Lubna Masarwa
A Palestinian journalist born in Israel, Masarwa is the Palestine and Israel bureau chief for the news website Middle East Eye, and is based in Jerusalem
While many are familiar with Edward Said’s book Orientalism, his lesser-known work published a year later in 1979, The Question of Palestine, is no less important. In it, Said discusses many facets of the Palestinian experience, including the Nakba – the catastrophe of forced displacement to which 700,000 Palestinians and their descendants were subjected – and explores the misrepresentation of Palestine and Palestinians in the west – a subject as controversial today as it was nearly four decades ago.
Learning about the history of Palestine is a constant process of myth-busting. Among the most egregious is the idea that Palestine was a desert before Zionist immigration made it “bloom”. In Before Their Diaspora, Walid Khalidi, a historian from Jerusalem, has compiled a collection of images that show late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine as a place roaring with culture, vitality and personality. The photographs range from pleasantly workaday images of farmers to bustling cities and resistance fighters.
The Al-Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe series available on YouTube is one of the most comprehensive documentaries about the root causes of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It draws on interviews with experts, Palestinian and Israeli, as well as survivors of massacres and displacements that led to where we are today. The film-makers Benny Brunner and Alexandra Jansse elegantly jump from past to present, providing a picture that is rich in detail and extensive in subject, leaving the viewer with an all-round understanding of the history of the conflict.
Broadcast by Channel 4 in 2011, The Promise tells the story of a young British woman (Claire Foy) who goes to Israel to stay with her friend’s wealthy family. There, as she witnesses the brutality of the Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, she reads the diaries of her grandfather, a British soldier stationed in Palestine after the second world war. The drama shifts back and forth between 1948 and 2005, underpinned by interviews with British veterans, members of armed Zionist groups, spies, peace activists and soldiers.
Ella Shohat comes from an Iraqi-Jewish background. In her collection of essays Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, published in 2006, she engages postcolonial thought from the perspective of Mizrahi or Arab-Jews, who come from the Middle East and north Africa, developing a rich critique of Eurocentric epistemology. This has changed the way I see the fabric of Israeli society and helped me feel more in solidarity with the Mizrahi Jews.
Matt Frei
Global presenter and Europe editor of Channel 4 News, currently reporting from Israel. Frei also presents a radio programme on LBC every Saturday, 10am-1pm
I have spent the past five weeks sitting on my hotel balcony for a few hours each day looking at the honey-coloured stone walls of the Old City of Jerusalem and listening to the competing sounds of Christian church bells, the muezzin’s plaintive call to prayer and the muttering of the Talmud, recited by Orthodox Jews in our hotel. Intruding into this soundscape of religion and history is the occasional air raid siren and the constant cacophony of cable news, in Hebrew, Arabic and English. It’s like living in the hifi shop from hell. It demands some context from the written or spoken word. I would begin with reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s excellent Jerusalem: A Biography. It explains beautifully the competition for cramped real estate of the three monotheistic religions in this place that feels once again like the vexed navel of the world. It will make you appreciate the blessing and the curse of this city. For more historical context about the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict I recommend A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin. It charts the disastrous carving up by imperial Britain and France of the Arab world after the collapse of the Ottoman empire.
For a pause in the reading I recommend the very engaging editions of William Dalrymple and Anita Anand’s Empire podcasts on the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration. We Brits have a lot to answer for.
If you want to understand the twisted evolution of Hamas, and the role that Israel played in nurturing an extremist movement that helped undermine the more moderate Palestinian Authority, then try Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement by Beverly Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell. One of the accusations levelled by Israelis against their embattled prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is that he never embraced a two-state solution and told his Likud party that supporting Hamas would undermine the existence of a separate Palestinian state precisely because Hamas never recognised the right of Israel to exist. He wanted to bolster an impossible partner for peace while dividing the Palestinian camp. Hamas obliged him with their brutality. Their rule of the Gaza Strip which has been described as an open-air prison is akin to vicious inmates running the penitentiary.
To understand the politician who has dominated Israeli politics for a decade and a half and who even many of his supporters now predict is finished, the best book is Anshel Pfeffer’s Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu. The best leaders who have shown the requisite courage for peace – Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin – have tragically been assassinated by extremists in their own camps. If you still have an appetite for more on this moral and political pretzel of a subject I thoroughly recommend the drama Fauda on Netflix. In a landscape dominated by brutal caricatures of Israelis and Palestinians this is full of nuance and tortured humanity.
