This is a bit dated, since I haven’t been able to read normal size print without pain since about 2000, but I thought it was still worthwhile as a reference. The un-annotated works are mostly sources from Dr. Jane Adas. It also chronicles my own growth–I’m a bit embarrassed by the naivete of expressed in some of the annotation I wrote in the mid-1990s.
Abboushi, W.F. The Unmaking of Palestine. Brattleboro, VT. Amana Books, 1990.
Abu-Amir, Ziad. Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim. ed. Palestinian Rights: Affirmation and Denial. Wilmette, IL: Medina Press, 1982.
Aburishi, Said K. Children of Bethany: The Story of a Palestinian Family. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
________. Cry Palestine: Inside the West Bank. Boulder: Westview Press, 1991.
Abu-Sharif, Bassam and Uzi Mahnaimi. The Best of Enemies: The Memoirs of Bassam Abu-Sharif & Uzi Mahnaimi. Boston:Little, Brown and Company, 1995. If each of these authors had published separate autobiographies, the results would have been compelling. Told contrapuntally, their stories make more gripping reading than most adventure novels. The fact that these men are of a similar age and have lived through the same events often in the same locations enables the reader to view Middle East history of the last 50 years from an astonishingly broad perspective. As final testimony to the effectiveness of this book I will add that 2 of the 3 copies in the Monroe County Library System have ended up “lost.”
Are, Thomas L. Israeli Peace, Palestinian Justice: Liberation Theology and the Peace Process. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 1994.
________. Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996.
Aronson, Geoffrey. Creating Facts: Israel, Palestinians & the West Bank. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1987. Good nuts and bolts coverage of the Occupation. Unfortunately, the statistics and maps only go up to the mid-eighties. Aronson quotes extensively from the liberal Israeli press, demonstrating that it is considerably less biased that the U.S. press in regards to the settlement program.
Aruri, Naseer. The Obstruction of Peace: The U.S., Israel, and the Palestinians. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995.
________. Occupation: Israel Over Palestine. Belmont, MA: AAUG, 1983.
Ashrawi, Hanan. This Side of Peace. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Useful for seeing how the cards have been stacked against the Palestinians in most negotiating situations. Rather sad reading in some ways. Once the Palestinian negotiating team consisted of non-politicians whose main emphasis was human rights and that is no longer the case. It as interesting how Ashrawi was always able to tell when the American negotiators were operating from a State Dept. manual on what Arabs are like. Too bad people still don’t see that truth for Palestinians is more important than some “honor/shame” code.
Ateek, Naim. Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989.Ateek, an Anglican priest, readjusts the classic Latin American Liberation Theology parameters to fit Palestinian reality, esp. Palestinian Christian reality.
Avishai, Bernard. The Tragedy of Zionism: Revolution and Democracy in the Land of Israel. New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1985.
Avnery, Uri. My Friend, the Enemy. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1986. Avnery is a former member of the Irgun who became one of Israel’s most famous peace activists and a member of the Knesset. He makes talking to a bunch of people over the course of a decade pretty gripping reading. Also provides a fascinating behind the scenes look at the development of the PLO and how Israel “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity” making peace with it. Two of Avnery’s friends. mentioned in the title, Said Hammammi and Issam Sartawi, were eventually assassinated, which makes the whole book poignant from the outset. When I started the book, I was put off by Avnery’s self-congratulatory tone. When I finished, I thought he was entitled to it.
Bahbah, Bishara. Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986.
Bailey, Kenneth E. Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary-cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke. Combined edition. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983. I did not read this book for this bibliography, but after I finished, I thought this look at parables from perspective of Middle Eastern villagers also provides useful perspective on contemporary politics.
Ball, George W. and Douglas B. The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992.
Bamford, James. The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret Agency. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Co., 1982. Has a brief account of the 1967 Liberty incident in which Israel tried to destroy an American spy ship.
Beit-Hallahmi, Benjamin. The Israeli Connection: Who Israel Arms and Why. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987. Beit Hallahmi’s thesis is that Israel has supported all the right-wing oppressive regimes throughout the 2/3rds world, because it is terrified of decolonization happening anywhere. The success of any national liberation movement calls into question Israel’s domination of the Palestinians. After reading about how the Mossad helped keep the Duvaliers in power in Haiti, I felt my CPT experiences had come full circle.
Beit-Hallahmi, Benjamin. Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel. New York: Olive Branch, 1992.
Bellah, Robert N. and Frederick E Greenspahn. Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America. New York: Crossroad, 1987.The two most relevant essays in the book are Jonathan D. Sarna’s “Jewish-Christian Hostility in the United States: Perceptions from a Jewish point of view” and John Murray Cuddihy’s “Elephant and the Angels; the Incivil Irritatingness of Jewish Theodicy.”
Bennis, Phyllis. From Stones to Statehood. The Palestinian Uprising. New York: Olive Branch, 1992.
Bentwich, Norman. For Zion’s Sake: A Biography of Judah L. Magnes. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1954.
Benvenisti, Meron. City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
________. Conflicts and Contradictions. New York: Random House, 1986. Perhaps the best attempt by an Israeli to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from both a Palestinian and International point of view (while at the same time not rejecting his own pride in being an Israeli, and noting ways in which his own actions militated against his value system.) This would be a good book to read alongside Said’s Politics of Dispossession, partly because he specifically criticizes some of Said’s assertions and partly because he sees many of the same things that Said does. Their thinking is actually pretty close.
________. Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Benvenisti is almost dispassionate as he recounts the egregious human rights abuses that have grown out of the occupation. He belongs to neither the right nor the left, and blames both equally for the on-going oppression of the Palestinians. I appreciated his putting the conflict in the context of other ethnic conflicts around the world. The one annoying thing about the book is that he quotes people without attribution.
________. Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948. trans. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Benvenisti describes, in his typically balanced way, how the Israeli leadership destroyed Palestinian villages, and moved new immigrants into the buildings they left standing, changed Arabic names for places into Hebrew, and Muslim holy sites into Jewish holy sites. He is perhaps uniquely qualified to discuss these issues, because his father was one of the geographers who renamed Palestinian sites in order to link them with names Israel’s ancestral homeland. As in his other books, Benvenisti pulls no punches for Israelis, Palestinians or even himself. He ends his analysis of the Palestinian and Israeli struggle for the landscape with the wry observation that the Zionist “struggle for the Land has become the struggle for profitable zoning.” In a conclusion that is sure to offend both Israelis and Palestinians, he notes that “after fifty years of struggle for the landscape, the Arabs have become the last of the Zionists.” Sacred Landscape is worth purchasing for Benvenisti’s epilogue alone, in which he offers creative alternatives to the “all or nothing” attitudes present in current Israeli/Palestinian negotiations. He notes that if the Israeli government were to provide infrastructure to the “unrecognized villages” where Israeli Arab citizens were driven during the 1948 war, give building permits to these citizens, allow restoration of Arab mosques and churches in communities where Jewish immigrants were settled, and compensate Arab owners of land currently being sold by the State to developers, it would set a “precedent for good intentions” and signal that the state of war with the Palestinians is finally over.
Benziman, Uzi. Sharon: An Israeli Caesar. New York: Adama Books, 1985. Benzimann notes in his preface that many people associated with Sharon over the years refused to talk to him out of fear. He manages to demonstrate that Sharon’s handling of the Lebanon war was typical of the way he had always worked within the military and within the government. Interesting that Benzimann never refers to Sharon’s raids as terrorist, although Palestinian raids are routinely referred to as such.
Berger, Elmer. Peace for Palestine: First Lost Opportunity. Gainesville: University PRess of Florida, 1993.
Bernards, Neal. The Palestinian Conflict. From the Opposing Viewpoints Juniors series. San Diego: Greenhaven, Press, Inc., 1990. Although it purports to have an even-handed approach in helping young people identify propaganda, it fails on several counts 1) the cover shows Palestinian boys throwing stones 2) It casts the argument into a Israelis-want-security/Palestinians want a homeland frame, ignoring the fears Palestinians have for their security 3) It cites Joan Peters (p. 13) as a Middle East expert ignoring the fact that Israeli historians have completely discounted her scholarship in her notorious From Time Immemorial.
Binur, Yoram. My Enemy, My Self. London: Doubleday, 1989. An Israeli Black Like Me.
Block, Gay and Malka Drucker. Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust. New York: TV Books, 1992. An inspiring book containing interviews with and pictures of Europeans who hid Jews during WWII. Drucker had the integrity to let each rescuer tell his or her own story without putting a spin on feelings of bitterness or personal politics. I was especially interested in the rescuers’ views of modern Israel. Some had strongly pro-Zionist sentiments and others couldn’t understand why the Israelis persecuted the Palestinians, given the history of anti-semitism.
