Hi Page Turners,
Books for me allow me to make sense of the world. It also acts as an escapism and a comfort to allow me to switch off. I have been wanting to do this post for a while and because I admittedly haven’t read that many books on Palestine I felt I wasn’t in a position to recommend books. However I want this post to reach those who don’t know where to start, I will be recommending books that I have read and those that are on my to-be-read pile.
I remember someone telling to me read books by people whose perspective is different from yours and to listen to voices that I haven’t heard before and are not being heard. With the war in Israel and Palestine this advice has never come at more of an important time does this make sense one of my favourite writers Jeanette Winterson says ‘Language is a finding place, not a hiding place’.
Books are a tool of education but it also allows hope for amplifying voices that are not being heard and breaking barriers to understand the situation better. So below are my recommendations and as always please comment if you have any books you would also like to add to the list and please share so it reaches those who can benefit from the list.
The books chosen are books that offer insights into Israel and Palestine’s past and present and are both non-fiction and fiction. I have chosen ones that can educate you on the history and ones that center around the human experience of people living/displaced/immigrated and the stories of their homes.
Goodreads list- https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/71950525-fiz-substack-link-in-bio?shelf=palestinian-lit
Out of It by Selma Dabbagh
Gaza is being bombed. Rashid - a young, clever Palestinian - has been smoking grass on the roof watching it happen when he gets the e-mail he has been desperate he's won a scholarship to London. Rashid's sister, Iman, frustrated by the atrocities and inaction around her, is beginning to take an interest in an Islamic resistance group. Sabri, their intellectual older brother, is working on a history of Palestine from his wheelchair while their mother pickles vegetables and feuds with the neighbours. Out of It follows the lives of Rashid and Iman as they try to forge places for themselves in the midst of occupation, the growing divide between Palestinian factions, and the rise of fundamentalism. Written with extraordinary humanity and humour, and moving between Gaza, London and the Gulf, this book helps to re-define Palestine and its people.
Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman
The Talmud says: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” This instinct to take every measure, even the most aggressive, to defend the Jewish people is hardwired into Israel’s DNA. From the very beginning of its statehood in 1948, protecting the nation from harm has been the responsibility of its intelligence community and armed services, and there is one weapon in their vast arsenal that they have relied upon to thwart the most serious threats: Targeted assassinations have been used countless times, on enemies large and small, sometimes in response to attacks against the Israeli people and sometimes preemptively. In this page-turning, eye-opening book, journalist and military analyst Ronen Bergman offers a riveting inside account of the targeted killing programs—their successes, their failures, and the moral and political price exacted on the men and women who approved and carried out the missions.
Bergman has gained the exceedingly rare cooperation of many current and former members of the Israeli government, including Prime Ministers Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as high-level figures in the country’s military and intelligence services: the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), the Mossad (the world’s most feared intelligence agency), Caesarea (a “Mossad within the Mossad” that carries out attacks on the highest-value targets), and the Shin Bet (an internal security service that implemented the largest targeted assassination campaign ever, in order to stop what had once appeared to be unstoppable: suicide terrorism).
Including never-before-reported, behind-the-curtain accounts of key operations, and based on hundreds of on-the-record interviews and thousands of files to which Bergman has gotten exclusive access over his decades of reporting, Rise and Kill First brings us deep into the heart of Israel’s most secret activities. Bergman traces, from statehood to the present, the gripping events and thorny ethical questions underlying Israel’s targeted killing campaign, which has shaped the Israeli nation, the Middle East, and the entire world.
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
The twentieth century for Palestine and the Palestinians has been a century of denial of statehood, denial of nationhood and denial of history. The Hundred Years War on Palestine is Rashid Khalidi's powerful response. Drawing on his family archives, he reclaims the fundamental right of any to narrate their history on their own terms.Beginning in the final days of the Ottoman Empire, Khalidi reveals nascent Palestinian nationalism and the broad recognition by the early Zionists of the colonial nature of their project. Enemies and Neighbours Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Drawing on a wide range of sources - from declassified documents to oral testimonies and his own decades of reporting - Enemies and Neighbours brings much-needed perspective and balance to the long and unresolved struggle between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land. Beginning in the final years of Ottoman ruleand the British Mandate period, when Zionist immigration transformed Palestine in the face of mounting Arab opposition, the book re-examines the origins of what was a doomed relationship from the start. It sheds fresh light on critical events such as the Arab rebellion of the 1930s; Israel's independence and the Palestinian catastrophe (Nakba in Arabic) of 1948; the watershed of the 1967 war; two Intifadas; the Oslo Accords and Israel's shift to the right.
