The Israel-Palestine Conflict: 25 Books That Shocked the World
Historical books about the Palestine-Israel conflict. We are talking about the Best Books to Understand the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
For most ordinary readers, reading books that have been tested for a long time and still retain a strong explanatory power is a shortcut to refer to this international difficult situation, or at least it will help most ordinary readers.
Understand the basic clues and background of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a perspective.
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has recently continued to escalate, causing more people to pay attention to Middle East affairs again. The “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” and even the Middle East issue can be said to be one of the most thoroughly studied fields in the world.
Professional researchers from various disciplines such as history, religion, ethnology, diplomacy, and international politics have set foot in this area. The academic Red Sea has published a large number of excellent books, which can be said to be full of sweat.
But today, the Palestine issue and the Palestine-Israel conflict, whether in academic circles, political circles, or religious circles, are still at odds on possible solutions, even in the academic field.
What do you think about the recent Palestine-Israel conflict? Are there any books on this period of history recommended?
Here we recommend the 25 Best Books to Understand the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
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25 Best Books to Understand the Israel-Palestine Conflict
- The Bible and the Sword by Barbara W. Tuchman
- Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore
- Enemies and Neighbors by Ian Black
- From Beirut To Jerusalem by Thomas L. Friedman
- My Promised Land by Ari Shavit
- Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter
- The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand
- After the Last Sky by Edward W. Said
- How I Stopped Being a Jew by Shlomo Sand
- The Invention of the Land of Israel by Shlomo Sand
- Mornings in Jenin: A Novel by Susan Abulhawa
- Sonora by Hannah Lillith Assadi
- I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti / Edward W. Said / Ahdaf Soueif
- Kingdom of Olives and Ash by Michael Chabon
- An Improbable Friendship by Anthony David
- The Way to the Spring by Ben Ehrenreich
- To the End of the Land by David Grossman
- Drinking the Sea at Gaza by Amira Hass
- Our American Israel by Amy Kaplan
- Dear Zealots by Amos Oz
- The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe
- Strangers with the Same Dream by Alison Pick
- All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan
- Sadness Is a White Bird: A Novel by Moriel Rothman-Zecher
- Out of Place: A Memoir by Edward W. Said
To the End of the Land by David Grossman
The 600-page novel “To the End of the Land” describes an Israeli mother who fled the house with her old lover because she was afraid of receiving a notice of her son’s death.
During the journey, she told him about the growing up of their son. The details present the typical fate of a modern Israeli family in detail. Ola, the protagonist of the novel, is a simple housewife.
She is kind-hearted, gentle, and sensitive, and always regards family stability as her greatest happiness, but the world does not develop as she envisioned. She has no power to stop the spread of violence and terrorism, nor can she change the wishes of the people she loves.
The only thing she can do is to create a weird disconnect in the course of the world’s operation, so as to “stop” the doom.
Drinking the Sea at Gaza by Amira Hass
Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege.
In what is sure to be a controversial book, Israeli reporter Amira Hass offers a rare portrait of the Palestinians in Gaza. Very few journalists have lived in that troubled region; Jewish ones are rarer still. “To most Israelis,” Hass writes, “ my move seemed outlandish, even crazy, for they believed.
I was surely putting my life at risk.” But Israelis desperately need to understand the plight of the Palestinian people, she writes, and few of them read the unvarnished truth in the Jerusalem press. This has made most of them ignorant of what goes on right next door, and inspired unduly “harsh” attitudes toward Gaza and its one million residents.
Hass even quotes the late Yitzhak Rabin, who wished that Gaza “would just sink into the sea, “shortly before he signed the Oslo Accords. Wishing away the problem, however, is no solution, and Hass delivers a detailed — and highly opinionated — diagnosis of what’s wrong with Israeli policy toward Gaza.
Strong supporters of Israelis will say that Hass is nothing but a mouthpiece for the Palestinians. Indeed, this book’s subtitle could apply as much to Israel, surrounded by bitter enemies, as it does to Gaza. Yet it would be wrong to ignore Hass: the scene in Gaza is woefully unreported.
The book is not likely to change many minds — this is one of those subjects where passions run deep and fierce. Those who already sympathize with Hass’s pro-Palestinian views will find Drinking the Sea at Gaza an invigorating book. — John J. Miller
Our American Israel by Amy Kaplan
Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance
An essential account of America’s most controversial alliance that reveals how the United States came to see Israel as an extension of itself, and how that strong and divisive partnership plays out in our own time.