Bookbinder, Hyman and James G. Abourzek. Through Different Eyes: Two Leading Americans, A Jew and an Arab, Debate U.S. Policy in the Middle East. Bethesda, MD: Adler and Adler, 1987. Helpful in showing where dialogue regarding the issue generally breaks down and how propaganda becomes internalized. Also shows the futility of bombarding people with facts when their beliefs are driven by feelings.
*Brenner, Lenni. Zionism in the Age of Dictators: A Reappraisal. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1983. Details the collaboration of prominent Zionists with Fascist leaders in Europe and the callousness of some of these same leaders toward the European Jews during the Holocaust. Although intended as a stunning indictment of Zionism, the book confirmed my belief that all sorts of nationalism tend to make people cruel or indifferent to the suffering of others not of their nationality.
Butt, Gerald. Life at the Crossroads: A History of Gaza. Essex, England: Rimal, 1995.
Chacour, Elias. Blood Brothers. Tarrytown, NY: Chosen Books, 1984. Chacour, a Palestinian Catholic-Melkite priest, gives a lucid first person account of what happened to the Palestinian villages within Israel during the 1947-48 war. He has been a strong voice within Israel for Christian-Muslim-Jewish reconciliation.
________ and Mary Jensen. We Belong to the Land. San Francisco: HarperCollins Paperback, 1992. Covers much of the same biographical information in Blood Brothers, but also has material on Israel’s war in Lebanon and and Chacour’s work in the last decade.
Chapman, Colin. Whose Promised Land? Oxford: Lion Paperback, 1992. (First published 1983.)
Chertok, Haim. Stealing Home: Israel Bound and Rebound. New York: Fordham University Press, 1988. I am beginning to discover as of this writing that accounts like Chertok’s, i.e. first person perspectives of life in Israel or Palestine are the most useful for understanding the conflict there. It forces the observer to think in terms of people instead of politics. Chertok is an odd combination of a Zionist who believes the diaspora is bankrupt and dying and a leftist who supports, at least theoretically, human rights for Palestinians.
Chomsky, Noam. Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1996. Section on Israel focusses mostly on U.S. Aid to Israel and American misconceptions about Oslo. 8/99
________. Chronicles of Dissent: Interviews with David Barsamian. Common Courage Press, 1992. Although there are two sections in this book dedicated to Israel and the Gulf War, references to the U.S.-Israeli relationship occur throughout this collection of interviews. I was particularly interested in Chomsky’s description of his Jewish upbringing and of how he is routinely censored by the media powers that be.
_________ and David Barisamian. The Common Good. Berkely, CA: Odonian Press, 1998. In the Middle East section, Chomsky makes some interesting remarks about the relationship between Israel and the American Jewish community. 8/99
________. The Fateful Triangle:The United States, Israel and the Palestinians. Boston: South End Press, 1983. Densely written and densely footnoted, this book took me three times as long to read as I thought it would. Chomsky confirms my own feeling that the Israeli press is more honest about what is happening in Israel than the American press is. No one is better than Chomsky at cutting through perception to get at what is. Highly recommended.
________. Keeping the Rabble in Line: Interviews with David Barsamian.Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994. Less in this book about Israel and Chomsky’s Jewish heritage, but it is still useful for putting Chomsky’s view on the Middle East in context.
________. Peace in the Middle East: Reflections on Justice and Nationhood. New York: Vintage, 1974.
_________ and David Barsamian. The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many. Berkeley, CA: Odonian Press, 1993. Covers the Clinton administration’s relationship with Israel, Oslo deceptions and Lebanon.
________. World Orders Old and New. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. The third section of this book is devoted to the Middle East, although reading the first two will help give an economic and political context for U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Punctures the myths of the Oslo peace process.
________. Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.
Cockburn, Andrew and Leslie. Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S. Israeli Covert Relationship. New York:HarperCollins Publishers, 1991. And a mighty sick relationship is is. The Cockburn’s use Beit-Hallahmi’s book extensively, but also seem to have had a lot of access to American and Israeli intelligence operators. Certain to leave you in a cynical frame of mind.
Cohen, Aharon. Israel and the Arab World. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1970. Five hundred fifty pages of small print detailing Jewish-Arab relations before, during and shortly after the founding of the State of Israel. Cohen fought in the Ô48 war and figures prominently in Morris’s Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. Somehow that makes his drive to improve Israeli-Arab relations more poignant. Although his references to Arabs as “backward” made me cringe, he put more blame on the British and the U.S. for preventing cordial relations from developing. For people too impatient to read the whole book, I highly recommend the last chapter which sadly demonstrates that Israeli-Arab relations have not changed much since 1970, when it was written. This is the quote that should be required reading: After citing the Israeli position that Arabs only understand force, Cohen writes, “To be sure, like everyone else, the Arab does not belittle strength, but a demonstration of force will not arouse his respect. Justice, generosity, and openheartedness are more impressive and are more likely to win his trust.”
Cooley, John. Payback: America’s Long War in the Middle East. Washington, DC: Brassey’s 1991.
Corbin, Jane. The Norway Channel: The Secret Talks that Led to the Middle East Peace Accord. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994.
Cozic, Charles P. Israel: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1994.
Crowe, David M. A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Gives a short account in each chapter of what happened to the Gypsies when the Nazis took over these countries.
Curtiss, Richard H. A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute. Washington, DC: American Educational Trust, 1986. . Although Curtiss lets US policymakers off the hook a bit too easily (with the exception of Kissinger and Haig), the book provides a fascinating behind the scenes account of U.S. dealings with Israel since it became a state. Because Curtiss was a State Department employee from 1951 on, he had first hand access to Presidents from Eisenhower on. I had known that Israeli manipulation of the U.S. government was bad. I didn’t know it was this bad. However, after reading Avnery’s book (above) I came to the conclusion that the US has done its share of manipulating Israel, as well.
Dan, Uri. To the Promised Land: the Birth of Israel. New York: Doubleday, 1988.This coffee table book is a quintessential example of the sort of Zionist history that Flapan, Morris and Segev have sought to correct in their books. In 1982 Dan became Ariel Sharon’s media advisor and accompanied him to Lebanon. Nuff said.
David, Ron. Arabs and Israel for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1993, 1996. This book might be precisely the antidote to the source cited immediately below. Unfortunately, David cites certain Ancient Near Eastern happenings as facts instead of hypotheses, which could give what follows less credibility in the eyes of some. However, the book reads quickly and is helped by the pencil sketches on every page.
Davis, Leonard J. and Decter, Moshe, eds.Myths and Facts 1982: A Concise Record of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Washington, DC: Near East Report, 1982.The sad thing about this book is that one could refute most of its egregious twistings of truth using entirely Israeli sources. To do so, however would require referring to a dozen scholarly works, none of whichÑwith the possible exception of Segev’s works, are nearly as easy to read. The item that really made me mad was the reference to Saad Haddad as a “Lebanese patriot.” The editors demonstrated his worthiness by citing his training at Fort Benning! The book does has some useful documents in its appendix (texts of U.N. Security Council resolutions, etc.)
Davis, Uri. Israel: An Apartheid State. London: Zed Books, 1987.
*________ and Mezvinsky, Norton, eds. Documents from Israel: 1967-1973. London: Ithaca Press, 1975. Contains various articles and essays from largely Hebrew language sources. I found the pieces from The Black Panther especially helpful in learning about the attitudes of the Mizrahi Jews toward the establishment. Invaluable compendium of primary sources.
Dinnerstein, Leonard. America and the Survivors of the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Doughty, Dick and Mohaammed El Aydi. Gaza: Legacy of Occupation–A Photographer’s Journey. Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1995.
Ellis, Marc. Beyond Innocence and Redemption: Confronting the Holocaust. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990. Ellis writes at the end, “The task before us is to confront that which threatens the foundations of Jewishness, drawing strength from the tradition of dissent and raising up the liturgy of destruction to include both those who persecuted us and those whom Jews persecute today. This is the avenue to critical thought and activity that moves beyond innocence and redemption to recover the ethical tradition at the heart of Judaism.”
________. Ending Auschwitz: The Future of Jewish and Christian Life. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994. Two statements Ellis drills into his classes at Maryknoll are, “Oppose all orthodoxy” and “Beware the guardians of tradition.” These statements are an underlying theme of this book in which Ellis balances Auschwitz with the genocide in the Americas begun in 1492. He essentially calls for an end to all theologyÑChristian and JewishÑthat excludes others. Frequently throughout the book he cites Irving Greenburg’s dictum that any theology today must be credible in the presence of burning children.
________. Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation: The Uprising and the Future. Ellis seeks to convince Jewish readers that their theology needs to have a deeper base than the history of persecution and the Holocaust. I have heard criticism from Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom, who agrees with Ellis’s premises, that Ellis does not back up his arguments with the Talmud. He is therefore not given a fair hearing among many Jewish scholars. Milgrom believes the Talmud can be used to back up Ellis’s premises.
