Items17The creator’s order
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Enemies and Neighbours (2017)Published Jan 1, 2017The 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…0 - 2
Righteous victims (1999)Published Jan 1, 1999An 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…0 - 3
Israel (2012)Published Jan 1, 2012A 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…0 - 4
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (2020)★ 10.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2020A 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…0 - 5
The Question of Palestine (1979)★ 5.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1979A 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…0 - 6
The Iron Wall (1999)★ 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1999A 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…0 - 7
My Promised Land (2013)★ 7.2/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2013An 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,…0 - 8
Once upon a country (2007)Published Jan 1, 2007A 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…0 - 9
Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor (2018)Published Jan 1, 2018A 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…0 - 10
Palestinian walks (2007)★ 6.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2007Six 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…0
