100 Books Like Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

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.

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.

This anthology is heavily weighted toward the political and diplomatic dimensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict. I find the point-counterpoint of debates between representatives of Arab and Israeli governments stimulating: whatever one’s natural inclination, one has to take into account how political realities appear to someone from a totally different perspective.

I have found it valuable as a resource because it focuses on the conflict between Israel and the Arabs/Palestinians after 1948. The book is a mine of political speeches, summit declarations, newspaper editorials, organizational manifestoes, interstate treaties, and assorted other texts related to wars, negotiations, and peacemaking between Israel and the Arabs.

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."

As the Israel-Hamas conflict rages in 2024, Palestinian writers shed light on the trauma and violence of dispossession and colonization in this anthology translated from Arabic to English.

Through the controlled, curated form of poetry, eminent authors Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, and Fadwa Tuqan join emerging writers, several of them women, in narrating the Palestinian experience from 1948, the beginning of the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) to today.

This book is about geography and identity, the ground beneath one’s feet and belonging, origins and history, displacement, and diaspora. There is longing everywhere in the book for what was lost—home, family, tribe, community, and culture. There is also the plight of powerlessness, occupation, and enslavement. The words that express the loss and mourning of the Palestinian people are haunting and memorable, perhaps because they are translated from Arabic, a flowery and lyrical language.

When we hear about 33,000 dead Palestinian civilians,… show more.

In luminous prose, Raja Shehadeh describes six walks into the Palestinian countryside between 1978 and 2006.

He writes of the ancient practice of rural peoples of naming each wadi, spring, hillock, escarpment, etc., in their immediate environment.

Shehadeh sometimes risks his life simply to walk on the land near Ramallah in the proximity of ever-expanding Israeli settlements. I have twice been to the West Bank, most recently in January of 2025. No area is safe, but the love Palestinians have for the land has in no way lessened.

Shehadeh’s book is a timeless and compassionate love letter to the earth. To know Palestine, first you must know the land.

This is among the bravest and most original books that I’ve read in the past decade.

To quell violence, to truly make peace, one first needs to contemplate what James Baldwin wrote many years ago: “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man with nothing to lose.”

Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been violently oppressed for decades. Nasser Abufarha, an anthropologist originally from Jenin, explores the conditions that almost inevitably lead to violent confrontations.

I have been in the West Bank and worked side-by-side with Palestinians and Jewish Israeli activists and other international volunteers who share one goal: ending the occupation. I admire Abufarha for exploring the roots of violence and telling difficult truths.

This history traces some of the ties between Irish revolutionaries and Jewish ones in Palestine and provides an unvarnished history of the events and personalities leading to the establishment of the Jewish state.

For Paul O’Dwyer, his own activism as an “Irish Zionist” in New York after WWII was motivated by his antagonism towards the British, viewing the British Mandate in what was then Palestine as the chief obstacle to a lasting arrangement beneficial to Jews and Arabs. He supported Jewish militant groups seeking to evict the British and open Palestine’s ports much wider to Holocaust survivors in Europe.

As a scholar of contemporary Jewish history and a practicing Jew, I used to deal mostly with books written by Jews. This book is one of the first I read that would be written by a Palestinian. Albeit born and bred in New York City, the author has a strong connection with Palestine, and one of his ancestors, the mayor of Jerusalem, wrote to Theodor Herzl as early as 1899 that the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine would encounter opposition from local population.

Khalidi leaves behind the often-confusing narrative of a conflict between two nations in favor of a history of colonial settlement and indigenous resistance to it. 

I liked the way the book explains the passion about Zionism, how it’s so personal for so many people, both for and against, and how these emotions are driven by hope, fear, pride, and longing.

I liked how the book breaks down different types of Zionism and rethinks its ties to colonialism. It explains Jewish identity in a personal and human way that left a strong impression on me.