On Palestine: Book List

A history told from the Palestinian perspective, arguing the period since the Balfour declaration of 1917 has amounted to a hundred years of colonial war against the Palestinians.

There are more than two sides in the conflict between Palestine and Israel. There are millions. Millions of lives, voices, stories behind the enduring struggle in Israel and Palestine. Yet, the easy binary of Palestine vs. Israel so often relied upon for context in media reports effectively silences the multitudinous lived experiences at the heart of this strife. Anyone interested in more nuanced debate, will want to read this collection of essays.

Considered by many as a key founder of the contemporary Palestinian art movement, Anani’s development as an artist has run in parallel with major events in recent Palestinian history. His work reflects the lived Palestinian experience, exhibiting distinctive responses to issues of exile, dislocation, conflict, memory and loss.

A masterful expose of the web of bureaucracy used by Israel to deprive the Palestinians of basic rights and freedoms, and calls for international justice and inclusive security in place of discrimination and division.

For more than 60 years, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have lived as Israeli citizens within the borders of the nation formed at the end of the 1948 conflict. Pappé analyzes the Israeli state's policy towards its Palestinian citizens, finding discrimination in matters of housing, education, and civil rights.

Edward Said's groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East has become a modern classic. Essential, and still eye-opening, Orientalism remains one of the most important books written about our divided world.

Barred from his homeland after 1967’s Six-Day War, the poet Mourid Barghouti spent thirty years in exile—shuttling among the world’s cities, yet secure in none of them; separated from his family for years at a time; never certain whether he was a visitor, a refugee, a citizen, or a guest. As he returns home for the first time since the Israeli occupation, Barghouti crosses a wooden bridge over the Jordan River into Ramallah and is unable to recognize the city of his youth. Sifting through memories of the old Palestine as they come up against what he now encounters in this mere “idea of Palestine,” he discovers what it means to be deprived not only of a homeland but of “the habitual place and status of a person.”

Salim Tamari offers eleven vignettes of Palestine's cultural life in the momentous first half of the twentieth century.

Transcolonial Maghreb offers the first thorough analysis of the ways in which Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian writers have engaged with the Palestinian question and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the past fifty years.

Beyond Occupation looks at three contentious terms that regularly arise in contemporary arguments about Israel's practices towards Palestinians in the occupied territories – occupation, colonialism and apartheid

The Balfour Declaration is a riveting volume about the ancient faiths and timeless treacheries that continue to drive global events.

Through the lens of international law and justice, the book debunks the myth that law is not useful to its resolution, illustrating through both theory and practice how international law points the way to a just and durable solution to the conflict in the Middle East.

A major translation of remarkable, late poems by the great Palestinian poet.

“Darwish’s poetry is an epic effort to transform the lyrics of loss into the indefinitely postponed drama of return.”
– Edward Said

Ghada Karmi's acclaimed memoir relates her childhood in Palestine, flight to Britain after the catastrophe, and coming of age in Golders Green, the north London Jewish suburb. A powerful biographical story, In Search of Fatima reflects the author's personal experiences of displacement and loss against a backdrop of the major political events which have shaped conflict in the Middle East. Speaking for the millions of displaced people worldwide who have lived suspended between their old and new countries, fitting into neither, this is an intimate, nuanced exploration of the subtler privations of psychological displacement and loss of identity.

Having grown up in Britain following her family's exile from Palestine, doctor, author and academic Ghada Karmi leaves her adoptive home in a quest to return to her homeland. In her journey, she takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the heart of one of the world’s most intractable conflict zones and one of the major issues of our time. Visiting places she has not seen since childhood, her unique insights reveal a militarised and barely recognisable homeland, and her home in Jerusalem, like much of the West Bank, occupied by strangers.

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

Nicholas Blincoe weaves a dramatic narrative filled with driven players and coaches who are inspired as much by nationalism as a love of the game. Blincoe traces the history from the sport's introduction through church leagues, he rising tensions after the creation of Israel, and the decades of violence, war, and hunger strikes that have decimated teams.

An internationally best-selling novel. The story of one family's struggle and survival through over sixty years of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, carrying us from Jenin to Jerusalem, to Lebanon and the anonymity of America. It is a story shaped by loss, by scars and fear, but also by the transformative intimacy of marriage and the fierce protectiveness of motherhood. It is a story of faith, forgiveness, and of life-sustaining love.

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.

A Palestinian American woman wrestles with faith, loss, and identity before coming face-to-face with a school shooter in this searing debut. The Beauty of Your Face navigates a country growing ever more divided. Afaf Rahman, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, is the principal of Nurrideen School for Girls, 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: the bigotry she faced as a child, her mother’s dreams of returning to Palestine, and the devastating disappearance of her older sister that tore her family apart.

Internationally bestselling author Susan Abulhawa''s powerful new novel explores the legacy of dispossession across continents and generations. With devastatingly clear-eyed vision of political and personal trauma, The Blue Between Sky and Water is the story of flawed yet profoundly courageous women, of separation and heartache, endurance and renewal.

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.

Isabella Hammad delicately unpicks the tangled politics and personal tragedies of a turbulent era – the Palestinian struggle for independence from the British Mandate, the strife of the early twentieth century and the looming shadow of the Second World War. An intensely human story amidst a global conflict, The Parisian is historical fiction with a remarkable contemporary voice.

Longlisted for The Booker Prize 2021. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.

Maisoon is a tradition-defying Palestinian Christian woman, who lives on her own in Haifa, works as a jewellery designer, and is resisting her Muslim boyfriend Ziyad’s continuous attempts to marry her for fear of losing her independence. She cannot understand her father Majid, nor Ziyad’s apathy for the things going on around them, causing tension in both relationships. Maisoon crosses paths with Shahd, a young Palestinian woman who lives in a refugee camp and becomes smitten with her. Through the characters of Maisoon and Shahd, we witness the differences in the daily challenges faced by Palestinians living in Israel, and Palestinians living in refugee camps.