________. Unholy Alliance: Religion and Atrocity in Our Time. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997. The title is self-explanatory.It is helpful to view the atrocities committed by the state of Israel in the context of other atrocities that occurred partly through the collaboration of people who used religion to justify their actions.
Elon, Amos. A Blood-Dimmed Tide: Dispatches from the Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. It is fascinating to see how Elon’s thinking evolved between 1967 and 1995Ñthe period of history that these articles and essays cover. In 1967, he found the triumphalism after the Six Day War vaguely disturbing. By 1995, he knows exactly why he found it disturbing. Straight-forward and informative.
Emerson, Gloria. Gaza: A Year in the Intifada: A Personal Account from an Occupied Land. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1991.
Englander, Nathan. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Most of these stories take place in the ultra-Orthodox milieu that Englander grew up in. The last story, about what sounds like the bombing of Ben Yehudah Mall, gives the reader an idea about the different way that Israelis and expatriates cope with the threat of terrorism.
Ennes, James M. Jr. Assault on Liberty: The True Story of the Israeli Attack on an American Intelligence Ship. New York: Random House, 1979.
Epstein, Melech. Profiles of Eleven. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965.
Ezrahi, Yaron. Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. The major theme of Ezrahi’s book is that there has been such a “poverty of the individual” throughout Israel’s history, that Israelis do not have the resources to develop an individual’s conscience and resistance to collective injustice. As of this writing (12/2/97) the book is very current. It discusses Netanyahu’s defeat of Peres in May 1996. As is usual, I found Ezrahi’s personal stories–what it was like to grow up in Israel at the time it achieved statehood, what it was like to send his son to the army–the most interesting part of the book.
Feingold, Henry L. The Politics of Rescue. New Jersey: Rutgers University, 1970. Exposes the miserable response of Roosevelt and the State Department to Jewish refugees fleeing genocide and gives a good picture of what was going on in Europe at the time. Shonfeld’s and Weissmandel’s accusations re: the American Jewish community are not dealt with. The Palestinian Jewish community’s response to the Holocaust is also not much developed. Tom Segev gives a more complete picture of the Jewish response in The Seventh Million.
Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock and Mary Evelyn Hocking. Israelis & Palestinians: The Struggle for Peace. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.
Feuerlicht, Roberta Strauss. The Fate of the Jews: A People torn Between Israeli Power and Jewish Ethics. New York: Times Books, 1983. Feuerlicht grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family on the Lower East side of New York. I found her description of her family’s history fascinating, as well as her tracing the history of Jewish “liberalism.” As an insider, she may be a little harder on her community, since she is more aware of its faults. It is usually good to puncture romantic notions people have of various ethnic groups, however.
Findley, Paul. Deliberate Deceptions: Facing the Facts about the US-Israeli Relationship. New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1993. For people without the patience to read Flapan and Morris, this is easily digested. Like Curtiss, Findley lets the US off the hook a little too easily, and as a pacifist, I am of course concerned that he sees arming Arab countries as a trend toward egalitarianism. I think Findley dismisses the biblical aspirations of some Israelis too easily.
Finkelstein, Norman G. Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. New York: Verso, 1995. Finkelstein’s analysis of Joan Peter’s From TIme Immemorial appears in Said’s and Hitchen’s Blaming the victims. That essay and others of the same nature make this volume a useful reference for analyzing how media and scholarship related to the Israeli-Palestinian question are slanted. I was especially interested in his analysis of Benni Morris’s historical works.
________ and Ruth Bettina Birn. A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth. New York: Metropoloitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 1998. Finkelstein picks apart Goldhagen’s central thesis, i.e., that the Germans were preternaturally disposed toward “eliminationist anti-semitism” in much the same way he picked apart Peters’ central thesis in From Time Immemorial. He speculates that Goldhagens’ book received the acclamation it did for many of the same reasons that FTI did. Birn’s essay demonstrates how Goldhagen manipulated the data from German archives to support his thesis. (12/99)
________. The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Finkelstein packs a lot into this 121 page book. In addition to recounting the year he spent living and teaching in the Beit Sahour area, he does some comparative analyses that are stunning. He compares Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the attitudes of Palestinians toward Israelis with the attitudes of his parents, who were Holocaust survivors, toward the Germans and the mechanisms that Israel has used to force the Palestinians off the land with the mechanisms that the U.S. used to force the Cherokees off the land. As is usual with Finkelstein, everything is meticulously documented. Highly recommended.
Finkelstein, Norman H. Friends Indeed: The Special Relationship of Israel and the United States. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook Press, 1998. Got this out by mistake, thinking it was another book by Norman G. (See above.) Written for young adults, this book provides an easy summation of the conventional wisdom about Israel. In another decade or so, when the conventional wisdom becomes that of historians such as Morris, Flapan and Segev, Norman H. Finkelstein’s book will serve as an excellent, articulate example of what people in the U.S. used to believe about Israel. (9/99)
Flapan, Simha. The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987. Flapan, an Israeli historian, examines seven of the myths surrounding the 1947-48 war (e.g., that the Arab countries broadcasted radio announcements encouraging Palestinians to leave their homes.) Using primary sources, he demonstrates that these popularly held beliefs are not always true.
________. Zionism and the Palestinians. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1979. Covers the same period that Cohen’s Israel and the Arab World does, but Flapan had access to more primary sources of Ben Gurion, Weizmann, et al. than did Cohen.
Fonseca, Isabel. Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. I read this and Crowe’s and Friedlander’s books to try to gain an understanding of how the Holocaust had affected other groups targeted for destruction by the Nazis. Fonseca writes beautifully and manages to present a view of Romani life and history that his both unsentimental and compassionate. Interesting tidbit toward the end about how it wasn’t until Elie Wiesel resigned in 1986 that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council was able to include a Gypsy on its council. Wiesel opposed Gypsy representation.
Freedman, Robert O.. ed. Israel Under Rabin. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.
Friedland, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel HIll, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Friedland seeks to expand the definition of Nazi genocide to include other “biologically selected” targets, especially the Gypsies and the handicapped. He shows how the murder of handicapped and disabled people eventually set the groundwork for the Final Solution.
Friedman, Robert. The False Prophet: From FBI Informant to Knesset Member. Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books, 1990. A biography of Meir Kahane and his influence among American Jews and in Israeli politics. (Kahane lived in Kiryat Arba, outside of Hebron, and there is a park dedicated in his honor there.)
________. Zealots for Zion: Inside Israel’s West Bank Settlement Movement. New York: Random House, 1992. Friedman examines the right wing Israelis of American background who started and perpetuate the settlement movement in Israel. Gives backgrounds on several of the Hebron settlers with whom CPT has come in contact.
Friedman, Thomas. From Beirut to Jerusalem. New York: Doubleday, 1990. The most readable book I have found on the Middle East conflict. Friedman was the New York Times correspondent in Lebanon during the war in the early Ô80’s and was in the correspondent in Jerusalem during the time of the Intifada. His first person account of what he saw and his historical analysis, while not radical, do run counter to many of the prevailing myths Americans believe about Israel and Lebanon. After reading this book, people should read Edward Said’s critical review of it in The Politics of Dispossession.
Gaffney, Mark. Dimona: The Third Temple? The Story Behind the Vanunu Revelation. Brattleboro, VT: Amana Books, 1989.
Ganeri, Anita. I Remember Palestine: Why We Left. Austin, TX: Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 1995.
The first 12 pages of this 27 page books seem to be devoted to justifying Israel’s conquest of the region and it ends with a paean to Oslo. This is supposed to be part of a series (I Remember Bosnia, I Remember Somalia.) It would be interesting to see the political slant on those.
Gerner, Deborah J. One Land, Two Peoples: The Conflict over Palestine. Boulder: Westview Press, 1991.
Ghareeb, Edmund, ed. Split Vision: The Portrayal of Arabs in the American Media. Washington, DC: Arab-American Affairs Council, 1983.
More thorough than Shaheen’s book. The numerous interviews with journalists regarding how Arabs are portrayed sheds an interesting light on some familiar faces and names.
Giacaman, George and Dag Jorund Lonning. After Oslo: New Realities, Old Problems. London and Chicago: Pluto Press, 1998.
Gluck, Sherna Berger. An American Feminist in Palestine: The Intifada Years. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. Gluck, an American Jewish professor, stands strongly in solidarity with Palestinian women. Her introduction and conclusion deal with some of the emotional struggles she has had as a result of her background. In the end she concludes that she has come to the place she is regarding Palestinian rights because of her Jewish heritage rather than in spite of it. The intro and conclusion alone are worth the price of the book.
