Reading list for the Israel

The past few weeks have been difficult to process—or as the New York Times put it at the start of this week, “War Has Smashed Assumptions About Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” This is apparently as true for veteran analysts of the region as it is for those of us who are less well-versed in the past several decades (and centuries) of this history. As debates about whether we all have to opine about these topics individually raged on, here at Slate we found ourselves looking to one another for guidance on what to watch, listen to, and read to better understand the current conflict. (It turns out our sister publication, Foreign Policy, had this same idea—their recommendations are incredibly thorough and worth checking out too.)

Read on for recommendations from all corners of our staff.

My Promised Land, by Ari Shavit

Part family memoir, part history, this is an honest, poignant probing of Israel’s noble ideals and its dark roots as an occupying power.

A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin

A classic diplomatic history about the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“The Explosive, Inside Story of How John Kerry Built an Israel-Palestine Peace Plan—and Watched It Crumble”

By Ben Birnbaum and Amir Tibon, the New Republic, July 20, 2014.
A thoroughly reported, mainly on-the-record account of how Obama‘s secretary of state nearly negotiated a Middle East peace but failed because neither Israel nor the Palestinian Authority wanted it.

Jerusalem, by Simon Sebag Montefiore

This book bills itself as a biography, and it helps to think of it that way—a broad portrait of a place that has been so central and significant to many peoples over the centuries.

People Love Dead Jews, by Dara Horn

A disturbing, illuminating exploration of how the revered Jewish past often reinforces antisemitic and dehumanizing narratives about Jews; it provides essential context for understanding the national mourning experienced by Jewish Israelis right now.

Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, edited by Sumaya Awad and Brian Bean

This collection of essays offers essential, and accessible, insights into the Palestinian diaspora and probes questions about the Palestinian people’s struggle as related to gender and Black American solidarity.

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi

This definitive history draws from generations of the author’s own family’s archives to assert that this isn’t a modern, fair fight between two equal states: Instead, it’s a complex colonial war of continual dispossession of a homeland belonging to Palestinians.

Palestine, by Joe Sacco

A remarkable work of ’90s comics journalism—the author traveled to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the waning days of the first intifada and heard from numerous Palestinians about their brutal experiences under Israeli occupation.

The Punishment of Gaza, by Gideon Levy

A collection of Haaretz columns by a longtime Israeli journalist covers Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza, the first election of Hamas, the twilight of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s political career, the second Lebanon War, and the subsequent Gaza War.

“The Hamas Attacks and Israeli Response: An Explainer”

By Alex Kane, Mari Cohen, Jonathan Shamir, and Isaac Sher, Jewish Currents, Oct. 10, 2023. This extremely comprehensive explainer answers some foundational questions about what’s happened since Oct. 7, and outlines the stakes and questions that remain.

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