a riveting narrative that is larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and national, both deeply human and of profound historical dimension.
We meet Shavit’s great-grandfather, a British Zionist who in 1897 visited the Holy Land on a Thomas Cook tour and understood that it was the way of the future for his people; the idealist young farmer who bought land from his Arab neighbor in the 1920s to grow the Jaffa oranges that would create Palestine’s booming economy; the visionary youth group leader who, in the 1940s, transformed Masada from the neglected ruins of an extremist sect into a powerful symbol for Zionism; the Palestinian who as a young man in 1948 was driven with his family from his home during the expulsion from Lydda; the immigrant orphans of Europe’s Holocaust, who took on menial work and focused on raising their children to become the leaders of the new state; the pragmatic engineer who was instrumental in developing Israel’s nuclear program in the 1960s, in the only interview he ever gave; the zealous religious Zionists who started the settler movement in the 1970s; the dot-com entrepreneurs and young men and women behind Tel-Aviv’s booming club scene; and today’s architects of Israel’s foreign policy with Iran, whose nuclear threat looms ominously over the tiny country.
As it examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, My Promised Land asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can Israel survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is currently facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. The result is a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements (2017) by Ella Shohat
Spanning several decades, Ella Shohat's work has introduced conceptual frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of Palestine, Zionism and the Middle East, focusing on the pivotal figure of the Arab-Jew. This book gathers together her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies and memoirs, as well as previously unpublished material.
Defying the binarist and Eurocentric Arab-versus-Jew rendering of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Shohat's work has dared to engage with the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism and nationalism. Shohat's paradigm-shifting work unpacks such fraught issues as the anomalies of the national/colonial in Zionist discourse; the narrating of Jewish pasts in Muslim spaces; the links and distinctions between the dispossession of the Nakba and the dislocation of Arab-Jews; the traumatic memories triggered by partition and border-crossing; the echoes within Islamophobia of the anti-Semitic figure of 'the Jew'; and the efforts to imagine a possible future inter-communal 'convivencia'.
Shohat's transdisciplinary perspective illuminates the cultural politics in and around the Middle East. Juxtaposing texts of various genres written in divergent contexts, the book offers a vivid sense of the author's intellectual journey.Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide (2015) by Michael B. Oren
Michael Oren served as the Israeli ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013. An American by birth and a historian by training, Oren arrived at his diplomatic post just as Benjamin Netanyahu, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton assumed office. During Oren's tenure in office, Israel and America grappled with the Palestinian peace process, the Arab Spring, and existential threats to Israel posed by international terrorism and the Iranian nuclear program. Forged in the Truman administration, America's alliance with Israel was subjected to enormous strains, and its future was questioned by commentators in both countries. On more than one occasion, the friendship's very fabric seemed close to unraveling. Ally is the story of that enduring alliance -- and of its divides -- written from the perspective of a man who treasures his American identity while proudly serving the Jewish State he has come to call home. No one could have been better suited to strengthen bridges between the United States and Israel than Michael Oren -- a man equally at home jumping out of a plane as an Israeli paratrooper and discussing Middle East history on TV's Sunday morning political shows. Oren interweaves the story of his personal journey with behind-the-scenes accounts of fateful meetings between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, high-stakes summits with the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, and diplomatic crises that intensified the controversy surrounding the world's most contested strip of land.
In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story (2002) by Ghada Karmi
Ghada Karmi’s acclaimed memoir relates her childhood in Palestine, flight to Britain after the catastrophe, and coming of age in Golders Green, the north London Jewish suburb. A powerful biographical story, In Search of Fatima reflects the author’s personal experiences of displacement and loss against a backdrop of the major political events which have shaped conflict in the Middle East. Speaking for the millions of displaced people worldwide who have lived suspended between their old and new countries, fitting into neither, this is an intimate, nuanced exploration of the subtler privations of psychological displacement and loss of identity.
The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (2016) by Ben Ehrenreich
Over the past three years, American writer Ben Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, staying with Palestinian families in its largest cities and its smallest villages. Along the way he has written major stories for American outlets, including a remarkable New York Times Magazine cover story. Now comes the powerful new work that has always been his ultimate goal, The Way to the Spring.
We are familiar with brave journalists who travel to bleak or war-torn places on a mission to listen and understand, to gather the stories of people suffering from extremes of oppression and want: Katherine Boo, Ryszard Kapuściński, Ted Conover, and Philip Gourevitch among them. Palestine is, by any measure, whatever one’s politics, one such place. Ruled by the Israeli military, set upon and harassed constantly by Israeli settlers who admit unapologetically to wanting to drive them from the land, forced to negotiate an ever more elaborate and more suffocating series of fences, checkpoints, and barriers that have sundered home from field, home from home, this is a population whose living conditions are unique, and indeed hard to imagine. In a great act of bravery, empathy and understanding, Ben Ehrenreich, by placing us in the footsteps of ordinary Palestinians and telling their story with surpassing literary power and grace, makes it impossible for us to turn away.Unbelonging (2021) by Gayatri Sethi
Where do those relegated to the margins find belonging?
In her luminous debut Unbelonging, Gayatri Sethi deftly interweaves verse, memoir, and a bold call to action as she recounts her experience searching for home in the diaspora.
Drawing upon her life story as a Tanzanian-born-Punjabi turned American educator and mother of biracial children, Sethi tells an intimate tale of stepping into her power while confronting misogyny, racism, and empire.
Spanning decades and continents– from Partition to the Black Lives Matter movement, South Africa to Atlanta – Unbelonging tells urgent truths, inspires critical self-reflection, and emboldens its readers to pursue radical forms of justice, compassion, and solidarity.
That’s it for now. Hopefully I will finish the regular newsletter in the next couple days, I dunno. I didn’t read a ton, but there’s good stuff in the past couple months I want to tell you about.
If you’ve got recommendations on Palestine-Israel reading, post a comment or let me know!