Goldberg, J.J. Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment. New York, et al: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. 1996. Goldberg quotes former National Security Council staffer William Quandt as saying, “When people just accept your assumptions, you’re halfway there in policy debate.” Goldberg’s assumptions are that nearly all Arab complaints regarding Israel are illegitimate and that all non-Jews who criticize Israel are anti-semitic. He pooh poohs works by Chomsky, Findley, Stephen Green, Tivnan and George and Douglas Ball for “attempting to document the Israel lobby’s stranglehold over American foreign policy.” Those criticisms aside, I found Goldberg’s explanations as to why American Jewish leadership’s politics are often at odd with those of the Jewish rank and file helpful. (11/99)
Goldmann, Nahum. The Autobiography of Nahum Goldmann: Sixty Years of Jewish Life. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969.
Gordon, Haim. Quicksand: Israel, the Intifada and the Rise of Political Evil in Democracies. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995.
Gordon, Neve and Ruchama Marton. Torture: Human Rights, Medical Ethics and the Case of Israel. London: Zed Books, 1995.
Graff, James A. Palestinian Children and Israeli State Violence. Toronto: NECEF, 1991.
Green, Stephen. Living by the Sword: America and Israel in the Middle East 1968-87. Brattleboro, VT: Amana Books, 1988. The Cockburns cite Green’s books as a valuable resource. Largely using unclassified U.S. documents, Green uncovers some of the more unsavory aspects of Israel’s ventures and the United States’ collaboration with these ventures. Having read a lot of Israeli history by now (3/97), I did not expect to read anything new. I was wrong. Interesting that the first book was put out by a major publisher and the second one wasn’t.
________. Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with a Militant Israel. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1984.Especially interesting in this book to note that the unclassified documents from the time of the Ô47-’48 war had never been accessed before Green did so. A demonstration of myths taking precedence over facts.
Grose, Peter. Israel in the Mind of America. New York: Knopf, 1983.
Grossman, David. The Book of Intimate Grammar. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.
Gives a fictional account of growing up in Israel to immigrant parents in the fifties.
________. Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993. Grossman speaks Arabic fluently and has long been a critic of the Israeli occupation. This book exposes much of the racism in Israeli society. He makes some interesting comparisons in this book between West Bank Palestinians and Palestinian Israelis.
________. Smile of the Lamb. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.
Supposedly the first fictional novel about the corrupting influence of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank on Israeli society. Certainly the Arabs and the Moroccan Jewish protagonist come across as more moral than the Ashkenazi characters.
________. See Under: Love. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989.
Like Grossman’s other fiction, this novel is somewhat mystical and hard to understand. However the Wasserman section is worth all the rest of the book. Grossman manages to convey both the full horror of the Nazi death camps and humanize the officer running one of these camps (which makes the horror greater, of course.) The other sections seem to show that the Holocaust has rendered all of Israeli society dysfunctional.
________. The Yellow Wind. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989.
This edition has a prologue which Grossman wrote talking about how his perceptions, and Israeli perceptions have changed since the outbreak of the Intifada (the original book was published before the Intifada.) His treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank is largely sympathetic. And his treatment of settlers in the West Bank is largely unsympathetic.
Guyatt, Nicholes. The Absence of Peace: Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. London and New York: Zed Books, 2001
Habiby, Emile. The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist. London: Zed Books (1974?) Distributed 1985. A fictional account, based on Voltaire’s Candide, of the adventures of a Palestinian collaborator in Israel after the 1947-48 war. Habiby, who died this year, was a Palestinian Israeli and provides a glimpse of Israel’s wars from a Palestinian perspective.
Hadawi, Sami. Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine. New York: Olive Branch, 1989.
Halevi, Yossi Klein. Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist: An American Story. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995. A revealing portrait of life inside the Jewish Defense League and into the all-Jewish environment in which Halevi grew up. It is disappointing in the end to see Halevy fail to empathize with the fate of the Palestinians, because we have seen him grow so much throughout the course of the rest of the book.
Haddad, Hassan and Donald Wagner, eds. All in the Name of the Bible: Selected Essays on Israel and American Christian Fundamentalism. Brattleboro, VT: Amana, 1986.
Halsell, Grace. Journey to Jerusalem. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1981. If it were not so dated, this book would appear on my “highly recommended” list. Sadly, while the political situation has changed since 1981, the attitudes that Halsell describes have not.
*________. Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1986. Halsell explores the origins and philosophy of the Christian Zionist movement and recounts her experiences on tours conducted by Jerry Falwell and other prominent Christian Zionists. She makes a good case for Christians taking the threat these Zionists pose for Middle East peace seriously.
Harkabi, Yehoshafat. Israel’s Fateful Hour. trans. Lenn Schramm, New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
Hass, Amira. Drinking the Sea at Gaza. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999. Hass, a journalist for Ha ÔAretz newspaper, lived in Gaza and gives a first person account of the strains that Gazans have had to deal with–first under the Israelis and now under the PNA. Although her focus is on Gaza, the book effectively shows the contours of the pressure cooker into which all Palestinians have been forced as a result of the Israeli occupation. (read Spring 2000)
Hecht, Ben. Perfidy. New York: Julian Messner, Inc., 1961. An invaluable look at the controversial Kastner trial in Isral in the mid-1950’s and at the callousness that the rulers of Israel showed to the millions of Jews dying in Europe–some of whom they had the opportunity of saving. Hecht cannot be dismissed as a knee-jerk anti-Zionist, because his sympathies lay with the Irgun and Jabotinsky. Moreover, he quotes liberally from actual transcripts of the trial.
Heiberg, Marianne and Geir ¯venson. Palestinian Society in Gaza, West Bank and Jerusalem: A Survey of Living Conditions. FAFO-report, 152.
Heikal, Mohammad. Secret Channels: The Inside Story of Arab-Israeli Peace Negotiations. London: Harper Collins, 1996.
Heller, Mark A. and Sari Nusseibeh. No Trumpets No Drums: A Two-State Settlement of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict. New York: Hill & Wang, 1991.
Herman, Edward S. The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda. Boston: South End Press, 1982. While Herman deals more extensively with state terrorism in Latin America than he does with Israeli terrorism, the book is useful for students of the Israeli Palestinian conflict in that it gives a different paradigm from which to view terrorism. The section on the media is especially helpful for people seeking to understand why a government bombing civilians is not terrorism while one person hijacking a plane, car, etc. is.
Hersh, Seymour. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. New York: Summit Books, 1983. Chapters 18,19, and 29 deal with Kissinger and Nixon’s Middle East policy. Hersh argues persuasively that the 1973 Israeli-Egyptian war could have been prevented entirely, but Kissinger’s personal vendetta against Secretary of State William P. Rogers who tried to mediate between the two countries and Kissinger’s megalomaniacal insistence that all major foreign policy decisions be attributed to himself alone, scuttled negotiations.
________. The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. New York: Random House, 1991.
Hertzberg, Arthur. Being Jewish in America: The Modern Experience. New York: Schocken Books, 1979.
Herzl, Theodor. Old-New Land. New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1960. Herzl’s fictional vision of what the hypothetical Jewish state would become is not without its charms. Although an ethic of European colonialism pervades the vision (one of the chief protagonists still has black servants), Herzl made point of demonsrating how Arab inhabitants of Palestine would have the same rights as the Jewish pioneers and how they would be perfectly free to maintain their cultural identity. The translator litters the manuscript with footnotes pointing out how much of the Zionist vision had come true without addressing how (and why) this fundamental part of the vision did not.
Heschel, Abraham Joshua. A Passion for Truth. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. I checked this out because I wanted to balance all the deception inherent in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the place truth holds in Judaism. It wasn’t quite what I expected. Heschel compares and contrasts the Hasidic rebbe, “the Kotzker” with the Baal Shem Tov and with Kierkegaard and casts the debate in terms of love vs. truth. Still, like Klagsbrun, Heschel does elevate what is true and good and noble about Judaism, which is important for anyone involved in the dialectic of the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
Hillel, Daniel. Rivers of Eden: The Struggle for Water and the Quest for Peace in the Middle East. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Hiltermann, Joost R. Behind the Intifada. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Hirst, David. The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East. New York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, 1977. Hirst takes an unflinching look at the violence promulgated by both Israelis and Palestinians and tackles the popular myths most people believe about Israel’s wars. I would recommend this over Curtiss’s book in that regard (Curtiss quotes heavily from Hirst’s book in fact), but it ends in 1977, before the war in Lebanon.
Hunter, Jane. Israeli Foreign Policy: South Africa and Central America. Boston: South End Press, 1987.
Hurley, Andrew J. Israel and the New World Order. Santa Barbara: Fifthian Press, 1991.
