After Hamas’s brutal assault on Israel and amid Israel’s “complete siege” and bombardment of Gaza, we found ourselves revisiting books that offer unique insights into the history and politics of Israel-Palestine. Below, Foreign Policy staff and contributors recommend books that examine, among other subjects, the rise of Hamas, the innerworkings of Israeli intelligence, and the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The books’ authors represent a wide range of perspectives, from a renowned Palestinian American historian to the former Israeli ambassador to the United States.
The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977
Gershom Gorenberg (Holt Paperbacks, 480 pp., $29.99, March 2007, paperback)
Gershom Gorenberg’s history of the early settler movement was published in 2006—one year after then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement” from Gaza and the year that Hamas won a Palestinian legislative election, eventually leading to intra-Palestinian violence and Hamas’s seizure of the strip. Since that time, settlements in the West Bank have ballooned as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s successive governments have indulged the right-wing settler movement and brought its leaders into the inner sanctum of power.
Gorenberg, an Israeli historian and journalist, takes readers back much further, to the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel seized massive amounts of territory from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria but refrained from formally annexing most of it. In captivating and engaging prose, he details how the Israeli left played a central role in the expansion of settlements after the war—even if, as he argues, it was the absence of a coherent policy rather than overt decisions that allowed religious settlers to build on occupied Palestinian land while Washington mostly looked the other way. When the right came to power, led by Menachem Begin in 1977, the settlement enterprise was turbocharged by an explicitly ideological religious-nationalist agenda—increasing the settler population from 4,000 to more than 100,000 by the time of the Oslo peace process in 1993.
Thirty years ago there was still some hope for a two-state solution; but in the years since the book was published the settler population has doubled from roughly 250,000 in 2007 to more than 500,000 today while Hamas grows more violent and senior members of the Israeli government ignore Palestinian aspirations for a sovereign state and unapologetically advocate annexation. To understand when and how many of today’s problems began, The Accidental Empire is essential reading.
—Sasha Polakow-Suransky, FP deputy editor
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan Books, 272 pp., $29.99, October 2023)
Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama paints an intricate picture of life under Israeli occupation through the prism of a horrid 2012 traffic accident on the outskirts of Jerusalem that left a permanent scar on the Palestinian psyche.
Thrall, a journalist and former director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, reconstructs the day that a bus carrying Palestinian kindergarteners collided with a truck and burst into flames, leaving six children and one teacher dead. Due to the geography of occupation, emergency services were late to arrive—Israeli responders from the illegal settlements in the West Bank nearby took a while to locate the site of the accident, while Palestinian responders were stuck at bottlenecks due to Israeli checkpoints.
The narrative centers on Abed Salama as he spends the day looking for his 5-year-old son, Milad, one of the children taken to different hospitals, and eventually learns that Milad has died. But Thrall, who has also written a 2017 book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, also highlights how the structural inequality and oppression Palestinians have long faced at the hands of the Israeli military contributed to the scale of the calamity. He weaves analysis, history, and personal stories of individuals on both sides of the Green Line to explain the greater tragedy of the holy land.
—Dalia Hatuqa, FP contributor
Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
Sara Roy (Pluto Press, 408 pp., $37, October 2006, paperback)
To understand the deeper origins of the brutal violence claiming the lives of Israelis as well as Palestinians in Gaza, I can think of no better place to start than Sara Roy’s Failing Peace. In careful but compassionate prose, Roy, a political economist, chronicles the systematic immiseration of Gaza, the devastating consequences on the people trapped there, and the failed peace process that has enabled Hamas to endure and attract support.
The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Roy writes with a keen sensitivity to the plight of people suffering under oppression and with a powerful moral commitment to finding justice for Palestinians and Israelis alike. The tale she tells is a bleak one, and it is even more troubling to reflect on how much the situation in Gaza has deteriorated in the years since her book was published.
—Stephen M. Walt, FP columnist
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
Jimmy Carter (Simon & Schuster, 288 pp., $16, September 2007, paperback)
Decades before some of the world’s leading human rights organizations began to label Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “apartheid,” former U.S. President Jimmy Carter made the same assessment in a landmark 2006 book. Carter, who helped broker the 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, has long been committed to the idea that all people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea deserve to live with dignity.