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Gundar-Goshen is an Israeli author and clinical psychologist based in Tel Aviv. Her most recent novel is The Wolf Hunt (Pushkin)
When you read the news, it’s very divided: you’re either with the Israelis or the Palestinians. But in literature, at least in good literature, it’s not about good guys and bad guys, it’s about humanism and trying to create a more complex narrative.
Cinderella is a short story by Sayed Kashua, an Israeli-Palestinian author now based in America. Originally written in Hebrew, it’s about a Jewish guy who, every night at midnight, turns into a pro-Palestinian Arab man. It’s very funny, but more than that, Kashua tackles the idea that there’s always this split, that you can’t fully integrate both narratives.
David Grossman’s To the End of the Land is a key novel in Israeli literature that portrays how trauma is transmitted through the generations. The protagonist is an Israeli mother desperately trying to protect her son, who has been recruited to the army. It’s about realising that your kids are reliving the same nightmare all over again because your generation wasn’t smart enough to create something different.
A generation younger than Grossman, Eshkol Nevo creates a very complex narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his novel Homesick, set in a Jewish village that was once an Arab village – the former inhabitants were evacuated in the war of independence. Nevo depicts with great compassion and insight both a Palestinian construction worker whose family once lived in this village and an Israeli boy whose brother was killed in a military operation.
All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan is a love story between a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman who meet when they are both screened by the US authorities as potential threat. It’s a modern-day Romeo and Juliet.
Etgar Keret’s short story Cocked and Locked encapsulates the entire conflict in just a few pages, with an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian fighter facing one another in the occupied territories. It’s such a brilliant story, asking who is the victim and who is the aggressor – and what does it mean to win? It addresses the struggle to remain human inside dehumanising propaganda on both sides.
Raja Shehadeh
Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer, Orwell prize-winning author and co-founder of the human rights organisation Al-Haq. His latest book is We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir (Profile Books)
Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance by Tareq Baconi is one of the best books on Hamas. Drawing on publications from the group as well as interviews with its leaders, it charts the rise of Islamic Palestinian nationalism and describes Hamas as a multifaceted liberation organisation that is rooted in the nationalist claims of the Palestinian people.
Victor Kattan’s From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949 begins with antisemitism, colonialism and Zionism and ends with the creation of Israel. It describes in a lucid and scholarly manner how Jews and Palestinians were caught up in the net of great-power politics and analyses critical early decisions that led to the failure of the international community to resolve the conflict over Palestine.
The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War by Avi Raz examines the first two years after the 1967 war that resulted in the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Raz describes Israel’s foreign policy of deception showing how, while King Hussein of Jordan and the West Bank Palestinians were eager to make peace, Israel’s postwar diplomacy was in bad faith, preferring land over peace.
Arna’s Children, a 2004 Dutch–Israeli documentary film by Juliano Mer-Khamis, follows the life of four Palestinians, three of whom later died while resisting the Israeli army. The story revolves around a children’s theatre group in Jenin which was established by Arna Mer-Khamis, the director’s mother.
The Palfest [Palestine festival of Literature] event But We Must Speak: On Palestine and the Mandates of Conscience took place in New York on 1 November but it’s possible to see the whole event on YouTube. Especially good is Noura Erakat’s intervention and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s conversation with Rashid Khalidi, chaired by Michelle Alexander.
Etgar Keret
An Israeli writer based in Tel Aviv, Keret is known for his short stories, graphic novels and screenplays. His latest translated collection, Fly Already (Granta), won the 2019 National Jewish Book award for fiction
Since 7 October, I’ve been unable to read. When I need the solace that I usually get from reading, right now I just listen to music, and almost every day I end up playing My Baby Boy by the Israeli band theAngelcy. The line that’s always in my mind is “Tossing and turning in his bed / My baby boy’s already dead.” It’s not about the specific fear for your child as much as the understanding that the unbearable reality you’re dealing with is here to stay. We’re heading to a bad place and we just keep on going.
If you have the capacity to read at the moment, I would recommend Dancing Arabs by Sayed Kashua, a Palestinian writer who grew up in Israel. It is a funny and heartbreaking coming-of-age novel that deals with the conflict from a critical yet extremely human perspective. It’s very supportive of the Palestinian cause and critical of Israeli policies, but at the same time it does not see the Israelis as the other. That is very, very rare in this conflict.
Today we live in an age of selective empathy. Most people say, what side am I on? Who should I feel sorry for and whose pain should I disregard? This is a very Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is about a different conflict – the bombing of civilians in Dresden during the second world war – but to me it’s proof that empathy can and should transcend any nationality or ideological narrative one holds.
