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Philosopher Craig Duncan writes: "I would find it interesting to hear what histories of Israel (from the rise of the Zionist movement in the late 19th century onwards, say) you and your readers might recommend as reliable and intelligent sources." Comments are open for reader suggestions; please say a bit about the books or articles you're recommending.
I'm by no means an expert on this subject, but I would recommend 10 Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian now teaching in the U.K.
The book details the rise of the Zionism movement, Israeli independence, the multiple wars of Israel, the failed peace plans and the issue of whether Israel is "really" a democracy, etc.
It's only 192 pages, so it serves as a guide for those of us don't have the time and energy to read thousands of pages on the subject. It's sort of "everything you wanted to know about Israeli Zionism but were afraid to ask" for those of us on the anti-imperialist left.
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/370-ten-myths-about-israel
A History of Zionsim by Walter Laquer and Israelis: Fathers and Sons by Amos Elon
With the emergence of the current conflict, I found myself insufficiently prepared to be confident in my position. "Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn" by Daniel Gordis was recommended to me. I've found it excellent and also recommend it. I knew of much of the modern Israeli history, but everything prior to 1948 was new. The author weaves poetry throughout in just the right amount to lend a sense of the personal. I've come away with a new appreciation for how much smaller the country is than one might imagine and how it emerged through the efforts of a relatively small group of people. As the title indicates, it is "concise" but do not be concerned that it is in anyway some abbreviated version of history.
Another recommendation of the Daniel Gordis book. Covers the interesting place of thinkers like Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, whose vision of a binational state lost out.
On the emergence and early development of Zionism, Walter Lacqueur (1972) "A History of Zionism" and David Vital's triology are good places to start. For something focused on the "major players" during this period, you could check out Zipperstein (1993) on Ahad Ha'am and Jacques Kornberg (1993) on Herzl. I've not read the last of these but heard it's good.
Four books that have shaped my understanding of this area are:
Amos Oz (1983), In the land of Israel
Adam Keller (1987), Terrible Days: Social divisions and political paradoxes in Israel
Two books which give social and political divisions within Israel their due and make a persuasive case for liberal Zionism and a two-state solution based on honouring the aspirations of two nationalities. Oz also includes an interview with someone classing himself as a "Judeo-Nazi" – who believes that the Zionists' mistake in 1948/9 was not to exterminate the native population outright – and notes in an afterword that he had letters from people denouncing this grotesque caricature of Zionism, and other letters from people expressing agreement.
Regina Sharif (1984), Non-Jewish Zionism: Its Roots in Western History
I bought this book on the strength of its title, which struck me as a contradiction in terms. It's not; the hopes and aspirations that went into the Balfour Declaration and the establishment of the State of Israel, and with which the present-day state is still loaded, are not all Jewish by any means.
Lucy Dawidowicz (1973), The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945
Not about Israel, but very informative about the 20th-century roots of contemporary Zionism. While I don't share Dawidowicz's take on Nazism and the Holocaust, her book includes a lengthy and valuable study of Jewish institutions in occupied Poland, showing that Zionism was a minority current existing alongside Orthodox and Bundist (socialist) political strands.
Caveat #1: I'm considerably more interested in Zionism than in Israel per se
Caveat #2: I'm not sure which, if any, of these are in print
Avi Shlaim is very good (start with War & Peace in the Middle East).
Chomsky's Middle-East Illusions is interesting on the changing attitude of the US towards Israel ('a new Sparta') from the 50s to the 73 war.
Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred-Year War on Palestine starts with the Balfour Declaration (1917) and charts what Khalidi calls a 'history of colonialism'.
These are all what one might think of as pro-Palestinian.
Simon Sebag Montefoire, "The Decolonization Narrative is Dangerous and False," The Atlantic Magazine, October 27, 2023. Insightful historical analysis. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/decolonization-narrative-dangerous-and-false/675799/
Daniel Jonah Goldenhagen, "The Devil that Never Dies: The Rise of Global Antisemitism" (hard read, but incredibly informative and powerful).
