Books like My Promised Land

This collection of poetry by a revered Palestinian poet illuminates his people’s emotional and historic connection to the land that is now the state of Israel.

His poems, many of which were set to music, are credited with solidifying a Palestinian national consciousness. His family was displaced from their home by the Israeli army; when they returned, they lived as second-class citizens.

The work achingly describes an abiding sense of love and loss.

I love how this book takes a familiar story and twists it in unexpected ways. In this classic of nonfiction on the Middle East, Scott Anderson tells the real story of Lawrence of Arabia.

I love how he does so by combining sound research with a writing style that makes the book read like a novel. Ten years after reading the book, I still remember its protagonists–T.E. Lawrence (obviously), the German agent of influence, the American oilman, and a Romanian-born Zionist agronomist. Their fates collide and unfold as the reader sees the Modern Middle East take shape.

In novels and non-fiction, Israeli author David Grossman has spent much of his career writing about the failed struggle for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

This series of essays, written over a period of years, chronicles moments of goodwill and hope on both sides, constantly undermined by sectarian passion and extremist opposition to peace. 

Oslo is a theatrical rendering of the behind-the-scenes negotiations that led to the Oslo Accords in 1993.

This Tony-Award-winning play takes a perhaps unreasonably optimistic view of potential peace. Nor will reading (or better yet, seeing) this play satisfy a serious researcher’s desire for historic detail. But it lays out the emotional stakes with humanity and humor, not qualities one usually dares to associate with the conflict in the Middle East.

I was excited to discover Dowty’s anthology because I appreciated his translation/publication of certain Hebrew texts from two early Zionists, i.e., Ahad Ha’am and Yitzhak Epstein. As indicated by the title, this volume, while representing Jewish and Arab voices going back to the 1800s, foregrounds the contradictory viewpoints of, specifically, Israelis and Palestinians and brings the story of the conflict of these two ethnonational groups down to about 2015.

Since my students are mostly political science majors, they are aware that a major debate at present is whether Israel/Palestine should be one state or two. The last section of the Dowty book contains texts that advocate for a "one-state solution" vs. others that propose a "two-state solution."

When determination, vision, and the necessity to survive forced a small country, Israel, perform miracles. No matter the difficulties and challenges, from draining the swamps and turning the desert green, the vision for a better tomorrow, to be free and self-determined people made this country and her citizens rise above fear and embrace hope.     

Perhaps the biggest surprise of King Hussein’s epic life is that he died in his own bed of natural causes and at a relatively advanced age––Hussein of Jordan always assumed he would die from an assassin’s bullet. Incredibly, his long reign had a happy ending: Hussein surmounted enough tragedies and challenges to fill the Book of Job––he witnessed his grandfather’s murder, his father went insane, his beloved cousin was shot, the wife he adored went down in a helicopter crash––yet steered his country and the people of Jordan to safe harbor through five decades of war, revolt and revolution. This book meets the majesty of the man and his life and times.

Every nationalist struggle requires effective leaders. Zionism, in particular, faced such long odds and such peculiar circumstances, that success depended not only on effective, but ruthless and single-minded leadership. In this monumental biography of David Ben-Gurion, the single most dominant individual within the Zionist movement and in the first two decades of Israel’s existence, Tom Segev shows that Zionism did have such a leader. Contrary to official hagiography, Ben-Gurion offered no brilliant or innovative ideas about politics, history, or the human condition. What he contributed was a shrewd, consuming, and merciless dedication to wresting as much of Palestine, or the Land of Israel, from its Arab inhabitants as possible without risking the state he wanted by demanding more than the world could be forced to provide. 

Ben-Gurion’s model was Lenin, his modus operandi was Bolshevik. Everything for the cause, and nothing not for the cause, at least insofar as those… show more.

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… show more.

This is an important collection of essays. It provides state-of-the-art understanding of Israeli society, its history, politics, and sociology. The book is wide-ranging and comprehensive. Its chapters were written by well-known authorities. The book includes important chapters on the Israeli electoral system, the Israeli Arab citizens, state and religion, gender in Israel, the Jewish ethnic divide and ethnic politics in Israel, the political economy of Israeli neoliberalism, Israel’s national security, the military in Israeli politics, political culture and Israeli politics, Israeli institutions and Israel’s position in the world.

I was invited to contribute to this volume but had to decline due to previous commitments.