RECOMMENDED READING

This is not a list of the most important or influential books written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though a few are that too.  It is a personal and partisan selection: books that I think offer in a readable and convincing form an antidote to the Zionist mythology that infects most debate in the mainstream media.

Fouzi al-Asmar, To be an Arab in Israel, Frances Pinter, 1975

This book is virtually impossible to get hold of today but I have included it because it is the only personal account I know of in English telling the story of what it was like to live under the cruelties of the military government imposed on Israel’s Palestinian citizens until 1966. A forgotten episode in Israel’s history.

Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, University of California Press, 2000

Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, has been publicly grappling with his Zionism for a while. Apart from his indulgent excuses for Israel’s conduct in the 1948 war, Sacred Landscape is a meticulously detailed account of how the Jewish state has buried the physical remains of a Palestinian narrative. A little too heavyweight at times.

Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, Verso, 2000

Finkelstein’s powerful account of how the major international and American Jewish organisations used the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jewish people to enrich themselves and empower Israel.

David Grossman, Sleeping on a Wire, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993

Compassionate approach to the testimonies of Israel’s Palestinian citizens about living as strangers in their own homeland, marred only by Grossman’s occasional Zionist interjections in the narrative.

David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, Faber, 2003

Hirst’s huge tome on the rise of Zionism and Israel, and the subsequent Arab-Israeli wars. Hirst’s readable journalistic style and an academic’s talent for analysis and context make this an ideal introductory book.

Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide, Verso, 2003

A devastating dissection of the Israeli establishment’s goal of dissolving the Palestinians as a national group written by one of Israel’s great intellectuals. The book betrays some of its author’s Zionist ideological underpinnings, however, particularly in his obsession with singling out Ariel Sharon for criticism.

Nur Masalha, A Land without People, Faber, 1997

An overview of the transfer policies adopted by the Israeli state since its founding, drawing on archive material. Masalha concludes that Israel has been continually plotting to expel as many Palestinians under its rule as possible.

Susan Nathan, The Other Side of Israel, HarperCollins, 2005

Nathan, a British Jew, moved to Israel in 1999 an ardent Zionist. This is a disturbing account of her growing disenchantment with her newly adopted homeland as she witnesses the racism directed at Arab citizens from the Jewish public and Israeli institutions alike, and the problems she encounters crossing the ethnic divide to live among the country’s Arab minority.

Michael Neumann, The Case against Israel, Counterpunch, 2005
"Relentless", says the dust jacket. And that perfectly sums up philosopher Michael Neumann’s rubbishing of the moral and political justifications, historically, of Zionism as a Jewish national building project on another people’s land and, contemporaneously, of Israel as an occupying state that wants to extend further the limits of Jewish sovereignty. Neumann has a wonderful way of making logical arguments crystal clear, particularly in the section on terrorism. "Devastating" is another word the cover could have used.
 

Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld, 2006
The ethnic cleansing debate has been raging between Israel's revisionist historians for more than two decades: did Israel's founders plan the ethnic cleansing of 1948, in which at least 80 per cent of the Palestinians were removed from the new Jewish state, or did they simply take advantage of unfolding events? The historical facts always suggested the former to be true; now Pappe unearths the archival evidence to make the case water-tight. A long-overdue, myth-shattering book.

Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine, Cambridge University Press, 2004

An extremely readable and comprehensive account of Palestine’s history from 1850 to the present day, revealing how the high politics of colonial rulers, Zionist movements and Palestinian notables changed the lives of two peoples living in the same land.

John Rose, The Myths of Zionism, Pluto, 2004

A fascinating, if at times a little turgid, debunking of the 10 most famous myths employed by Zionists to justify Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians.

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Jonathan Cook News Archive,  last updated on Friday, 14 September 2007