Understanding the war in Gaza and the myriad political and historical currents that have shaped this part of the world could take a lifetime. As the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent, it is my job to try and convey the complexities of the region in news stories.
It is always worth digging deeper, however, and while there are hundreds of books that offer insights into Israel and Palestine’s past and present, these are some of my favourites. Both the nonfiction and novels I’ve chosen are deeply human, centring the experiences of the people living here and how and why they can feel so differently about the same issues and events.
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Out of It by Selma Dabbagh
I always find it difficult to describe what Gaza is like, and I think a lot of reportage struggles to convey the reality of life there, too. It’s hard to get the claustrophobia of siege across to an audience. This debut novel from British Palestinian Selma Dabbagh, set in Gaza City during the second intifada in the 00s, does that well. Dabbagh is gentle in her treatment of the Mujahed family, chronicling their hopes and dreams as well as their suffering.
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Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman
The Talmud says: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” In his 2018 history of the Mossad spy agency, the New York Times journalist Ronen Bergman looks at Israel’s assassinations – a long hitlist that has included Nazis, Iranian nuclear scientists and Palestinian leaders – as well as those wrongly targeted and innocent bystanders. Some are killed with poisoned toothpaste, others in drone attacks. Rise and Kill First is a breathtaking read based on hundreds of interviews with members of Israel’s intelligence services, raising many questions about ethics and strategy along the way.
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Return to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani
Ghassan Kanafani, a politician and author from Acre, was one of the aforementioned targets, assassinated by the Mossad with a car bomb in Beirut in 1972. He wrote four novels before he died aged 36, the last of which was Return to Haifa, about a Palestinian couple who are forced to abandon their baby son after the creation of Israel in 1948 and learn that he was adopted by an Israeli couple, raised Jewish and is now an Israeli soldier. It’s more mature than Kanafani’s earlier writings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; his Israeli characters are fully fleshed out and also recognised as victims of dispossession.
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Apples from the Desert by Savyon Liebrecht
This is a collection of short stories about Israeli women, published in 1998, when hope for the Oslo accords peace process was still alive. Liebrecht’s characters come from different ethnic backgrounds and walks of society, but a common thread between them is the horror of the Holocaust, which stalks their pasts and has an impact on the kind of country Israel is.
Liebrecht explores what it means to be Jewish, and Israeli, and to live alongside the Palestinian people. I have no idea why her work isn’t as famous as that of Amos Oz, Israel’s most respected national writer; she is every bit as good.
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The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
Not everyone will agree with Rashid Khalidi’s settler-colonialist analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian issue, but he powerfully lays out the current asymmetry of the conflict, decades of bad faith negotiations by Britain, the US and Israel, and the many failings of the Palestinian leadership that have led us to the dark present moment.
There are precious few English-language histories of Palestine, and this is the latest, drawing on Khalidi’s family archives and experiences as an activist and peace negotiator. This cogent and compelling Palestinian perspective is long overdue.