Bethlehem (2013), a film by Yuval Adler, portrays the relationship between an Israeli secret service operative and a Palestinian teenager whom he recruits as an informer. It’s a little bit like a Mediterranean version of The Wire in that it’s really not judgmental: it is able to understand the tragedy and the suffering of all the characters, even the ones who are doing horrible things.
Finally, read any book you can find about Hamas’s history and ideology. In the past month I’ve encountered so many people who had a very heated and passionate take on Hamas and at the same time knew nothing at all about the murderous, homophobic, fundamentalist history of this organisation or its leader, Yahya Sinwar (nicknamed “the Butcher” after confessing to murdering 12 Palestinians whom he suspected of being collaborators). To Know Hamas by Shlomi Eldar is one place to start: it tells not only the story of the rise of Hamas in Gaza but also how it was in the Israeli rightwing’s interest to strengthen Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority.
NS Nuseibeh
Nuseibeh is a British-Palestinian author whose first book, Namesake (Canongate), will be published next year and explores ideas of identity, religion and nationhood in the context of Islam and contemporary Britain
It is often called a complex conflict and yet, as Ta-Nehisi Coates recently said, “the most shocking thing is how not complicated it actually is”. As a writer and researcher who grew up in East Jerusalem, immersed in this so-called conflict, I can agree. The situation is not, in fact, so intimidatingly opaque (and neither, indeed, is genocide). Nur Masalha’s Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, which traces the story of the Palestinians from the bronze age to the present day, portrays this beautifully; Israeli historian Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, first published in 2006, pretty much sums it up (for a digest that covers both, visit the brilliant decolonizepalestine.com). Ian Black’s Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, meanwhile, offers a very readable overview of the last century.
I would recommend reading any of the memoirs of the Orwell-prize-winning Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh which, with their lyrical prose, bring to life the realities of the occupation and its history, often through the lens of nature and landscape. For a different perspective, Israeli-Palestinian Sayed Kashua’s Native – a selection of his satirical Ha’aretz newspaper columns – is another deeply personal, often tragicomic, account of day-to-day living as a Palestinian within Israel. More sweeping, but no less absorbing, views of the Palestinian experience can be found in Susan Abulhawa’s exquisite novel, Against the Loveless World, which is both a love story and a moving portrayal of Palestinian resistance, and Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses, a stirring account of Palestinian displacement.
If reading feels like too much right now or you are tight on time, The Present, a 20-minute film currently on Netflix, is a short but eye-opening glimpse of what life is like for Palestinians in the West Bank, while Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza is an incredible piece of comic-book reportage that centres on Rafah, on the Gaza-Egypt border. An episode of Jewish Currents’s On the Nose podcast from last October, titled Gaza Under Blockade, presents a particularly relevant analysis of Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank.
Nathan Thrall
A Jewish-American author and journalist based in Jerusalem, Thrall is the author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story (Allen Lane), which uses a tragic accident to tell the wider story of daily life in Israel and the West Bank
I can’t think of a more profound documentary on the occupation than The Law in These Parts by Israeli film-maker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz. It is unique in its exploration of the complicity of the Israeli judicial system in the violation of Palestinian rights. On its face it’s a very simple work. But I don’t know of any anti-occupation activist who can name a film that is a deeper and more thorough examination of Israel’s system of control.
Gaza Mon Amour is a beautiful feature film by Arab and Tarzan Nasser, twin brothers who grew up in Gaza. It captures the ordinary lives of Gazans, their sense of humour, their spirit of resilience and, rather bravely, the scepticism that many Gazans have towards their leaders. It’s a love story about an old fisherman who inadvertently pulls up an ancient statue of Apollo in his fishing net. The story follows his entanglement with the authorities and his late-in-life romance with a woman that he meets in the streets of Gaza.
The Iron Wall is perhaps the most revealing essay ever published on the struggle over Palestine. Written in 1923 by Vladimir Jabotinsky, a rightwing founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement, it captures the essence of the dilemma of the Zionist movement in attempting to transform historic Palestine into the Land of Israel against the will of the native majority. It’s an extraordinarily frank essay that is as relevant today as it was then.
Israel: A Colonial Settler State?, by Jewish-French historian Maxime Rodinson, is a very short book that is that is among the sharpest pieces of historical analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Despite having been written in 1967, just before the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, all of the issues that it touches on are still with us today.
The Politics of Dispossession is a collection of Edward Said’s essays which includes the most prescient early criticism of the 1993 Oslo accords, which Said foresaw would not lead to Palestinian freedom and which he referred to as “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles”.