Our American Israel tells the story of how a Jewish state in the Middle East came to resonate profoundly with a broad range of Americans in the twentieth century. Beginning with debates about Zionism after World War II, Israel’s identity has been entangled with America’s belief in its own exceptional nature.
Now, in the twenty-first century, Amy Kaplan challenges the associations underlying this special alliance.
Through popular narratives expressed in news media, fiction, and film, a shared sense of identity emerged from the two nations’ histories as settler societies. Americans projected their own origin myths onto Israel: the biblical promised land, the open frontier, the refuge for immigrants, and the revolt against colonialism.
Israel assumed a mantle of moral authority, based on its image as an “invincible victim,” a nation of intrepid warriors and concentration camp survivors. This paradox persisted long after the Six-Day War when the United States rallied behind a story of the Israeli David subduing the Arab Goliath.
The image of the underdog shattered when Israel invaded Lebanon and Palestinians rose up against the occupation. Israel’s military was strongly censured around the world, including notes of dissent in the United States. Rather than a symbol of justice, Israel became a model of military strength and technological ingenuity.
In America today, Israel’s political realities pose difficult challenges. Turning a critical eye on the turbulent history that bound the two nations together, Kaplan unearths the roots of present controversies that may well divide them in the future.
Dear Zealots by Amos Oz
Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land.
This collection of three new essays — all based on talks delivered by Amos Oz — was written out of a sense of urgency, concern, and belief that a better future is still possible.
It touches on the universal nature of fanaticism and its possible cures; the Jewish roots of humanism and the need for secular pride in Israel; and the geopolitical standing of Israel in the wider Middle East and internationally.
These three pleas illuminate the argument over Israeli, Jewish, and human existence, and Amos Oz sheds a clear and surprising light on vital political and historical issues, daring to offer new ways out of a reality that appears to be closed down.
Dear Zealot is a significant document that outlines Amos’s current thinking about the Middle East — urgent reading for anyone interested in the conflict.
I saw it last year. It’s very short. The most impressive point is justice against justice, which is also injustice against justice, and a conversation between the author and the taxi driver about killing all the Palestinian.
The conversation ends with whether or not to kill the last Palestinian baby in an apartment. Most of the time, fanaticism is just a concept in the mind that has not been materialized, but the hatred that has not been materialized is inflammatory.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe
“The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to escalate, I want to know why the once-displaced Jews will once again displace Palestinian Arabs.
And this book traces the source of history. In 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs either fled or were expelled. These people accounted for half of the Palestinian Arab population before the 1948 Palestinian War. About 400 to 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed. This tragedy is called Nakba.
Just as the author wrote in his thank-you speech: Ever since I knew Nakba, I have been burdened with their suffering and hope. Only when they return to their homeland will this tragedy be over and let all people live in Palestine in peace and harmony.
Strangers with the Same Dream by Alison Pick
“Strangers with the Same Dream” is A brilliant, astonishing, and politically timely page-turner set in 1921 Palestine, from the author of the bestselling novel Far to Go, nominated for the Man Booker Prize.
This spare, beautifully written, shocking, and timely novel whisks us back to 1921 Palestine, when a band of young Jewish pioneers, much-escaping violence in their homelands, set out to realize a utopian dream: the founding of a kibbutz on a patch of land that will, twenty-five years later, become part of the State of Israel.
Writing with tightly controlled intensity, Alison Pick takes us inside the minds of her vastly different characters — two young unmarried women, one plain and one beautiful, escaping peril in Russia and Europe; one older man, a charismatic group leader who is married with two children; and his wife, Hannah, who understands all too well the dark side of “equality” — to show us how idealism quickly tumbles into pragmatism, and how the utopian dream is punctured by messy human entanglements.
This is also the story of the land itself (present-day Israel and Palestine), revealing with compassion and terrible irony how the pioneers chose to ignore the subtle but undeniable fact that their valley was already populated, home to a people whose lives they did not entirely understand.
Writing with extraordinary power, Pick creates unforgettably human characters who, isolated in the enclosure of their hard-won utopian dream, are haunted by ghosts, compromised by unbearable secrets, and finally, despite flashes of love and hope, worn down by hardship, human frailty, and the pull of violent confrontation.
The novel’s utterly shocking but satisfying conclusion will have readers flipping back to the first page to trace patterns and wrestle with the question of what is, or is not, inevitable and knowable in the human heart.