Dara Horn, "People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present," may provide meaningful context for some perspectives.
I second John Collins's recommendation of Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years War on Palestine. It's very much from the opposite point of view as that of Regina Sharif, judging from Phil's short blurb (comment 6). I am not in a position to judge the quality of the scholarship, but the writing is journalistically plain and easy to read, and the viewpoint humane, though with some lapses. Here's an example of a kind of cold-bloodedness that might put some off:
"The people killed in the US Embassy bombing, the Marines who died in their barracks, and the many other Americans kidnapped or assassinated in Beirut–among them Malcolm Kerr and several of my colleagues and friends at the AUB–largely victims of attacks by the groups that became Hizballah, paid the price for the perceived collusion between their country and the Israeli occupier."
I couldn't/wouldn't get past the Atlantic paywall to read Simon Sebag Montefiore's piece on decolonization, but the first few paragraphs were quite irritating to a reader like me. Oxbridge snot. But perhaps it got better.
The Founding Myths of Israel by Zeev Sternhell. The intro is called "Nationalism, Socialism, and Nationalist Socialism," which gives you a taste of the issues. I read it during my second trip to Israel (teaching at Tel Aviv for a month) and it explained (and continues to explain) a lot.
Mohan – Regina Sharif writes the history of non-Jewish Zionism, but doesn't do so from a Zionist perspective.
Yes, Khalidi is very partizan, but, while not an expert, I didn't find any obvious historical flaws in the volume. Simon Sebag Montefiore is more of a media personality than a historian, as his Atlantic piece shows.
Sorry if I got you wrong, Phil. I was reacting to a phrase you used: "the hopes and aspirations that went into the Balfour Declaration . . . " (The rest of the clause was unremakable.) Often people characterize the Balfour Declaration as an exercise of colonial presumption, and so "hopes and aspirations" sounded as if the book was somewhat one-sided.
The comment by Howard (no.2) slightly misstated the title of Amos Elon's 1971 book. It's _The Israelis: Founders and Sons_. (I read it many years ago but don't recall it well. In looking up Elon recently, I discovered that he became increasingly disillusioned with Israel and spent his later years in Italy.)
M. Walzer's _The Paradox of Liberation_ (2015), although I find its main argument somewhat questionable, contains some interesting discussion of the history of Zionism in ch.2.
I'm somewhat surprised not to see anyone reference Benny Morris's _Righteous Victims_, which predates his more recent rightward turn and provides a broad and fair-minded overview. _The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem: 1947-1949_ is also a very good read.
Tom Segev's _One Palestine, Complete_ is a very detailed history of the Mandate years (1917-1948).
Though he comes at the issue from a decided leftist perspective, I've found Norman Finkelstein's writings on the issue meticulously researched and fair–but also unsparing in its criticism of the dominant western press narratives. Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, has been well reviewed though I have not had the time to read it. His earlier _The Holocaust Industry_ and his attack on Dershowitz (_Beyond Chutzpah_) are both excellent and appropriately critical. Anyone inclined to praise Dershowitz as an academic before the more recent years could have been spared that misjudgment by reading Finkelstein. Unfortunately, publicly taking the true but unpopular line wound up costing Finkelstein his academic career well before the latest rows around "cancel culture."
I'm not even remotely any sort of expert on the subject though the 'usual suspects' come to mind qua general left-leaning reader: Chomsky, Edward Said, Finkelstein.
In any case, I've been surprised to read in the prestigious LA Review of Books' Philosophical Salon section a series of essays by a certain Italian philosopher by the name of Fabio Vighi who has really gone well into the deep end of conspiracy philosophizing, most recently and particularly on the subject of the Oct 7 Hamas terrorist attack and the Netanyahu-led Israeli hyper-kinetic response.
Vighi's most recent essay, titled 'A New 9/11: The Stage is Set,' is a sort of updated take (with some of the poorly sourced 'prophetic gravitas') of something like Solzhenitsyn's 'Two Hundred Years Together': where as far as Jews and empires are concerned (in this case the American one) conspiracy—the vastest most inscrutable labyrinthine continuous conspiracizing—is the eternal elephant in the room.
