It’s important to note that I am not an expert. However, I do have a background in history, philosophy, politics, and international relations, as well as relevant cursory knowledge to draw upon. For the past month or so I have been reading as widely as possible. More importantly, I have – to the best of my ability – been carefully selecting sources from different perspectives and trying to understand the people and debates. Because the online space seems bereft of reasonable longform analysis, I have decided to list what I’ve been reading here with a few comments. I will continue to add to it.

I’ve organised it loosely into books and longform articles. I will add some films, too.

Books

Abdel Monem Said Aly, Khalīl Shiqāqī, and Shai Feldman, Israelis and Arabs: Conflict and Peacemaking the Middle East
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/arabs-and-israelis-9781350321380/

The best general academic overview I’ve come across. Detailed and sensitive to different narratives. I think is a long but invaluable starting point. The authors go through the more important historical moments, then present narratives that are commonly held, for example, in Palestine, in Israel, in Arab States, or in the US, etc. The authors then attempt a short analysis comparing each.

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hundred-Years-War-Palestine/dp/178125933X

Rashid Khalidi is probably the most well-known Palestinian-American historian working today. He is a professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. This is a morally charged narrative history which foregrounds Zionism as a settler-colonial movement, and the displacement of the Palestian people. It’s forceful, well-received but not without its critics, and concludes to the continuing marginalisation of the Palestinians in Oslo Accords.

This NYTimes review is worth reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/books/review/the-hundred-years-war-on-palestine-rashid-khalidi.html

Ari Shavit, My Promised Land
https://www.amazon.co.uk/My-Promised-Land-Triumph-Tragedy/dp/0385521707

If you think of early Zionists as ‘evil’ colonists and occupiers, then this book is a useful corrective. It highlights the contradictions, romanticism, idealism, persecution, and naivety that motivated Zionists fleeing Europe in the late 19^th century and on. Drawing on Shavit’s own family history, it’s movingly and personally written. Shavit asks how his well-intention Zionists moving excitedly to Palestine to build new lives did not see the people already there. Or maybe did not care.

Alpaslan Özerdem, Roger Mac Ginty, Comparing Peace Processes
https://www.routledge.com/Comparing-Peace-Processes/Ozerdem-Ginty/p/book/9781138218970

The relevant chapter is a good summary of the peace process since the Oslo Accords and concludes compellingly how one-sided the peace process has been.

Benny Morris, 1948 and After
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/1948-and-after-9780198279297

Benny Morris is one the ‘new historians’ who challenged the traditional historical narrative in Israel. This is a good introduction to the debates and historiography that surround the 1948 war and beyond. The 1948 moment is probably the most crucial in understanding what motivates both the Israeli right and Palestinians, in particular.

Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beirut-Jerusalem-Thomas-L-Friedman/dp/1250034418

I have only just started this, but Friedman is widely regarded to be one of the best authors on the Middle East, spending many years living and reporting from both Beirut and Jerusalem. The preface alone is the best introduction I’ve read to the complex politics, relationships, and wars of the surrounding countries, particularly in Lebanon. It gives you a good sense of the complexity of the entire region.

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/israel-lobby-and-us-foreign-policy

Walt and Mearsheimer s influential claim that AIPAC has a disproportionate influence on foreign policy, which they argued would be much more effectively directed elsewhere. There is the paper and the latter book.

Asima Ghazi-Bouillon, Understanding the Middle-East Peace Process
https://www.routledge.com/Understanding-the-Middle-East-Peace-Process-Israeli-Academia-and-the-Struggle/Ghazi-Bouillon/p/book/9780415853200

This book also focuses on the new historians, but also the wider academic context in Israel, looking at concepts like ‘post-Zionism’ – that Zionism is over, has fulfilled its goals, and should be superseded. And ‘neo-Zionism’ – that new battles over things like demographics have begun. It is quite dense, drawing on philosophy and theory to think through the different discourses. But is a useful frame if you want to understand how Israeli academia has concrete effects on what happens.

Avi Shlaim, Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, and Refutations
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2094-israel-and-palestine

A broad and accessible overview of the history from the Balfour Declaration on, including discussions of the different debates in the historiography, especially on the most contentious moments.

Longform articles

Haaretz, A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-20/ty-article-opinion/.premium/a-brief-history-of-the-netanyahu-hamas-alliance/0000018b-47d9-d242-abef-57ff1be90000

Makes the case that the Netanyahu government and Hamas benefit from each other.

A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

A thorough 200+ page report by Human Rights Watch describes how, by the ICC’s own definitions, the Israeli government is pursuing policies that can be described as Apartheid in the West Bank by among other things, restricting freedom of movement and assembly, denying building permits for Palestinians but not Israelis, controlling water supplies, denying right of return for Palestinians and not Israelis, and effectively ruling over two-tier society.

Avi Shlaim, The War of the Israeli Historians
https://users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc0005/The%20War%20of%20the%20Israeli%20Historians.html#:~:text=This%20war%20is%20between%20the,years%20of%20conflict%20and%20confrontation.

A good introduction to a civil ‘war’ within Israel between two interpretations of the country.

Shlaim writes ‘this war is between the traditional Israeli historians and the ‘new historians’ who started to challenge the Zionist rendition of the birth of Israel and of the subsequent fifty years of conflict and confrontation’.

He continues, ‘the revisionist version maintains, in a nutshell, that Britain’s aim was to prevent the establishment not of a Jewish state but of a Palestinian state; that the Jews outnumbered all the Arab forces, regular and irregular, operating in the Palestine theatre and, after the first truce, also outgunned them; that the Palestinians, for the most part, did not choose to leave but were pushed out; that there was no monolithic Arab war aim because the Arab rulers were deeply divided among themselves; and that the quest for a political settlement was frustrated more by Israeli than by Arab intransigence.’

New Yorker, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of Chaos
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/27/itamar-ben-gvir-israels-minister-of-chaos

A good primer on the far-right in Israel.

More

I haven’t examined it in detail, but this reading list from UCLA looks useful: https://www.international.ucla.edu/israel/article/270276