*Hurwitz, Deena, ed. Walking the Red Line: Israelis in Search of Justice for Palestine. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992. A collection of essays by the Israeli left presenting views that are never heard in American popular media.Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip: Washington, DC, September 28, 1995. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jerusalem. Essentially the Oslo Accords (or Oslo II). Great maps in a pocket in the back.
Jabbour, Hala Deeb. A Woman of Nazareth.(Fiction.) New York: Olive Branch Press, 1989.
Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Kanafani, Ghassem. All That’s Left To You. (Fiction.) Austin: University of TExas Press, 1990.
Karpin, Michael and Friedman, Ina. Murder in the Name of God: the Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1998. A really gripping account of how the Israeli right-wing cult laid the groundwork for Yigal Amir’s murder of Yitzhak Rabin. Many of the players described in the book are people well-known to CPT’s Hebron team, and the atmosphere of the summer of 1995 accords well with what the Hebron team saw in the first few months of CPT’s project there.
Kellerman, Jonathan. The Butcher’s Theater. Toronto; New York: Bantam Books, 1989. A murder mystery set in Jerusalem, and one of the most appallingly racist works of fiction I’ve ever read. With the exception of the Palestinian detective from Bethlehem, all of the Arab characters are grotesque in some way, e.g., extremely obese, cruel or afflicted with a rare condition called “micro-penis.” Kellerman also makes some statements that are patently false, e.g., that female circumcision is commonly done among Palestinians and that Yassar Arafat at one point countenanced gang rape as part of the PLO’s armed struggle. The sad thing is that it is a gripping mystery, but if Kellerman had written about African Americans the way he writes about Arabs, this would have been in the same league as the Turner Diaries.
Khalidi, Rashid. Palestinian Identity: the Construction of Modern National Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Khalidi goes back to newspapers and other primary sources from the Ottoman and British Mandate period to examine when Palestinians began thinking of themselves as “Palestinians rather than Arabs. The last chapter deals with how the question of identity has been manipulated by Israeli propagandists. Very readable for an academic work.
Khalidi, Walid. All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington, DC: The Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992. The title is self-explanatory. This massive book contains lots of photographs and maps which help the reader visualize the enormity of the dest ruction. . Palestine Reborn. London: I.B. Taurus, 1992.
Khalifeh, Sahar. Wild Thorns. (Fiction.) New York: Olive Branch Press, 1989.
Khouri, Fred J. The Arab Israeli Dilemma, 3rd ed. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993.
Kimche, Jon. The Last Option: After Nasser, Arafat and Saddam Hussein: The Quest for Peace in the Middle East. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991.
________. There Could Have Been Peace. New York: Dial Press, 1973.
Kimmerling, Baruch. Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians. London and New York: Verso, 2003.
Klagsbrun, Francine. Voices of Wisdom: Jewish Ideals and Ethics for Everyday Living. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. While not precisely a “Middle East” reference, this book helps to balance out Israel Shahak’s book mentioned below, by showing that there is indeed a humane, universalistic tradition that runs through the Talmud in addition to a xenophobic one.
Koestler, Arthur. The Thirteenth Tribe. New York: Random House, 1976. I checked this out because Ghareeb in his book cited it as “proof” that Ashkenazi Jews have no inherent right to Palestine. Koestler makes a good case linguistically, demographically, and historically that the bulk of the Jews of Eastern Europe were descended from the KhazarsÑa people in the Caucasus region that converted to Judaism in the 7th-8th centuries. Most of the modern Israelis are sephardic of course and I don’t think this revelation would change anything in contemporary Israeli policy (If I converted to Judaism, I would have the right to become an Israeli citizen, myself.) Still, I found the book intriguing as a convincing argument against typcasting anyone as a single “race.”.
Klagsbrun, Francine. Voices of Wisdom: Jewish Ideals and Ethics for Everyday Living. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. While not precisely a “Middle East” reference, this book helps to balance out Israel Shahak’s book mentioned below, by showing that there is indeed a humane, universalistic tradition that runs through the Talmud in addition to a xenophobic one.
Klieman, Aaron S. Israel’s Global Reach: Arms Sales as Diplomacy. McLean, VA: Pergamon-Brassey’s International Defense Publishers, 1985.
Koestler, Arthur. The Thirteenth Tribe. New York: Random House, 1976.
I checked this out because Ghareeb in his book cited it as “proof” that Ashkenazi Jews have no inherent right to Palestine. Koestler makes a good case linguistically, demographically, and historically that the bulk of the Jews of Eastern Europe were descended from the KhazarsÑa people in the Caucasus region that converted to Judaism in the 7th-8th centuries. Most of the modern Israelis are Sephardic of course and I don’t think this revelation would change anything in contemporary Israeli policy (If I converted to Judaism, I would have the right to become an Israeli citizen, myself.) Still, I found the book intriguing as a convincing argument against typcasting anyone as a single “race.”
Kolsky, Thomas A. Jews Against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism, 1942-48. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
*Langer, Felicia. With My Own Eyes. London: Ithaca Press, 1975.
Langer writes a series of vignettes of human rights cases she took on as an Israeli lawyer in 1968-1973. The writing is not elegant, but the simple recording of what she saw and heard in Israel and the Occupied Territories has a powerful impact.
Langfur, Stephen. Confessions from a Jericho Jail: What happened when I refused to fight the Palestinians. New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1992. A fascinating account of Langfur’s experience as a conscientious objector in the Jericho jail. Trained as a philosopher and steeped in the biblical dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Lanfur used his time in jail to do a lot of thinking and a lot of growing. The ending, in particular, in which he recounts and experience sharing in a Sabbath service with Jews from many different walks of life as Palestinians in their cell called for water is particularly haunting.
Le Carre, John. The Little Drummer Girl. New York: Bantam Books, 1983. I read this book because Benny Morris says it more or less accurately depicts how Israeli intelligence operates in Europe. Sobering thought. I wish Le Carre had been able to make the Palestinian characters as complex and humane as the Israeli characters. Mostly they are noble sufferers or terrorists. In a small way, Le Carre has bought into the “shoot and cry” stereotype of the Israeli soldier.
Lee, Eric. Saigon to Jerusalem: Conversations with U.S. Veterans of the Vietnam War who emigrated to Israel. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1992. The title is self-explanatory. It is interesting to see which Vietnam vets went on to become hawks and which ones went on to become doves in Israel. David Ramati, one of the veterans interviewed in the book is a settler from Kiryat Arba with whom the Hebron team is familiar. (11/99)
Leibowitz, Yeshayahu. Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State. ed. Eliezer Goldman. Cambridge, MA:. Harvard University Press, 1992. While not all of his essays will be engrossing to those not interested in rabbinic literature, most contain very sane reflections on what he saw Judaism becoming as a result of Israeli policy. Gives very clearcut commentary on the difference between Judaism and Zionism.
Lerner, Michael. Jewish Renewal: a Path to Healing and Transformation.New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994. Lerner’s chapters on the place Israel has held in North American Jewish ideology and faith and his analysis of Jewish Holy War passages in the Bible provide useful analysis for people trying to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in these contexts.
Levins, Hoag. Arab Reach: The Secret War Against Israel. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc, 1983. I was prepared to really hate this book at the beginning, when Levin described the architecture of the Tunisian embassy in sinister terms–along with all contacts between Arab lobbies and congress. Some of his descriptions are blatantly racist: “Faisal Ibn Abdul-Aziz al Saud, his faceÉresembling nothing so much as the face of one of the killer falcons he bred, proclaimed that the decision had been made to “unsheathe the sword of oil.” Levin also unfortunately uses the words “Palestinian” and “Muslim” interchangeably. On the other hand he does not cover up or defend Israeli actions that provoked the ire of Arab countries, and the book is really more a study of Arab economic interests in the US and Europe. I’m still not sure, however, why he thinks the Arab countries using their economic clout on behalf of the Palestinians is a morally dubious action.
Lilienthal, Alfred M.The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace? New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1978. The most useful part of this 778 page densely footnoted book are the sections in which Lilienthal demonstrates how the media, especially the New York Times, exhibits bias for Israel and the effect Zionism has had on Judaism in the United States and on policymakers. In a few sections, Lilienthal seems to let polemics get the better of him, as when he suggests that Anne Frank’s diary was a fake, saying that no teenage girl could have written that. (As a former teenage girl, I disagree.)
Lindsay, Hal. The Late Great Planet Earth. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1970. I read this mainly because I wanted to understand a little better where the Christian Zionists are coming from.
Lindsay, Hal, Planet Earth–2000 A.D.: Will Mankind Survive? Palos Verdes, Calif. : Western Front, 1994. See above. Lindsay lost me when he said the lack of anti-nuclear rallies in the U.S. since the Soviet Union broke up was a clear indication that it had been behind them all along. Says some really atrocious and perhaps libelous things about Islam and Yassar Arafat.