Evil Eye by Etaf Rum-
Raised in a conservative and emotionally volatile Palestinian family in Brooklyn, Yara thought she would finally feel free when she married a charming entrepreneur who took her to the suburbs. She’s gotten to follow her dreams, completing an undergraduate degree in Art and landing a good job at the local college. As a traditional wife, she also raises their two school-aged daughters, takes care of the house, and has dinner ready when her husband gets home. With her family balanced with her professional ambitions, Yara knows that her life is infinitely more rewarding than her own mother’s. So why doesn’t it feel like enough?
After her dream of chaperoning a student trip to Europe evaporates and she responds to a colleague’s racist provocation, Yara is put on probation at work and must attend mandatory counseling to keep her position. Her mother blames a family curse for the trouble she’s facing, and while Yara doesn’t really believe in old superstitions, she still finds herself growing increasingly uneasy with her mother’s warning and the possibility of falling victim to the same mistakes.
Shaken to the core by these indictments of her life, Yara finds her carefully constructed world beginning to implode. To save herself, Yara must reckon with the reality that the difficulties of the childhood she thought she left behind have very real—and damaging—implications not just on her own future but that of her daughters.
Against the Loveless World
Susan Abulhawa-
As Nahr sits, locked away in solitary confinement, she spends her days reflecting on the dramatic events that landed her in prison in a country she barely knows. Born in Kuwait in the 70s to Palestinian refugees, she dreamed of falling in love with the perfect man, raising children, and possibly opening her own beauty salon. Instead, the man she thinks she loves jilts her after a brief marriage, her family teeters on the brink of poverty, she’s forced to prostitute herself, and the US invasion of Iraq makes her a refugee, as her parents had been. After trekking through another temporary home in Jordan, she lands in Palestine, where she finally makes a home, falls in love, and her destiny unfolds under Israeli occupation.
The Beauty of Your Face
Sahar Mustafah
The Beauty of Your Face tells a uniquely American story in powerful, evocative prose. Afaf Rahman, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, is the principal of a Muslim school in the Chicago suburbs. One morning, a shooter—radicalized by the online alt-right—attacks the school. As Afaf listens to his terrifying progress, we are swept back through her memories, and into a profound and “moving” (Bustle) exploration of one woman’s life in a nation at odds with its ideals.
Salt Houses
Hala Alyan
On the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967.
Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus; Alia’s brother gets pulled into a politically militarized world he can’t escape; and Alia and her gentle-spirited husband move to Kuwait City, where they reluctantly build a life with their three children. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait in 1990, Alia and her family once again lose their home, their land, and their story as they know it, scattering to Beirut, Paris, Boston, and beyond. Soon Alia’s children begin families of their own, once again navigating the burdens (and blessings) of assimilation in foreign cities.
Lyrical and heartbreaking, Salt Houses is a remarkable debut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflict we might think we understand—one that asks us to confront that most devastating of all truths: you can’t go home again.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Ilan Pappé
Since the Holocaust, it has been almost impossible to hide large-scale crimes against humanity. In our communicative world, few modern catastrophes are concealed from the public eye. And yet, Ilan Pappe unveils, one such crime has been erased from the global public memory: the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948.
But why is it denied, and by whom? The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine offers an investigation of this mystery.
On Palestine
Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Frank Barat (Editor)
Operation Protective Edge, Israel's most recent assault on Gaza, left thousands of Palestinians dead and cleared the way for another Israeli land grab. The need to stand in solidarity with Palestinians has never been greater. Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky, two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, discuss the road ahead for Palestinians and how the international community can pressure Israel to end its human rights abuses against the people of Palestine. On Palestine is the sequel to their acclaimed book Gaza in Crisis.
The Question of Palestine
Edward W. Said
This original and deeply provocative book was the first to make Palestine the subject of a serious debate--one that remains as critical as ever. With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and an exile's passion (he is Palestinian by birth), Edward W. Said traces the fatal collision between two peoples in the Middle East and its repercussions in the lives of both the occupier and the occupied--as well as in the conscience of the West. He has updated this landmark work to portray the changed status of Palestine and its people in light of such developments as the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the intifada, the Gulf War, and the ongoing MIddle East peace initiative. For anyone interested in this region and its future, The Question of Palestine remains the most useful and authoritative account available.
I hope the list has helped you and given you an indicator on where to start and you can start educating yourself on the history of Palestine/Israel please share and screenshot this list so you can refer back to it.
Please continue to donate to Palestine as they still very much need our help and support with getting aid to them links are down below.
Tools for Palestine- https://toolsforpalestine.com/
Donate to Palestine- https://www.islamic-relief.org.uk/giving/appeals/palestine/?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiAxreqBhAxEiwAfGfndMpnUlYxLeyt6qgJaaCmHQMsCV6VYPw4ajq47P3ujWmtlJeWYWKFSRoC6egQAvD_BwE
With Love and Dua’s,
Fiz @Every Page She Turns.
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