Favourite Israel-Palestine & Jewish books of the year
More fact, a bit of fiction and some fakery
My first choice, The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other (2023), deserves the widest possible audience. It’s not the best book of history on Israel-Palestine, nor does it offer the most trenchant analysis of the conflict. However, the book is remarkable for its promotion of empathy and understanding to transcend polarization between Jews and Palestinians in the diaspora. My chief takeaways are two frameworks that the authors, Dr. Jeffrey Wilkinson and Raja G. Khouri, provide to their readers. One is ITV: identity, trauma and victimhood. On p. 17, the authors write:
Because we are wounded by how the pain of past events resides in our present existence, our tendency towards victimhood naturally ensures that this pain will continue forever. Crucially, new wounds, like antisemitic events for Jews, or military attacks on Gaza for Palestinians, intensify old wounds while also creating new ones.1
The second framework is what the authors describe as BADD actors. These are groups that “find or concoct reasons to lay Blame on the Other, Attack their actions, Demonize their intentions, and Dismiss their narrative.”2 The authors note that the pro-Israel information system hugely outweighs the Palestinian one in numbers, financial capacity and political influence.
If you don’t understand why the Holocaust or the Nakba matters so deeply or believe that empathy is important for understanding the conflict, then this is the book for you. If you think Israel was a “land without a people for a people without a land,” then this book is also for you. If you think that all Israel-Palestine history since 1948 can be undone with the stroke of a pen and Israeli Jews should go back to Europe, then this book is also for you. Frankly, this book is for anyone who thinks Israelis and Palestinians are human beings.
Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years of War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020) is a highly accessible, often personal, work of history. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about why Israel is labelled a settler colonial state. What the book also shows is that Palestinians do a far better job of reading and understanding Israelis than the other way around. In writing about the Palestinian suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, Khalidi’s argument undercuts spurious and wrongful claims of antisemitism.
Equally risible is the idea that such attacks on civilians were hammer blows that might lead to a dissolution of Israeli society. This theory is based on a widespread by fatally flawed analysis of Israel as a deeply divided and ‘artificial’ polity, which ignores the manifestly successful nation-building efforts of Zionism over more than a century, as well as the cohesiveness of Israeli society in spite of its many divisions.3
Kapo by Aleksandar Tisma (1987) is one of the very few Holocaust novels that focuses on the victimizer. In this case, the book is an intense, difficult read about how Lamian, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, became a kapo and how he ritually dehumanized one female Jewish prisoner. Kapo, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, were prisoners who aided Nazis. The Sydney Jewish Museum notes that “they were Jewish inmates who were forced by the Nazis to serve as ‘stand-in’ guards. In effect, being a Kapo blurred the lines between collaborator, perpetrator and victim.”4
My final choice is The Jewish Fake Book by Velvel Pasternak (1997). A fake book contains the basic chord sequences of music like jazz. If you’re like me and want to learn the melodies and chords to prayer music, Passover songs and more, then this book is for you.
Agreements or disagreements? Let us know.
The Wall Between.
The Wall Between, p. 103.
The 100 Years War.
Sydney Jewish Museum: https://sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au/news/kapos/