Louvish, Simon. The Silencer. (Fiction.) London: BLoomsbury, 1991.
*Lustick, Ian, ed. Arab-Israeli Relations in World Politics. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1994. A collection of academic articles, apparently photocopied directly from other journals (the typefaces are all different.) Lustick’s article, “Israeli Politics and American Foreign Policy,” is worth readingÑif only to think regretfully of some common sense steps the U.S. could have taken during the settlement expansion under Begin (when the article was written.) Taken together, however, the essays really seem insignificant compared to the writings of Israelis and Palestinians recounting personal experiences.
*________. For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988. Less easy to read than Friedman’s Zealots for Zion or even Sprinzak’s The Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right. However, the book quotes extensively from settler publications in Hebrew, which makes it a useful resource, and it examines in more detail the affect that Gush Emunim had on Israeli society as a whole than either of the other two books.
Lynd, Staughton, Sam Bahour & Alice Lynd. eds. Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians. New York: Olive Branch Press, 1994.
Mallison, W. Thomas and Sally V. The Palestine Problem in International Law and World Order. Essex, England: Longman Group Ltd., 1986.
McDowall, David. Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Beyond. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1989.
Makovsky, David. Making Peace with the PLO: The Rabin Government’s Road to the Oslo Accord. Washington, DC: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1996.
Mansour, Camille. Beyond Alliance: Israel and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Masalha, Nur. Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “transfer in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestinian Studies, 1992.
Massalha, Omar. Towards the Long-Promised Peace. London: Saqi Books, 1994.
Mattar, Philip. The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin Al Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement. London: Saqi Books, 1994.
Mendelsohn, Everett. A Compassionate Peace: A Future for Israel, Palestine and the Middle East. Revised ed. (A Report Prepared for the American Friends Service Committee.) New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989.
Morris, Benny. 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
________. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.Slow, difficult reading–mostly because Morris methodically covers how each city, town and village in Palestine was emptied during the 1948-49. It is an important and valuable work, because Morris works almost entirely from primary sources and manages to demonstrate that the flight of the Palestinian refugees was a complex process, and differed in circumstance from region to region. The book is written from an Israeli perspective (One is still left with the feeling that Morris viewed all the unpleasantness as a sad necessity), but he does not cover up the atrocities that occurred as a result of the war, and he successfully demonstrates the effect that Israeli war propaganda had in hardening the hearts of the Israeli public. For people looking for an easier read, I recommend Segev.
________. Israel’s Border Wars. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
________ and Black, Ian. Israel’s Secret Wars: A History of Israel’s Intelligence Service. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991. It would be good to read this in conjunction with Curtiss’s book, because the attitude toward Israel’s wars is written from an entirely different perspective. I realized after a while that what bothered me about Morris’s book was that it did not really touch on the motivations behind the Arab countries’ attacks on Israel. It seems that Morris depends as much on interviews as he does on documents, which of course, accounts for part of this perspective. Appreciated his comment at the end that in a perfect world, intelligence would be used for making peace with enemies instead of making war.
Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. I read Avi Shlaim’s Iron Wall, shortly after finishing this comprehensive history and Morris seems so ponderous by comparison. I had to renew his book six times to finish it. Morris is upfront about telling readers that he writes from an Israeli perspective because he has more access to Israeli sources. An interesting review of the book in the March 13 issue of the Jerusalem Report says this is no excuse. Morris could have sought the help of Arabic speakers to read Arab sources. I was a little taken aback by his casual references to the Israeli attacks on the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967 and on the U.N. headquarters at Kafr Kana in 1995 as regrettable accidents, without mentioning that there is considerable international controversy over whether these attacks were accidental. Still, the book covers a large swathe of history and helps the reader to put the Israeli-Palestinian within a largely demythologized framework.
Muhawi, Ibrhaim Sharif Kanaana. Speak Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Murphy, Jay, ed. For Palestine. New York and London: Writers and Readers, 1994.
Neff, Donald. Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy Towards Palestine and Israel since 1945. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995.
________. Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days That Changed the Middle East. New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1984.
Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. Novick believes that the paradox of the Holocaust becoming a focal point in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s instead of in the 50’s and 60’s, can be explained by the waning international and American support of Israel. ( Novick notes that most Vietnam movies and books came out within 10 years after the war.) Some interesting tidbits: the article on the Mufti of Jerusalem in the 4 volume Encyclopedia of the Holocaust is twice as long as the articles on Goebbels and Goering and four times as long as the article on Himmler. One rabbi’s explanation why the Holocaust has become the focal point of American Jewry: God and Israel are too controversial. (9/99.)
Nye, Naomi Shibab. Sitti’s Secrets. New York: Four Winds Press, 1994. A beautifully illustrated picture book about a young American girl’s visit to her grandmother in Palestine. The political message is very subtle, but probably all the more effective because of the subtlety.
Orr, Akiva. Israel: Politics Myths and Identity crises. London: Pluto Press, 1994.
Ostrovsky, Victor and Claire Hoy. By Way of Deception. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. I read this book in Haiti, little knowing that some day I would have to deal with the mentality Ostrovsky describes in the book. I imagine the blatant immorality that characterizes the Mossad isn’t all that different from that which characterizes the CIA or other espionage outfits.
________. The Other Side of Deception. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Reads like a novel and includes a lot of stuff he felt he couldn’t include in the first book, e.g., that the Mossad was planning to assassinate Bush at Madrid and blame it on the Palestinians and that Israel has used Palestinians and black South Africans as guinea pigs in medical experiments.
Oz, Amos. In the Land of Israel. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983. Most interesting of these essays are those which contain conversations with IsraelisÑOriental Jews, West Bank settlersÑwho view kibbutzniks like Oz as one of the enemy. An interesting look at the factions into which Israelis are divided.
________. Israel, Palestine and Peace. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1994. A collection of essays. While Oz does not fully appreciate the hardships under which most Palestinians live, he does a lot better than most Israelis. He concludes his introduction with, “Ultimately these pages were written by an Israeli who fought for his country and who loves it, even during dark times when he was unable to like it. I have never maintained that Ôright or wrongÑI must stand up for my country’; I have often felt that my country will survive and prosper only if it does right.”
________. The Slopes of Lebanon. Trans. Maurie Goldberg-Bartura, 1989. I liked this collection of essays better than the 1994 collection (but a lot happened between the publishing dates of both books, so maybe Oz grew more cynical.) Two of the most insightful essays in the book are “Hebrew Melodies,” (in which Oz describes how Lebanon might be conquered in the same way the West Bank was) and “The Heart of Fear.”
Palumbo, Michael. The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from Their Homeland. London: Quartet Books, 1987.
Pappé, Ilan. The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951. London: I.B. Tauris, 1994.
Parker, Richard B. The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Peck, Juliana S. The Reagan Administration and the Palestinian Question. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestinian Studies, 1984.
Peretz, Don. Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising. Boulder: Westview Press, 1990.
Perlmutter, Nathan and Ruth Ann. The Real Anti-Semitism in America. New York: Arbor House, 1982. After noting that surveys show that liberal Protestants have fewer anti-semitic attitudes but are more critical of Israel and that Fundamentalist Protestants have more anti-semitic attitudes but support Israel, the Perlmutters do NOT conclude that anti-semitism and criticism of Israel are not the same thing. Rather, they conclude that liberal Protestants are secretly more anti-semitic and fundamentalists are secretly less anti-semitic.
Peters, Joan. From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. I have actually not read this as of 8/9/99, but have read lots about it. It is notorious as an example of pro-Israeli propaganda. People to whom I have submitted this bibliography for input have shuddered upon seeing this work cited. The best source for discussion of this book may be found in Finkelstein’s Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (See above.)
Prior, Michael. The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique. England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997.
Quandt, William B. Peace Process: American Diplomacy amd the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 1993.
________, Fudad Jaber and Ann Mosely. The Politics of Palestinian Nationalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
Ragen, Naomi. Jephte’s Daughter. New York: Warner Books, 1989.
I read the Ragen books on the recommendation of a Canadian-Israeli peace activist. Each of them sensitively addresses the dilemmas that Orthodox Jewish women face when their faith collides with the modern world. As novels, they are excellent. When one reads them from a political perspective, one sees how it is possible for many Israelis and American Jews to be good people and at the same time totally ignorant of and unsympathetic to the struggles of Palestinian families.
________. The Sacrifice of Tamar. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
________. Sotah. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
Raheb, Mitri. I Am a Palestinian Christian. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.
Raviv, Dan and Melman, Yossi. Every Spy a Prince: The COmplete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
________. Friends Indeed: Inside the U.S.-Israel Alliance. New York: Hyperion, 1994.
Reuther, Rosemary Radford and Ellis, Marc. eds. Beyond Occupation: American Jewish, Christian and Palestinian Voices for Peace. Good selection of essays from people of a variety of religious backgrounds more interested in human rights and ethics than in nationalism.
