The following books are an illuminating beginning to understanding what is happening right now, and will hopefully be helpful for anyone who knows that challenging Israel's actions does not mean stoking antisemitic sentiments, nor does it mean conflating the actions of the Israeli government and right-wing extremists with the opinions and actions of Jewish people everywhere. Rather, it is a reading list for anyone who wants to fight for a future that means an end to occupation and state-sanctioned oppression, and liberation for Palestinians.
For further information, organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and Democracy Now are good places to start. Americans should also remember that this isn't just an international problem, but a domestic one thanks to this country's heavy influence in the region, and should reach out to their representatives today to voice their concerns.
Khalidi's lucid, necessary examination of the quest for Palestinian statehood demonstrates the ways in which the Palestinian people were continuously thwarted in their mission by external forces, from the Ottoman Empire to the British Empire to the Zionist movement. Over and over again, Palestinians were not only denied the right to self-determination, but their future was also unjustly tied to that of Zionist settlers. What Khalidi makes devastatingly clear is that the oppression of Palestinians wasn't an unfortunate side-effect of establishing the state of Israel — it was a vital part of it. Also of note is Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, which makes clear the ways in which the Palestinian people — long before the Balfour Declaration, let alone the establishment of Israel proper — knew that their existence as a people and a culture were threatened by the Zionist movement.
What's in a name? Only everything, as is made clear in this book by an Israeli writer who, as a child, traveled around the newly created country with his father, renaming Palestinian villages, ruins, and landmarks with Hebrew names. This is the perfect book for anyone who was ever under the misapprehension that Zionists came to Palestinian land and found nothing, establishing a country whose past was conveniently free of the people who had lived there for centuries. Benvenisti chillingly demonstrates how easy it is to erase generations of history when trying to create a new one, and makes clear the danger of looking at Eretz Israel/Palestine from a binary perspective; to him, there should be no split, no vanquishing of "signposts of memory," or there can be no future.
A profoundly moving memoir of one woman's experience of displacement, loss, and reclamation of a history; Karmi was just a girl when she and her family were uprooted from their home in Jerusalem during the Nakba ("catastrophe") in 1948, when thousands of Palestinians were removed from their homes and villages. Though Karmi lived through a period of intense global political crisis and conflict, her perspective is an intimate one, and the toll this conflict has caused on a human level is immediately apparent.
A fascinating perspective from a true insider — Ben-Ami was the Foreign Minister under Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and present at the 2000 Camp David negotiations — this book offers a critical, clear-eyed assessment of everything that has prevented peace between Palestinians and Israelis. No figure, no matter how prominent, is spared in Ben-Ami's evaluation of what was a critical time in the region's history. Of particular note is Ben-Ami's criticism of American politicians (namely, former president George W. Bush), who not only failed to promote peace, but actually fomented even more divisiveness.
Not a history book, but a novel rooted in the current crisis, Grossman's To the End of the Land is the story of Ora, who, after hearing that her son, Ofer, has been deployed on the front of a new zone of combat, sets off on a walk in the Galilee as a means of avoiding hearing any bad news. Grossman deftly explores what it means to live in a place of unending conflict, what effect that has on one's family, and one's own humanity. Grossman's own son was killed in 2006, while serving in the Israeli Defense Forces, but he and his wife have remained staunch advocates for Palestinian rights, and have been assaulted by police while demonstrating against the occupation.
Segev is one of Israel's "new historians," who used once-sealed historical documents to challenge the country's foundational myths and offer a clearer picture of what actually happened. In 1967, Segev tackles the war that changed the region forever, led to the extensive occupation of Palestinian land, and the way in which Israel's decisive victory defined a specific cultural blend of bravado and prickly defensiveness that persists to this day — and is wielded as a weapon and a shield.
In order to be an occupying force, you need to have more than just an army — you need to have infrastructure. Weizman's examination of the many ways in which architecture — from tunnels into Gaza to militarized spaces on land and in the air to constant surveillance apparatuses — makes occupation possible is a must-read for anyone who needs to see how comprehensive a system is needed in order to maintain control over an unwilling population.
This elegiac memoir recounts Barghouti's experience returning to Ramallah, the city of his youth, after being barred following the Six-Day War in 1967. Barghouti, a poet, spent decades in exile around the world, before returning to a home that he could no longer recognize as his own. This isn't just a lament for a lost state, but for a lost identity, one that others have tried to erase and redefine for not only Barghouti, but countless others like him.
For a comprehensive academic look at the crisis in the Middle East, this textbook — written by Egyptian, Palestinian, and Israeli scholars — is a nuanced, thoughtful overview, which gives context to so many of the most explosive elements of the situation, and offers insight into the different perspectives, without devaluing any of them.
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