Palestine History

An Improbable Friendship is the dual biography of Israeli Ruth Dayan, now 98, who was Moshe Dayan's wife for 37 years, and Palestinian journalist Raymonda Tawil, Yasser Arafat's mother-in-law, now 74. It reveals for the first time the two women's surprising and secret 40-year friendship and delivers the story of their extraordinary and turbulent lives growing up in a war-torn country.

Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial. How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.

A riveting memoir of the first Israeli-born Jewish American to be sent as a Peace Corps volunteer to a closed Arab society. A good memoir is a survivor's tale - the story of a person who has faced obstacles and made it through well enough to tell it. Dalya Cohen-Mor, a Sabra-born American woman, volunteered to serve in the Peace Corps, went through a lengthy and highly competitive application process, was accepted, and was sent to serve in the predominantly Palestinian country of Jordan.

Operation Protective Edge, launched in early July 2014, was the third major Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in six years. It was also the most deadly. By the conclusion of hostilities some seven weeks later, 2,200 of Gaza's population had been killed, and more than 10,000 injured. In this book, journalist Mohammed Omer, a resident of Gaza who lived through the terror of those days with his wife and then three-month-old son, provides a first-hand account of life on-the-ground during Israel's assault.

A Genocide Foretold confronts the stark realities of life under siege in Gaza and the heroic effort ordinary Palestinians are waging to resist and survive. Weaving together personal stories, historical context, and unflinching journalism, Chris Hedges provides an intimate portrait of systemic oppression, occupation, and violence.

In Israel and Civilization, syndicated columnist, legal scholar, and popular commentator Josh Hammer makes a righteous case that the key to the prosperity of the West is the flourishing of the Jewish people and the Jewish State of Israel. Hammer’s uplifting offense is our best defense against the enemies of the Jewish people, the Jewish state, and all the West. As Hammer makes clear, manifesting the promise of Israel requires action by the United States and its allies.

In 1896, a Jewish state was a pipe dream. Today the overwhelming majority of Jews identify as Zionists. How did this happen? Ilan Pappe unveils how a lobby changed the map of the Middle East. Zionists exerted pressure on the Congress, cracked down on dissent in the Labour Party, and relentlessly smeared critics.

Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish captured hearts and headlines around the world in the aftermath of horrific tragedy: on January 16, 2009, Israeli shells hit his home in the Gaza strip, killing three of his daughters and a niece. By turns inspiring and heartbreaking, hopeful and horrifying, this is Abuelaish’s account of a Gazan life in all its struggle and pain. A Palestinian infertility specialist who lived in Gaza but worked in Israeli hospitals, he spent most of his life crossing the lines that divide the region.

In September 1984, Lisa Paul, an American college student and nanny living in Moscow, entered Inna Meiman’s house for her first Russian language lesson. And so began a two–year friendship and a fight for Inna’s life. In Swimming in the Daylight, Lisa chronicles her friend’s struggle to shed her refusenik status, obtain a visa to America, and find medical treatment for her malignant cancer. Inna endured a perverse reality as a citizen of the Soviet Union....

Ahed Tamimi is a world-renowned Palestinian activist, born and raised in the small West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, which became a center of the resistance to Israeli occupation when an illegal, Jewish-only settlement blocked off its community spring. Tamimi came of age participating in nonviolent demonstrations against this action and the occupation at large. Her global renown reached an apex in December 2017, when, at sixteen years old, she was filmed slapping an Israeli soldier who refused to leave her front yard. The video went viral, and Tamimi was arrested.

As former vice president of the City of David Foundation, Doron Spielman has guided numerous visitors—including donors, diplomats, professors, celebrities, and American politicians—on a journey into the City of David’s tunnels. While often holding vastly different political views, these visitors agree on one thing: the story of the City of David must be told.

On the morning of Saturday, October 7, Amir Tibon and his wife were awakened by mortar rounds exploding near their home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, a progressive Israeli settlement along the Gaza border. Soon, they were holding their two young daughters in the family’s reinforced safe room, urging their children not to cry while they listened to the gunfire from Hamas attackers outside their windows. With his cell phone battery running low, Amir texted his father: “They’re here.”

Why do Israelis have among the world’s highest life expectancies and lowest rates of “deaths of despair” from suicide and substance abuse? Why is Israel’s population young and growing while all other wealthy democracies are aging and shrinking? How can it be that Israel, according to a United Nations ranking, is the fourth happiest nation in the world? Why do Israelis tend to look to the future with hope, optimism, and purpose while the rest of the West struggles with an epidemic of loneliness, teen depression, and social decline?

An authoritative and deeply personal narrative history of the State of Israel, by one of the most influential journalists writing about the Middle East today. Not since Thomas L. Friedman's groundbreaking From Beirut to Jerusalem has a book captured the essence and the beating heart of the Middle East as keenly and dynamically as My Promised Land.

In early October 2023, Palestinian Plestia Alaqad was a recent university graduate dreaming of a career as a journalist. But by the end of November, her homeland was unrecognizable—and she was broadcasting videos of violence and destruction to millions online, known across the world as "The Eyes of Gaza."

In Enemies and Neighbors, Ian Black, who has spent over three decades covering events in the Middle East and is currently a fellow at the London School of Economics, offers a major new history of the Arab-Zionist conflict from 1917 to today. Laying the historical groundwork in the final decades of the Ottoman Era, when the first Zionist settlers arrived in the Holy Land, Black draws on a wide range of sources - from declassified documents to oral histories to his own vivid on-the-ground reporting - to recreate the major milestones in the most polarizing conflict of the modern age from both sides.

Golda Meir was a world figure unlike any other. Born in tsarist Russia in 1898, she immigrated to America in 1906 and grew up in Milwaukee, where from her earliest years she displayed the political consciousness and organizational skills that would eventually catapult her into the inner circles of Israel's founding generation. Moving to mandatory Palestine in 1921 with her husband, the passionate socialist joined a kibbutz but soon left and was hired at a public works office by the man who would become the great love of her life.

La genèse du conflit israélo-arabe, dont l'actualité est surabondamment couverte par les médias, demeure paradoxalement mal connue. Si c'est au sortir de la Première Guerre mondiale que se cristallise ce qui n'est pas seulement le choc de deux nationalismes, mais un affrontement culturel recouvert par un conflit " religieux " et d'innombrables polémiques sur la nature du projet sioniste, c'est bien avant 1914 qu'il a pris forme dans le discours à la fois des élites arabes, de la vieille communauté juive séfarade et des sionistes d'Europe orientale.

With this book, Sa'ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis. He explores critical junctures in the history of Palestinian LGBTQ activism, revealing the queer Palestinian spirit of agency, defiance, and creativity, in the face of daunting pressures and forces working to constrict it. Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique explores the necessity of connecting the struggles for Palestinian freedom with the struggle against homophobia.

Noted journalist Yardena Schwartz draws on her extensive research and wide-ranging interviews with both sides to tell a timely, eye-opening story. She expertly weaves the war between Israel and Hamas into a historical framework, demonstrating how the conflict today cannot be understood without the context of ground zero of this century-old war, which began long before the occupation, the settlements, or the state of Israel ever existed.