Reuther, Rosemary Radford and Herman J. The Wrath of Jonah: Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli Palestinian Conflict. New York: Harper and Row, 1989. Good background reading for people who don’t know a lot about the roots of the conflictÑbiblical and historical. Christians who wish to atone for the anti-semitic history of the church, but who also abhor Israeli policy toward the Palestinians will find the Reuthers to be helpful allies.
Rice, Michael. False Inheritance: Israel in Palestine and the Search for a Solution. London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 1994.
Roberts, Samuel J. Party and Policy in Israel: The Battle Between Hawks and Doves. Boulder: Westview Press, 1990.
*Rokach, Livia. Israel’s Sacred Terrorism: A Study based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary and Other Documents. Belmont, MA: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1986. In Rokach’s introduction to this 49 page monograph, she writes, “…Sharett’s Diary is potentially devastating to Zionist propaganda as the Pentagon Papers were in regard to U.S. aggression in Vietnam.” I agree. Sadly, it seems to have had little impact on Zionist mythology here in the U.S.
Rosenwasser, Penny. Voices from the Promised Land: Palestinian and Israeli Peace Activists Speak Their Hearts. East Haven, CT: Curbstone Press, 1992.
Roth, Philip. The Counterlife. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. Intriguing from a literary standpoint, this book also sheds some light on the relationship between American and Israeli Jews. The settler movement comes off looking pretty bad (Although Zuckerman, the narrator of these sections, is not the most appealing of characters either.) Because of the book’s literary structure, one could read the sections entitled, “Judea,” and “Aloft” for the purposes of better understanding Israeli-American Jewish relations and skip the rest of the book.
Rubenberg, Cheryl A. Israel and the American National Interest: A Critical Examination. Urbana; Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 1986.
Slow reading and heavily footnoted, this book covers a lot of the same territory as other revisionist histories of Israeli. However, she places this history in the context of her thesis, i.e., that America’s support for Israel has been detrimental to its interests.
She makes a couple geographic errors, e.g. putting Kafr Qassem in the West Bank.
Rubenstein, Danny. The People of Nowhere: The Palestinian Vision of Home. New York: Times Books, 1991.
Saba, Michael. The Armageddon Network. Vermont: Amana Books, 1984.
Sacco, Joe. Palestine: A Nation Occupied. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 1994. The comic book format brings the harsh reality of the occupation–especially the torture of administrative detaineesÑto life in the way that human rights releases cannot. Sacco also is able to capture the absurdities at work in Israel/Palestine better than most writers.
Said, Edward. and Christopher Hitchens. ed. Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. London, NY: Verso, 1988. Said, a Palestinian American and Hitchens, a journalist, examine and debunk “scholarly” propaganda that has had a large influence on Israeli and American public opinion. They make heavy use of Simha Flapan’s book.
________. Covering Islam How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981.
Said, Edward W. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. People looking for another polemic will be disappointed, because Said’s memoir is a deeply personal, intimate overview of his growing up in a dysfunctional family and never feeling like he belonged in Cairo, Jerusalem, the United States, or Lebanon. Given the lucid authority with which he writes on Israel/Palestine issues, however, I found his willingness to write about his insecurities courageous.
________. Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
________. The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self Determination 1969-1994. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. A collection of articulate essays that help to take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict off the Israeli-U.S. playing field and enable the reader to see the conflict from the viewpoint of a Palestinian American. I was especially intrigued by Said’s review of Friedmann’s Beirut to Jerusalem book which I had liked a lot.
________. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Savir, Uri. The Process: 1100 Days that Changed the Middle East. New York: Random House, 1998. A behind the scenes look at how the Oslo accords (and subsequent agreements) came about. Although Savir makes no apologies about negotiating a deal that was more beneficial for the Israelis than Palestinians, he presents the views of the Palestinian negotiators fairly. (Although he sometimes referred to what seemed to me perfectly reasonable demands by Palestinians as “polemical.”) Interestingly, he makes no mention of the negotiations that Ashrawi described in her book, This Side of Peace. Most useful for me was Savir’s exasperation with the the right wing’s insistence that Arafat has not annulled parts of the PLO covenant calling for Israel’s destruction. Savir states unequivocally that these portions were annulled in 1996.
Schiff, Ze’ev and Ya’ari. Intifada. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
________. Israel’s Lebanon War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
Schoenman, Ralph. The Hidden History of Zionism. Santa Barbara, CA: Veritas PRess, 1988.
Segal, Haggai. Dear Brothers: The West Bank Jewish Underground. Woodmere, NY: Beit Shamai Publications, Inc. Segal is unrepentant about his role in planting bombs in the cars of three West Bank Mayors. The book is a veritable orgy of self-adulation. The people involved with the bombings, the shoot out at Hebron University, planting bombs under five Arab buses, and plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock are depicted as misunderstood heroes. The most telling phrase in the book occurs when Segal refers to the group’s indictment: “Anyone reading it would have concluded that it referred to a violent gang bent on satisfying dark, sadistic impulses.”
Segev, Tom. 1949:The First Israelis. New York: Free, Press, 1986. Working almost entirely from primary sources such as Ben Gurion’s diaries and minutes from Knesset meetings, Segev, an Israeli, dispels a great many firmly entrenched myths about the creation of the State of IsraelÑespecially in regard to how the pre-state Zionists regarded the Palestinians. I was intrigued by the way that the Jewish immigrants from North Africa were received. It goes a long way toward explaining the current class system in Israel.
________. The Seventh Million: Israel and the Holocaust. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. Segev examines the actual reactions of pre-Israeli statehood Zionists to the slaughter of the Jews in Europe. He then examines how the refugees from the Holocaust were treated by Israelis and how the Holocaust has shaped Israeli politics since.
Sevela, Ephraim. Farewell, Israel. South Bend, IN: Gateway Editions, Ltd., 1977.
Shahak, Israel. Jewish History, Jewish Religion. London: Pluto Press, 1994. Shahak, an Israeli holocaust survivor gives a background of the Talmudic texts cited by the Israeli right wing to further a racist agenda. Also takes another look at the history of Jewish persecution. While I found the book valuable in trying to understand where the Hebron settlers were coming from, I agree with Jewish commentators that Shahak paints with too broad a brush stroke, esp. in his assertion that Jews involved in the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s were bereft of altruistic motives. Because he is looking to prove that Talmudic Judaism is racist, that’s what he finds. Other people who have looked for a universalistic Jewish defense of human rights can also find proof texts in the Talmud. It would be good to balance this book by reading Francine Klagsbrun’s.
________ and Norton Mezvinsky. Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. London and New York: Pluto Press, 1999.
Shaheen, Jack G. TV Arab. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1984. Discusses stereotypes of Arabs seen on TV.Unfortunately, the book is poorly organized. Shaheen drifts from tangent to tangent as he discusses shows that came from very different eras of television history. The book could have benefitted from some judicious editing. I found his conversations with TV producers enlightening, however.
Sheehan, Edward R.F. The Arabs, Israelis and Kissinger: A Secret History of American Diplomacy in the Middle East. New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1976
Shammas, Anton. Arabesques. (Fiction.) New York: Harper and Row, 1989.
Sheehan, Edward R.F., The Arabs, Israelis and Kissinger: A Secret History of American Diplomay in the Middle East. New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1976.
Shehadeh, Raja Occupier’s Law: Israel and the West Bank. Revised edition. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1988.
________. Samed: A Journal of a West Bank Palestinian. New York: Adama Books, 1984. Shehadeh brings the Catch-22 situation of the West Bank to life. This slim and readable book is the best I’ve read so far on what Palestinians living in the West Bank have to cope with on a day to day basis. Highly recommended.
________. The Sealed Room: Selections from the Diary of a Palestinian Living Under Israeli Occupation, September 1990-August, 1991. London: Quartet, 1992.
Shlaim, Avi. Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, The Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
________. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. W.W. Norton and Company, 2000. This is one of the most readable general histories of the Israeli-Arab conflict I’ve read. Benny Morris’s Righteous Victims suffers in comparison. Although Shlaim is considered a “revisionist” historian (meaning he uses primary sources regarding the formation of the state of Israel instead of cultivated propaganda), this book is still definitely written from an Israeli perspective. He sees immense differences between Labor and Likud’s philosophies, whereas from a Palestinian perspective, they’ve lost just as much land and been treated with just as much contempt under Labor than they have under Likud. On the other hand, having lived and worked in Hebron during the Rabin/Peres/Netanyahu years, I have to say his coverage of that period of time rings true to me. (6/2000)
________. The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionists and Palestine, 1921-1951. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
________. War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History. New York: Penguin, 1995.
________. War and Peace in the Middle East: A Critique of American Policy. New York: New York: Whittle Books in Association with Viking, 1994.