I mention all of this because I suspect that much of the intellectuality of the Global South sees Israel's response to the Oct 7 attacks preponderantly through such a Vighian conspiracy theorizing lens.
Thus more than a literary suggestion, I've a ruminative type of question: What most recent work (it seems perforce an essay if it is to directly address Israel's Oct 7 attacks) best conceptually separates the wheat from the chaff, so to say, vis a vis American grand imperial strategy, on the one hand, and, on the other, the facile lure of being lured into an analogous knee-jerk perception of Israel as being increasingly motivated by a sense of itself as an ethno-insular messianic state, which, inter alia, morally permits it the greatest degree of Machiavellian license in pursuit of the aforesaid messianic purpose?
In other words, wherein lies the logical error in seeing Israel as a microcosmic scale ethno-insular messianic version or mirror complementing and fitting into the US's own macrocosmic totalizing, universal hegemonic-cum-unipolar messianic sense of itself, of its purpose and destiny vis a vis the rest of the world?
A raison d'être to which the latter, as a matter of course, ascribes a literally divinely obtained origin and license, and wherein conspiracy and all manner of byzantinely complex machinations are implicitly de rigueur, indeed a state whose dereliction of conspiracy would be the true sign of madness and deviation from its divinely accorded destiny.
I second Phil's recommendation of Amos Oz, In the Land of Israel.
I also recommend Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Mohan: like you I was irritated by, and disagreed with, the sentiments expressed by Simon Sebag Montefiore in the first pars of his Atlantic article, and like you I didn't bother trying to get beyond the paywall.
But why do you describe him as an "Oxbridge snot"?
He's a London-based journalist and historian.
I don't think he's anything to do with Oxford or Cambridge. (I mean: he may have studied there, but so have most of the British establishment.)
Among the books on Zionism and Israel that I would recommend are Shlomo Avineri, THE MAKING OF MODERN ZIONISM (1982), which valuably highlights the diversity of the sundry doctrines that are generally grouped together as "Zionism"; Shmuel Almog, ZIONISM AND HISTORY (1987); and Chaim Gans, A JUST ZIONISM (2008). In a much shorter compass, the article "Does Zionism = Settler Colonialism?" by Samuel Fleischacker is a careful and perceptive discussion. It can be found here: https://thirdnarrative.org/does-zionismsettler-colonialism/
Hi Samir, Glad you agree about Montefiore. I heard him on the Empire podcast (which I generally like) and formed that impression of him, both the snot and the Oxbridge. But you have convinced me that my identification of British accents needs some work.
https://archive.ph/6badY is an unpaywalled version of the Montefiore Atlantic article which I've not read.
Thanks Michael for the unpaywalled Montefiore. It met my expectations.
On Sebag-Montefiore: Well, snot or not, he really is pretty Oxbridge, and indeed from a rather privileged background. (He is the scion of a famous family.) He went to Harrow (second only to Eton as the ritziest of Britain's 'public' schools) and then did both a BA and a PhD (in History) at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. This makes him rather more Oxbridge than I can claim to be (with only my first degree from Cambridge) and indeed rather more Oxbridge than the average member of the British establishment.
That said, his books on Stalin seem to me pretty good, though I got a bit bored with his book on Catherine the Great and Potemkin (However given the crisis in the Ukraine that is probably a book worth reading as the history is highly relevant.).
I met him once at a writer's festival in Auckland where we were both speakers. He had just published a novel (he has written several, I think it was Sashenka) which was clearly designed to be a sort of ‘War and Peace’ epic of the Stalin era. I asked him what he thought of ‘Generations of Winter’ and ‘Winter’s hero’ by Vassily Aksyonov (son of Evgenia Ginsberg, author of the brilliant Gulag memoir ‘Into the Whirlwind’) , since this was a pair of books with obviously similar ambitions. He claimed never to have heard of them which really surprised me and which I found rather difficult to believe.
