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Enemies and Neighbours (2017)
Published
The best single starting point here: a chronicle of the hundred years from 1917 to 2017 by Ian Black, a veteran Middle East reporter for the Guardian, writing as an outsider to both communities.
What makes it useful for a newcomer is its method. Black draws on sources from both sides as carefully as he can, so Arab and Jewish experiences of the same war or uprising appear side by side rather than in separate books. He is a journalist rather than an academic historian, and it shows in a readable, event-by-event pace rather than a grand argument. Read it first, then turn to the partisan accounts below knowing the outline they are arguing over.
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Righteous victims (1999)
Published
An Israeli historian's account of Zionist-Arab relations from 1881 to the end of the twentieth century. Benny Morris was a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, and the book sets out to explode the myths that both sides cherish.
It is long and detailed, closer to a reference work than a quick read, and its value lies in how unsparing it is about events either community would rather forget. Use it to look up a particular war or turning point and see what the record shows. The later Vintage paperback, subtitled 1881-2001, adds an afterword on Ehud Barak's time in office, Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon and the renewed conflict with the Palestinians.
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Israel (2012)
Published
A mainstream Israeli history of how the state was built, by Anita Shapira, a professor emerita at Tel Aviv University and the biographer of the Labour Zionist leader Berl Katznelson. It runs from the nineteenth-century beginnings of Zionism to the start of the second intifada in 2000, and it is strongest on the society, economy and Hebrew culture the founders created.
Choose it to hear the Zionist story from a careful scholar rather than a polemicist. Its gaps are part of the lesson: reviewers noted that it says little about Israel's Arab citizens and passes quickly over the collapse of Palestinian society in 1948, so read it beside Khalidi or Nusseibeh.
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The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (2020)
10.0/10on Open Library
Published
A major Palestinian history for readers who have mostly met the story from the Israeli side. Rashid Khalidi, a leading American historian of the Middle East from a Jerusalem family, frames the century from the 1917 Balfour Declaration onward as a colonial campaign against an indigenous people, and his subtitle says so plainly.
It opens in 1899 with a letter from his great-great-uncle Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, then mayor of Jerusalem, warning Theodor Herzl that the country already had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their displacement. From there it moves through 1948, Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the peace process. It is an argument, not a neutral survey, and it pairs naturally with Morris, Shapira or Shavit.
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The Question of Palestine (1979)
5.0/10on Open Library
Published
A landmark statement of the Palestinian case in English, by the literary critic Edward Said, author of Orientalism. Its publisher calls it the first book to make Palestine the subject of a serious debate.
Read it to understand where much of today's Palestinian argument in the West comes from: Said writes as an exile, with scholarship and open conviction, and makes no pretense of neutrality. It appeared in 1979, long before the Oslo Accords, so treat it as a primary document of a perspective rather than a guide to recent events, and turn to Khalidi for the fuller history.
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The Iron Wall (1999)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
A diplomatic history of Israel's first fifty years of statehood by Avi Shlaim, who held a chair at St Antony's College, Oxford. He is one of the so-called new historians who re-examined Israel's founding story, and he says openly that his aim is a revisionist reading of Israel's policy toward the Arab world.
The title comes from Ze'ev Jabotinsky's 1923 essays of that name, which argued that agreement with the Arabs would come only once an iron wall of Jewish strength had convinced them it could not be removed. Shlaim traces how that idea shaped Israeli decisions on war and peace. Its limit is one reviewers note: Arab state archives were hard to reach, so the Arab side rests more on interviews, memoirs and printed sources.
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My Promised Land (2013)
7.2/10on Open Library
Published
An Israeli journalist's attempt to hold pride and guilt about his country in the same book. Ari Shavit, a columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, asks why Israel was created, what it has achieved and what went wrong, weaving in his own family's arrival and his army service.
Its best-known chapter, first excerpted in The New Yorker, describes the forced expulsion of Lydda's Palestinian population in 1948, told by an Israeli who remains committed to Zionism. Some critics, among them the historian Martin Kramer, disputed parts of that account, and the argument is itself a window on how Israelis reckon with 1948. It won the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for nonfiction.
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Once upon a country (2007)
Published
A Palestinian political memoir by Sari Nusseibeh, a philosophy professor educated at Oxford and Harvard, descended from an old Jerusalem family, a former PLO representative and later president of Al-Quds University. His father had been a Jordanian minister and governor of Jerusalem, so the family story runs through 1948 and 1967 from the inside.
Its particular value is the author's own path to firm support for two states, argued by someone who also writes candidly about expulsions and dispossession. Readers who have only met Palestinian politics through its hardest voices will find a different one here, shaped by years teaching at Birzeit University and working in the national movement.
