Recommended Reading on Israel, Palestine, and the War on Gaza

Two novels shaped my earliest thinking about the formation of the state of Israel. I read James Michener’s The Source (Random House, 1965) and Leon Uris’s Exodus (Doubleday, 1958) in boarding school at Rift Valley Academy (ca. 1986-89). Equally influential from a Palestinian perspective, was a memoir, Elias Chacour’s Blood Brothers (Chosen, 1984), which I read in Canada in grade 11 (1989-90). By the time I left for a year of study in Israel in the summer of 2000, I had also read Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989) and, I’m ashamed to say, not much else about Israel or Palestine. 

Living in Jerusalem gave me a front row seat on the beginning of the second intifada. From the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus, we could see evidence of the violence unfolding on the Temple Mount. From our apartment in West Jerusalem, we could hear the Israeli army shelling Bethlehem. And we tried not to think too much about suicide bombers when we boarded a city bus. 

Personal experience can lull you into thinking you know what you are talking about, but does not qualify you to speak with any sort of competence. To understand a region’s present, you must learn about its past. Although I tried to keep an eye on current events, I did little to educate myself about Israel’s immediate past in the years that followed, except for a couple audiobooks. I listened to Amos Oz’s memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness (Harcourt, 2005), in 2018 while cycling to and from a research library in Cambridge. Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (Spiegel & Grau, 2013), which I “read” in 2016, filled in the picture through the early 2000’s. 

News about Hamas’s brutal attack on Oct 7, 2023 and Israel’s inevitable response was too painful to follow closely after the initial shock. I also didn’t want to read anything shrill or reactionary ... and I thought I knew something about the conflict. 

I knew I knew nothing about Ukraine, however, so earlier this year I listened to Serhii Plokhy’s, The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (Norton, 2024), which had been recommended as a reliable primer on the geo-politics of Ukraine, including Russia’s 2014 and 2022 invasions. On the analogy of Ukraine, where my ignorance is complete, I finally decided to look for an audiobook related to the conflict in Israel and the occupied territories. 

• I began with Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (Metropolitan Books, 2020). Khalidi hails from a prominent Palestinian family with centuries-long ties to Jerusalem. Before retiring in 2024, he was the Edward Said professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. The picture Khalidi paints of Israeli colonialism and American collusion between 1917-2017 is deeply troubling. Critical reviews of the book sometimes take issue with Khalidi’s framing of the conflict in colonial terms, but I am not aware of any that dispute the facts he has assembled. To my surprise, I found Khalidi more even-handed than Plokhy, who understandably, and rightly, makes a case for Ukrainian national identity.

• I turned from Khalidi’s Palestinian perspective to Peter Beinart’s just-releasted Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025). Beinart addresses his own anti-Zionist criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza to an insider Jewish audience. His argument is measured and, to my mind, compelling. It is also theological: The biblical prophets, Beinart suggests, would have had something to say about a Jewish exceptionalism that presents itself as always the victim and never the perpetrator:

“From the destruction of the Second Temple to the expulsion from Spain to the Holocaust, Jews have told new stories to answer the horrors we endured. We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated, with the support of many Jews around the world. Its central element should be this: We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims. We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense. It exempts Jews from external judgment. It offers infinite license to fallible human beings.” (10) 

“The legitimacy of a Jewish state—like the holiness of the Jewish people—is conditional on how it behaves. It is subject to law, not a law in and of itself (100). 

Blanket support for the state of Israel is, according to Beinart, a form of idolatry. Christian Zionist readers predisposed to support Israel without criticism should take note.

I have learned enough, I hope, to disclaim competence or punditry. But if you are at all concerned about current events in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, I recommend starting with Beinart and moving from there to Khalidi—perhaps especially if your political orientation tends to differ from theirs. (For an Israeli perspective, try Shavit.)

If you have recommendations of your own, feel free to share them in the comments.