He also told us that that he was briefly in favour with the Putin-led oligarchy because they liked the Catherine/Potemkin book but that this changed after he began writing about Stalin. No surprises there. A racy narrative of sex and conquest is just the kind of thing that would appeal to boys like them, whereas Stalin is now being re-sanctified by the Putin regime. They won’t be interested in books about what a monster he was.
Charles's comment is amusing, but I'm calling an end to this particular sub-discussion. While Sebag-Montfiore's piece is much inferior to Fleischacker's (linked above by Matt Kramer), he is not wrong about the inapposite "settler colonialism" bullshit as directed at the founding of Israel (as distinct from what's going on in the West Bank).
To Brian,
Fair enough. Let’s get more serious. I have one book to recommend about recent history and one about the more remote past, which is still in my view highly relevant since it helps to explain how the current conflict appears to the Arab world in general and Palestinians in particular
1) Dowty, Alan (2017) Israel/Palestine Polity Press, 4th edition
Seems good but I can’t entirely vouch for it since I found it so depressing that I could not bear to do more than lightly skim it.
2) Steven Runciman, A History the Crusades, 3 volumes, Penguin, 2016 (originally published by CUP in the 1950s)
I read this book for the first time about fifty years ago (and again more recently) and it was a real eye-opener, not just because the history the crusades is intrinsically interesting, but because it helps one to understand how Israel is likely to be viewed through (many) Arab eyes as the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Mark II. It is sometimes said that you cannot negotiate with a power that denies your right to exist, but the History the Crusades suggests that this isn’t true. it is doubtful whether an any of the Moslem states recognised a ‘right to exist’ on the part of the Crusader kingdoms and principalities (the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli and the Kingdom Jerusalem) but decades long ‘truces’ were often negotiated and indeed, the crusader states would probably not have lasted so long (nearly two hundred years) without them. There are probably more up-to-date histories of the crusades, but this is the one that had a formative influence on me.
3) I used to own a copy of Rabin’s memoirs. Interesting for at least two reasons: a) he clearly owns up to ethnic cleansing (still being ridiculously denied at one time) ; and b) one of his reasons for moving in a (slightly) more conciliatory direction was the decline in discipline and what he regarded as a proper military spirit on the part of the IDF when it was serving as an occupation force. Bullying people on a day-to-day basis is morally bad for you.
Jerome Slater, Mythologies without End. The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1917-2020, OUP, 2021
I am surprised not to find this book mentioned here. But maybe it is just too recent. Jerome Slater is a retired political scientist. The book is based on decades of research spanning his whole career. It covers the entire history of the conflict, starting at the end of WWII, with special emphasis on the role of the US, as the title suggests. It synthesizes a massive amount of literature, is well-balanced and very well-argued. An impressive piece of work and of writing too.
What are the myths referred to in the title? This passage, quoted from the first page of the introduction, will give readers an idea:
"In 1973, Abba Elban, the eloquent Israeli diplomat, said: 'The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity', an argument – better said, a myth – that was widely accepted and continues to have a huge impact on how the Arab-Israeli conflict has been understood in Israel, the United States, and most Western states. But that assessment was wrong then, and wrong since – if anything, the converse is close to being the case.'
One of the best history books I have read, full stop.
A bit tangential, but only a bit: I just say the movie Golda, about Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur War. It was very interesting and well worth seeing. It does provide insight into the current situation.
Judging from relatively long excerpts that are publicly available (on the Amazon website), Slater argues against uncritical Zionism, against the classic Israeli narrative that it has been an unfailingly reasonable negotiator that has been, since the very beginning, ready to make reasonable territorial compromises, and against the idea that the US attitude of unquestioning support is to be explained by the strength of the Israeli lobby (this because the US attitude has not actually been one of unquestioning support). Probably this line of argument is called for, but it is not terribly original in either content or evidence.
But then neither did I say otherwise.(And, incidentally, what you say about the US attitude is not his point.)
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