For those interested in an introduction to the history of our conflict, we can warmly recommend the work of Israeli/Iraqi/British historian Avi Shlaim. Shlaim’s books – Israel and Palestine, The Iron Wall and many more – present a history that is readable, engaging, and quite remarkably, that uses both Israeli and Arab (mostly Jordanian) archives and sources to present a picture that is considerably more nuanced and multi faceted than most.
Another very readable historical work is 1929 Year Zero of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict by Israeli historian Hillel Cohen. While Shlaim covers a breadth of history, military conflict and diplomacy, Cohen’s book is a mosaic of personal and local stories of victims, perpetrators, leaders who took part in the inter communal violence of 1929. Together they form a fascinating picture of the roots of our modern conflict. Cohen’s other books: Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaborators with Zionism, Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli-Arabs 1948-1967, and The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem: Palestinian Politics and the City since 1967, all share the quality of illuminating history through the small details and personal stories, that are both engaging and defiant of broad generalizations.
Palestinian writer and activist Ghassan Kanafani published several novels and collections of short stories before he was assassinated (apparently by Israel) at the age of 36. His stories translated to English – Men in the Sun, In the Land of the Sad Oranges, Return to Haifa and more – are stark, beautiful and give an intimate sense of what it meant to be a Palestinian refugee in the wake of the 1948 Nakba.
Ghada Karmi’s best selling memoir In Search of Fatima- A Palestinian Story tells of a different kind of refugehood. Karmi, born in Jerusalem in 1939, describes her childhood in a middle class Palestinian neighborhood, her family’s escape to England in 1948 and her subsequent life there as a successful doctor but also as a perpetual refugee, longing for a lost home.
Sahar Khalifeh is one of Palestine’s most prolific and widely translated novelists. Her novels, beginning with Wild Thorns in 1976 and up to My One and Only Love published in 2021 are deeply poetic, full of symbolism, and tell the stories of Palestinian women, both in her home town of Nablus in the West Bank and around the Middle East and the world. Though not always the easiest to read, they are beautiful and rewarding.
Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer and activist from Ramallah, as well as the author of several compelling books, written originally in English, which give a first hand picture of life in the West Bank under Israeli occupation. Palestinian Walks is a memoir on years of nature walks and hikes in the hills around Ramallah, gradually caged in by military bases, checkpoints and settlements. Together with Strangers in the House: Coming of Age Under Israeli Occupation and many more, Shehadeh’s books tell a story that is political but also very personal, imbued with love of nature and of people (including Israeli friends).
In Sharon and My Mother in Law: Ramallah Diaries, Suad Amiry provides an account of life under Israeli occupation that is both angry and remarkably funny. Amiry’s diaries span 20 years of her own life, and bring together pets, love stories, family relationships in an irresistible entanglement of the tragic and comic, the heart warming and the absurd.
Famed Israeli novelist David Grossman has written several works of non-fiction about Israeli rule over Palestinians, and they are all worth reading. The Yellow Wind about Israeli rule in the West Bank, Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel and Death as a Way of Life: From Oslo to the Geneva Agreement all deal with the conflict from the perspective of an Israeli seeking peace. They are all extremely well written, meticulously researched and often moving in the personal accounts both of the writer and those he interviews.
Shlomo Sand is an Israeli historian who writes less about the events of history than about the way they are commonly constructed. His books The Invention of the Jewish People and The invention of the Land of Israel have gained their fame by the controversy they espoused. Sand’s sharp wit and analytic abilities deftly deconstruct Israeli national narratives and force the reader to reexamine not only Israeli history but any national history as a series of half-truths and exaggerations that serve political ends.