Palestine is equal parts a memoir of Carter’s involvement in the Middle East peace process and a history of why it has failed. Carter places most of the blame on Israel and its leadership, committed more to furthering a ballooning settlement enterprise than negotiating in good faith with Palestinians. Though much has transpired since the book’s publication—Gaza, most notably, has been taken over by Hamas and strangled by a 16-year Israeli blockade—it remains an accessible and foundational text on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
—Allison Meakem, FP associate editor
Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, From Balfour to Trump
Khaled Elgindy (Brookings Institution Press, 345 pp., $28, April 2019)
So much analysis of the failures of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process understandably focuses on how Washington’s close relationship with Israel has influenced negotiations and U.S. policy over the years. Yet there’s another critical element to the story that gets less attention: the U.S. relationship with and approach toward the Palestinians and their leaders.
Khaled Elgindy’s book, Blind Spot, seeks to fill that gap. Elgindy served as an advisor to the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah on permanent status negotiations with Israel from 2004 to 2009 and thus had a front-row seat to Washington’s peacemaking efforts. His book provides a deeply researched historical examination of how U.S.-Palestinian relations shaped the peace process over the decades and contributed to the crisis of Palestinian leadership we see today.
—Jennifer Williams, FP deputy editor
Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations
Ronen Bergman (Random House, 784 pp., $35, January 2018)
The gruesome Hamas attacks on Israel that sparked the current war punched a giant hole in the reputation of Israel’s vaunted military and intelligence services. How could one of the world’s most capable national security apparatuses be caught by surprise? We’re still piecing together the answers, but there’s important context in the past. In Rise and Kill First, veteran Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman sheds a spotlight on the dark corners of Israeli intelligence, including its targeted assassination programs aimed at keeping Hamas and other enemies of Israel on the backfoot.
Bergman looks at Israeli intelligence’s historic triumphs and botched operations and examines how Israeli policymakers came to rely on assassinations as a “quick fix” for complex strategic problems—with predictably mixed results, including helping to embolden and foster more extreme militant groups. He doesn’t lose sight of the grim moral quandaries or human toll of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, either, and the result is a book that offers foreboding insights into how the current war may play out.
—Robbie Gramer, FP’s diplomacy and national security reporter
Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination
Adam Shatz (Verso, 368 pp., $34.95, May 2023)
A recent collection of essays by the excellent writer Adam Shatz doesn’t center specifically on Israel and the Palestinians but does include several profiles related to the region that are unusually insightful. Writers and Missionaries focuses on intellectuals across a broad spectrum, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Richard Wright to Jacques Derrida. But it’s the four opening pieces that touch on the Middle East and set the tone for the rest of the book.
The most impressive of them is a deeply reported work about the life and death of the actor Juliano Mer-Khamis, whose hybrid identity (his mother was Israeli and his father Palestinian) made him a personification of the conflict—and eventually a target for people on both sides. That one alone is worth the price of the book.
—Dan Ephron, FP executive editor, podcasts
Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East
Michael B. Oren (Oxford University Press, 480 pp., $54, June 2002)
Michael B. Oren, a U.S.-born historian who later became Israel’s ambassador in Washington, wrote arguably the best one-volume history of the Six-Day War in 1967 that planted many of the seeds of the current conflict in Israel and the broader region. “Rarely in modern times has so short and localized a conflict had such prolonged, global consequences,” he writes in Six Days of War. He offers an hour-by-hour, riveting account of what created the climate ahead of the war, the dramatic opening hours, and its seismic impact on the shape of Israel and the region today.
—Keith Johnson, FP deputy editor
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017
Rashid Khalidi (Metropolitan Books, 336 pp., $30, January 2020)
Rashid Khalidi approaches Palestine’s history from a unique perspective: He is not only one of the foremost historians of the Middle East but also the descendant of a mayor of Ottoman-era Jerusalem. In his provocative, beautifully written The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Khalidi leans on both archival research and personal experience to “help recover some of what has thus far been airbrushed out of the history.” What unfolds is part scholarly narrative, part family history—a deeply personal yet sweeping account of the past century from a Palestinian American point of view that reassesses the roots of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
—Chloe Hadavas, FP associate editor
Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel
Dan Ephron (W. W. Norton & Company, 320 pp., $16.95, October 2016, paperback)
FP’s Dan Ephron has written one of the best books on the rise of the Israeli far right. In Killing a King, Ephron traces the radicalization of Yigal Amir, the right-wing extremist who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a 1995 pro-peace rally in support of the Oslo Accords. Ephron also recounts Rabin’s personal and political machinations during the Oslo years.
Ephron’s interwoven tale covers many critical paradigm shifts in Israel, Palestine, and the world in the post-Oslo period, including the rise of now-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the decline of the Israeli left. The book is a chilling page-turner—and required reading for anyone interested in understanding how Israel ended up with its most extremist, right-wing government to date.
—Allison Meakem, FP associate editor
Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.