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Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor (2018)
Published
A short book of letters from an Israeli Jew to his Palestinian neighbors, which his wife has likened to a letter in a bottle thrown over a wall. Yossi Klein Halevi, who grew up in Brooklyn, moved to Israel in 1982 and is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, tries to explain why Jews feel bound to the land in terms a Palestinian reader could recognize.
It is the most direct answer here to the question of how a committed Zionist who wants a shared future sees the conflict. The paperback edition adds an epilogue of written responses from Palestinians and others in the region, which turns a monologue into something closer to a conversation.
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Palestinian walks (2007)
6.0/10on Open Library
Published
Six walks in the hills of the West Bank, spanning twenty-six years, by Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian human rights lawyer and writer who has lived there since his family fled Jaffa in 1948. Rather than explain the conflict through politics first, it lets the reader watch a loved landscape change over the decades.
That is what makes it so effective for anyone who struggles to picture the occupation as daily life rather than headlines. It won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2008, and it is short and quiet enough to read in a weekend.
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The Lemon Tree (2006)
10.0/10on Open Library
Published
One house in Ramla, two families. Bashir Khairi was six when his Palestinian family was expelled from the home with a lemon tree in the garden; Dalia Eshkenazi was an infant when her parents, Bulgarian Jews who had escaped deportation during the Holocaust, chose that house as their own. In 1967 the two met face to face for the first time.
Sandy Tolan tells both family histories with equal care and folds in a concise history of their competing claims to the land. It is perhaps the easiest book here for Jewish and Palestinian readers to discuss together, because neither has to give up their own story to follow the other's.
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A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (2023)
10.0/10on Open Library
Published
A single day, a single catastrophe: five-year-old Milad Salama's school bus, on its way to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem, collides with a semitrailer, and his father Abed rushes to find him. Nathan Thrall follows that search through the physical and bureaucratic obstacles Abed faces because he is Palestinian.
It explains the machinery of control in the West Bank more clearly than a map can, because the reader experiences it as a father's ordeal. It won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Expect a narrative written with Palestinian life at its center rather than an even split between the two communities.
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Apeirogon (2020)
4.0/10on Open Library
Published
The one novel on the list, built around two real fathers. Rami Elhanan, an Israeli Jew and former soldier, lost his daughter Smadar to Palestinian suicide bombers; Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, lost his ten-year-old daughter Abir to a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli border policeman. Both became peace activists through the Parents Circle, which brings bereaved families from both sides together.
Colum McCann calls it a hybrid novel, mixing fact, memory and invention in short sections with long digressions, such as the birds that migrate over the region. Choose it for the emotional core of what reconciliation costs; for history, pair it with one of the surveys above.
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The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2012)
Published
The map book to keep beside everything else on this list. The historian Martin Gilbert charts the Arab-Israeli conflict in maps, so borders, armistice lines, wars and population movements can be seen rather than imagined.
Many arguments about the conflict are really arguments about geography, and a map of a given year often settles more confusion than a paragraph can. Gilbert's framing follows the conflict between Israel and the Arab states as much as the Palestinian story, so use it for the shapes on the ground and the other books for what those shapes mean to each people. It has been revised many times, so look for a recent edition.
More about The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict15
The Gatekeepers (2012)
7.6/10on IMDb
Released
Six former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, speak candidly on camera about their part in Israel's long counterterrorism campaign and their controversial methods. Dror Moreh's documentary was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, in the same year as Five Broken Cameras.
The reason to watch is who is speaking. These are the people once charged with Israel's security, sitting in polo shirts and suspenders, weighing settlements and the two-state question with a weight no outside critic could carry. It suits viewers who want an Israeli insiders' view that is neither official nor activist.
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Five Broken Cameras (2011)
7.9/10on IMDb
Released
A Palestinian farmer's home video becomes a record of his village's protests. In 2005 Emad Burnat began filming in Bil'in, a West Bank village close to an Israeli settlement, as the separation barrier went up. Over the years his cameras were smashed by settlers and hit by a tear gas canister and by bullets, and the film is organized around the five that broke.
Burnat later brought in the Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi to shape the footage, and the pair received an Academy Award nomination as its Palestinian and Israeli directors. It shows weekly protest from inside one family. Israel's case for the barrier, that it prevented attacks, gets little room here, so pair it with The Gatekeepers.
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No Other Land (2024)
8.2/10on IMDb
Released
Made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, this documentary follows the Palestinian activist Basel Adra as Israeli soldiers destroy his community of Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank, and his alliance with the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. It won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in March 2025.
Its importance here is the partnership itself. It is also a work of advocacy: Israel's culture minister, Miki Zohar, said it distorted Israel's image, and it gives little room to the state's case, upheld by Israel's High Court in 2022, that the area is a military firing zone. Watch it as testimony from the ground, beside the histories that explain how the West Bank came to be governed this way.
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