Martin Cohen's favourite books to help understand the Israel-Palestine conflict

Many authors will know the question of where to start the story. I think that this is particularly true in any discussion of Israel-Palestine.

Sometimes Israelis like to start it 3000 years ago in a mythical Biblical state, sometimes in an equally chimerical version of Israel’s acceptance of what the UN agreed to in 1947 – and sometimes, with the perennial bias of news, it is started as though history began last week. 

Israel’s ability to control the narrative has long characterised the conflict. To declare unchallenged that: “The Balfour Declaration gave Israel a legal right to Palestine:” or “In 1948, Israel was attacked by all surrounding Arab armies:” or “In 1967, we were only defending ourselves.” 

So, it is in an effort to correct this, to tell the Palestinian story, that Ramzy Baroud’s book is written. At times angry, more often poignant and disturbing, it is a tale about identity and memory that, to me, has deeply philosophical implications for political legitimacy and the ability of individuals and peoples to make their own choices. 

I like books that challenge you to rethink your assumptions.

And Shlomo Sand certainly does that here, with a patient and precise account that reveals the complexity and plurality of Zionist thought while challenging the notion that there is a single strand of Zionist belief. At the same time, Sand explores Arab thinking from the end of the nineteenth century right up to today, explaining attitudes to early Jewish migration, the origins of the PLO and the recent politics of things like the Oslo Accords. 

What is most powerful, however, is the way that the book ends by saying that if, today, there is still no answer to the question of the future of Israel, it is still up to each of us who are concerned for the children of the region to continue pressing, even if against hope, for respect for those so much-denied, so much-trampled principles of equality and human rights.

I didn’t know much about Syria before picking up this book.

But reading it, I discovered that Syria is a place where international politics, ideology, colonial legacy, religion, economics, and ordinary human survival all collide at once, which makes it both incredibly important and incredibly difficult to understand, let alone sum up simply. Hence, this book demands quite a commitment from the reader.

Nonetheless, at the end of it, I was left with a better understanding of how today’s Syria is the result of the interplay between many global processes. Time and time again, he says, we see how developments in Syria are never determined by purely domestic factors but are instead shaped by the powerful forces they have no control over. You have to feel for this long-suffering nation!

As a gloomy Capricorn, I’m not very optimistic about the future, and so I am always happy to read a disaster book, and at first glance, the contents list of John Hand’s tale of what awaits humanity promises to be just that.

But after only a few pages of Hand's talking about space rocks hitting the Earth, the gloomy reader will already be a bit puzzled at what seems to be Hand’s indefatigable spirit of technological optimism. On the wonderfully awful prospect of huge space rocks hitting the planet, we’re told that, thanks to NASA scientists:

“…we now know that there are no comparably large asteroids (diameter greater than 5km) in orbits that could potentially hit Earth.”

Well, how boring is that! But I’m sure the scientists have their reasoning principles. They usually do, which, like Groucho Marx, they also offer to swap for other ones later if need be. A similarly optimistic note is struck a little later on, now in relation to the novel mRNA treatments for the coronavirus, when we’re told: “What is significant is how effective most of these vaccines have been.”

Nor is he concerned about Climate Change or overpopulation. Hands just seems to be an optimistic soul. In fact, this book’s disappointingly optimistic – if that’s not a contradiction.

I recommend this book as a bit of a gear change. Or, put another way, a different perspective on knowledge.

It’s not about Israel-Palestine, but it surely says something about how we shape the issue today. What do I mean? Well, consider, as the book challenges us early on: 

“When we say someone is smart—and especially in normal, everyday conversation—we often mean they are witty, funny, sharp, clever, entertaining, political, cagey, crafty, shrewd, sly, wary, wily, devious, sneaky, circumspect, cunning, tricky, biting, stinging, confident, popular, or a blast. These “smart”-associated terms have social implications...about how smartly we control and conduct ourselves among all the complex cooperative and competitive interactions with family, friends, enemies, and strangers. Our everyday use of “intelligent” usually concerns social intelligence.”

And that’s why, today, Mark and Tim think, social media has a surprisingly big role in how knowledge is really constructed even in the sciences.  

“You might think that science is about hypotheses and predictions and experiments and controls and analyses and statistics and confidence, but the real “genius” that makes science work is that...some scientists rise in reputation by virtue of being able to show true and interesting things. They accordingly get more influence; others are more likely to listen to their claims. And some scientists lower in reputation, either by saying boring things or by repeatedly making claims that are false or incoherent.”

The result is that:

“At the end of the day, scientists don’t believe other scientists’ claims because they carefully slogged through all the data and did all the analyses. There are too many papers and too little time. We simply believe what they say, in some part because of some reputation they have garnered.“

And so, this book, that starts out as a theory of “emotional expressions,” becomes, at the close, part of a wider debate about the social construction of scientific knowledge.