ISRAEL AND PALESTINE: SOME RECOMMENDABLE READINGS
Ali Abunimah. The Battle for Justice in Palestine. Haymarket Books: Chicago, 2014. (Palestinian journalist, director of the Electronic Intifada, and proponent of a “single state” solution.)
Max Blumenthal. Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. Nation Books: New York, 2013 (A powerful journalist’s overwhelming first-person account of life in Israel under right-wing domination.)
Max Blumenthal. The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. Nation Books: New York, 2015. (Why did Israel pummel civilian Gaza for six weeks in 2014 when it needed only six days to occupy all of Palestine and the Sinai in 1967? Blumenthal reveals all.)
Ron David. Arabs and Israel for Beginners. ForBeginners Books: Danbury, 2001. (Irreverent text and graphics well received by major scholars. A Jewish investigator gets beyond Israel’s whitewash of history.)
Ben Ehrenreich. The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine. Penguin: New York, 2016. (An incisive novelist and journalist conveys the lives of ordinary Palestinians and their “stubborn refusal of injustice”.)
Marc H. Ellis. Judaism Does Not Equal Israel. The New Press: New York, 2009. (A powerful testament by a leading Jewish theologian.)
Marc H. Ellis. Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation. 3rd edition. Baylor Univ. Press: Waco, TX, 2004. (A prophetic call for Jews to move beyond politics based on a sense of vulnerability and to take up the liberation theology embedded in Exodus)
Simha Flapan. The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. Pantheon Books: New York, 1987. (A “radical revision of the mythology” by a political activist who saw it first-hand.)
Jewish Voice for Peace. On Antisemitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice. Haymarket: Chicago, 2017 (Statements and essays by 22 writers.)
Rashid Khalidi. The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Beacon: Boston, 2007. (“A patient and eloquent work” covering the history from World War I to the death of Yasser Arafat.)
Smadar Lavie. Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture. Berghahn Books: New York, 2014. (Anthropologist and, herself, a Mizrahi single mom, Lavie explores the class and gender lines between Israel’s European and Eastern Jews in this first-person account.)
John Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Farrar, Straus, Gogiroux: New York, 2007 (Top rated political scientists were condemned as anti-Semitic for writing this important book.)
Ilan Pappe. A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge Univ. Press: Cambridge, 2006, 2nd ed. (Incisive social history since the mid19th century.)
Ilan Pappe. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. OneWorld Publications: London, 2006. (Israeli historian, using government documents, exposes the real history of the 1947-48 takeover of Palestine.)
Ilan Pappe. The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge. Verso: London, 2014. (A cultural history of the promise and failure of Israel’s “post Zionist moment in the early 1990s.)
Alice Rothchild. Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience. Pluto Press: New York, 2007, 2nd ed. (On-scene reports of film-maker and ob-gyn from Harvard Med. and JVP Boston)
Edward Said. From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: Essay:s. Vintage: New York, 2004 (Incisive assessments of events as they unfolded, by a leading Palestinian thinker, published after his death.
Shlomo Sand. The Invention of the Jewish People. Verso: New York, 2009. (An Israeli historian’s brilliant polemic against the claim that “the Jewish people” have a historical “right” to a nation state in Palestine.)
Ben White. Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide. Pluto Press: London, 2009. (A brief book hailed as “an essential guide” to “both the history and the day-to- day reality”.)