*Shonfeld, Reb Moshe. The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals. Brooklyn, NY: Neturei Karta of U.S.A., 1977. A lot of the same material can be found in Segev’s The Seventh Million, but Shonfeld highlights the confrontation between Jewish Orthodoxy and the Zionists. Part of the deep, deep anger expressed in this slim volume relates to the accusation by the Zionists that the passivity of ultra-Orthodox Jews allowed the Holocaust to happen. Shonfeld shows how at every stage in the Holocaust, Jews in Europe could have been saved through concerted international efforts, but the Zionists quashed these efforts in order to ensure that escaping Jews would go to Palestine only.
Shorris, Earl. Jews Without Mercy: a Lament. New York, Garden City: Anchor Press, 1982. Shorris attacks the Jewish spokesmen for the neoconservative movement, focussing in part on their unflinching support of Israel despite the war in Lebanon. Poetic and moving.
Sprinzak, Ehud. The Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. The title is self-explanatory. I found this book very helpful as I sought to understand the variations in rightwing ideology among the settlers of Kiryat Arba and Hebron. Many of the Hebron settlers with whom we had the most contact are heavily featured in the book. There are some inaccuracies about the Palestinian reality in Hebron (e.g. he calls Hebron University an “Islamic college”), but they are minor.
________. Brother Against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination. New York: The Free Press, 1999.
What I found most helpful in this book was the analysis of the circumstances that led to the Rabin assassination and his “short introduction to the Study of Political Violence” at the end, which has a much broader application. Not as engrossing as Karpin and Freedman’s book, and apparently he gives Eyal more credence than they did, but all in all, a worthwhile read. 8/99
Stone, Robert. Damascus Gate. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998. This book is everything that Kellerman’s Butcher’s Theatre is not. Sensitive to ambiguity and coldly realistic about most of the actors in the ongoing drama of Israel and Palestine. While the perspective is more Israeli/American than it is Palestinian, it is at least the perspective of Israelis we don’t hear much in North America. Pretty darn good thriller to boot.
Suleiman, Michael W., ed. U.S. Policy on Palestine from Wilson to Clinton. Normal, IL: AAUG, 1995.
Tack, Deane, A. Thorns of Resistance. Oregon: Destra Publishers, 1985.
Tawil, Raymonda Hawa. My Home, My Prison. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979. Tawil spends as much time talking about her oppression under patriarchal Palestinian society as she does about oppression under Israeli occupation. The story of her life highlights the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian relationships. She can cheer on the Palestinian guerrillas while at the same time speak fondly of her Jewish schoolmates in Haifa and Israeli journalist friends. Her friendships with Israelis led to her ostracism from Palestinians whose cause she was championing against their Israeli enemies!
Tessler, Mark. A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Bloomington: Indiana United Press, 1994.
Tillman, Seth P. The United States in the Middle East: Interests and Obstacles. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982.
Timerman, Jacobo. The Longest War: Israel in Lebanon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. A heartbreaking book. Timerman, who lost family in the Holocaust and who was imprisoned and tortured in Argentina, emigrated to Israel in 1979. Although he had been brought up to believe certain Zionist myths, he could not help but recognize fascism and oppression when he saw it. His anguish is authentic.
________. Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. Because his book on the Lebanese War moved me so much, I wanted to read his book about his incarceration and torture in Argentina. I understand The Longest War better now. Mythical Zionism was part of the hopes and dreams that sustained him through his imprisonment. When he saw what Zionism meant in the context of Israel, Palestine and the Lebanese war, no wonder his heart was broken.
Tivnan, Edward. The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Tivnan traces the origins of AIPAC and analyzes the American Jewish community’s relationship with Israel. He deems both dysfunctional. Also an interesting look at how deals are made in our government generally.
Tobin, Maurine and Robert Tobin [eds]. How Long o Lord? Christian, Jewish and Muslim Voices from the Ground and Visions for the Future in Israel/Palestine. Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 2002.
Turki, Fawaz. The Disinherited. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. A bit more history in this one than the others. All three of his books cited here cover the period from his childhood through adulthood, but in each one the perspective is a little different, and the stories and memories are different. I started with his latest book, below, and found it fascinating to see how each decade subtly shifted his outlook, and how each shift seemed to make a different set of memories relevant in each book. One thing that remains constant throughout each book is that his resentment at how Arab regimes have treated Palestinians surpasses the resentment he feels toward Israelis.
________. The Exile’s Return: The Making of a Palestinian-American. New York: The Free Press, 1994. A gritty biographical work of Turki’s struggle with the conventions of Palestinian society and his own personal demons–many of which were probably born as a result of his horrific childhood in a Beirut refugee camp. I have yet to read a book by either a Palestinian or Israeli that is as relentlessly self-critical or as critical of Palestinian culture and leaders. He has coined a phrase, “neobackwardness,” to describe the current Palestinian leadership.
________. Soul in Exile: Lives of a Palestinian Revolutionary. Monthly Review Press, 1988. In this book, he speaks of his sister Jasmine getting married, while in the later book, he tells of his brother killing her to avenge the family honor.
Usher, Graham. Palestine in Crisis: The Struggle for Peace and Political Independence After Oslo. London: Pluto Press, 1995.
Viorst, Milton. Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.
________. Sands of Sorrow: Israel’s Journey from Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Wagner, Donald. Anxious for Armageddon: A Call to Partnership for Middle Eastern and Western Christians. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1995. Wagner’s opening anecdote about his experience in Beirut while the Israelis bombed it is profoundly moving. I was hoping for a bit more head on tackling of the Christian Zionist movement, but Halsell’s book is a better bet for this.
Wallach, John and Janet Wallach. Still Small Voices: The Untold Human Stories Behind the Violence in the West Bank and Gaza. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.
Walvoord, John F. Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis: What the Bible Says About the Future of the Middle East and the End of Western Civilization. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990.
Wheatcroft, Geoffrey. The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma. Reading, MA, et al.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1996. I understood a lot more of the social forces in Europe that led to Zionism after reading this book. Of necessity, Wheatcroft does not do as thorough a job of analyzing the forces that led to Jews emigrating from Arab countries or indeed what actually has been happening in Israel and Palestine in the past decade, and certainly does not make much of an attempt to view things through Palestinian eyes. However, the book would have been three times as long if he had.
Wilentz, Amy. Martyr’s Crossing: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Wilentz is a journalist whose writing about Hebron in the Nation I have appreciated. The kernel of this story involves a child who dies of an asthma attack at the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah and the fall-out afterwards. Told from the viewpoints of his mother, a Palestinian-American, his grandfather, a character obviously based on Edward Said, and the soldier at the checkpoint (among others), it really does capture some of the complexity of the relationships between Israelis and Palestinians. My one quibble with the book has to do with the fact there is no “ordinary” Palestinian viewpoint, like those of the “ordinary” soldier and his mother. Wilentz has obviously spent more time among Israelis than she has among Palestinians, but she nonetheless pushes the boundaries of the discussion of the conflict beyond what one normally finds at a major publisher. (3/2001)
Winternitz, Helen. A Season of Stones: Living in a Palestinian Village. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991. Winternitz chronicles the months she spent living in the Palestinian village of Nahalin during the Intifada. While the 21st chapter is the most dramatic, detailing as it does a massacre of villagers by the border police, what struck me was her description of the slow strangulation of the village by surrounding settlements–something that still continues as of this writing (8/98.)
Woolfson, Marion. Bassam Shak’a: A Portrait of a Palestinian. London: Third World Centre, 1981.
________. Prophets in Babylon: Jews in the Arab World. London: Faber and Faber, 1980.
Yermiya, Dov. My War Diary: Lebanon June 5-July 1, 1982. Boston: South End Press, 1983. Yermiya exemplifies the old line Kibbutznik Zionist attitude that was slightly patronizing to Arabs but in general wished to live as good neighbors with them. The book is valuable in that we see the horror of what the IDF did to civilians in Lebanon through the eyes of a career military man. At times I felt a little uneasy about his self-proclaimed heroicism and his repeated assertions of how much Arabs like him. He also never refers to Palestinian guerrillas as anything other than terrorists. Given the alternatives though, it is a shame there were not more soldiers in Lebanon like him.
Young, Ronald J. Missed Opportunities for Peace: U.S. Middle East Policy 1981-86. Philadelphia: American Friends Service Commitee, 1987.
Zahran, Yasmin. A Beggar at Damascus Gate. (Fiction.) Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 1995.
Zukerman, William. Voice of Dissent: Jewish Problems, 1948-1961. New York: Devin-Adair, 1945.
