Books like Zionism — picked by fans

I admire every detail in this beautifully written family saga that reaches from Lithuania to Jerusalem.

When Amos Oz’s family escapes the antisemitism of Europe in the 1940s and resettles in Palestine, they seem to construct their new home of books rather than mortar. And beyond the towering bookcases, the volumes in twelve languages, lies a city of ancient stone torn by history and religion and competing claims.

Oz’s profound and personal understanding of the Holocaust leads him to conclude that Israel will be stronger by ending the occupation and forging paths that help to unite Jews and Palestinians.

I love the truth, the fact that empathy and compassion have the potential to heal the deepest wounds.

I loved it because of the quirky way it talks about the Arab Israeli conflict. I wouldn’t have picked it up if it were not for the comics and the irreverent way they deal with an issue that is often too difficult to handle.

I loved the funky blend of Indiana Jones, gay Romeo and Juliet and the Monty Python version of politics it serves up. 

I loved how the book looks at Zionism from a totally different angle, not just as history or ideology, but as a bold and thoughtful belief in human action. By going back to European ideas and exploring key Jewish and Hebrew thinkers from the 19th and 20th centuries, I gained a fresh way of understanding the roots of Zionism.

It also helped me see current Israeli politics in a new light. Instead of the usual political analysis, it made me think more deeply about the ideas and values that still shape things today.

I loved it because it was new and exciting for me to read stories by Arab authors who write about Jerusalem and, indirectly, also about Israel.

It’s not easy to have unmediated access to what people think of Israel and Palestine, from both Arabs and Jews, and I liked how this book uses literary imagination to do so, to speak about the paradoxes of time and space of these places. 

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.

I own the Fifth Edition of this book, which was inscribed for me by the author, Charles Smith. This book is different from the four noted above because it is a detailed chronicle and critical analysis of the Arab/Palestinian conflict with Israel by a single author, the documents supplementing rather than constituting the text.

Among the books I know of that purport to be balanced and comprehensive studies of this subject, I think this one has the best claim to those descriptors. The book is in its tenth edition, so the author has obviously successfully presented the subject's history in a way that has gained a substantial and appreciative audience. One of its merits from an instructional standpoint is the inclusion of numerous maps, chronologies, photographs, and a glossary.

I like the fact that it has been continually updated. The transition of the PLO “from pariah to partner” in the… show more.

How can I not be mesmerized by a master storyteller?

Adania Shibli, a Palestinian author born in the West Bank, begins with a tragic incident that occurred in the Negev in 1949. I admire her precision and nuance, especially her depiction of an Israeli officer who devolves into an emotionless psychopath.

I was a combat medic in the Vietnam War. I know first-hand the insanity of war, which Shibli reveals in her own unique way. The unnamed Israeli officer dominates the first part of Minor Detail, and a young woman, an amateur sleuth who investigates the officer’s crimes, takes center stage in part two.

I was horrified and enlightened, in equal measure. 

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.

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.

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.