Palestine: essential reading list

31 August 2010

Blog

One of our volunteers asked us the other day to recommend key books for someone wanting to learn more about Palestine. For anyone seeking a first guide, Ben White’s Israeli Apartheid (Pluto Press, 2009) gives a good overview and set of sources. Here’s a dozen of the works I’ve found most useful – from a variety of perspectives – plus a couple that I haven’t read yet but will be doing shortly. What have I left out? Do use the comments facility below to add to the list, and we will then be able to put up a more comprehensive compilation later.

General

Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (Random House, 1992 edition)

Ghada Karmi, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine (Pluto Press, 2007)

Mazin Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine (Pluto Press, forthcoming, 2010)

Edward Said, After the Last Sky (Vintage, 1993 edition), with photographs by Jean Mohr

Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (Profile Books, 2008)

Greg Philo & Mike Berry, Bad News from Israel (Pluto Press, 2004)

Michael Palumbo, Imperial Israel: The History of the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (Bloomsbury, 1992 edition)

Colin Shindler, The Land Beyond Promise: Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream (IB Tauris, 2002 edition)

Historical

Walid Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876-1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1984)

Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006)

Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992)

Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (Stanford University Press, 1999 edition)

Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917-1929  (Blackwell, 1991 edition)

Naomi Shepherd, Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine, 1917-1948 (J Murray, 1999)

Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2009)