Voices and Perspectives
We are grateful to Israel educator Ittay Flescher for some of the material in this section.
In the News:
There is no single news site, tweet, Instagram graphic or article that will provide a fair and balanced perspective on everything you need to know. This means that if you are keen to understand the whole story, you are going to need to invest more time reading news sites written by actual journalists that are fact-checked and cite sources rather than scrolling through Tiktok and Facebook for hot takes.
Israeli News sites (in English)
+972mag www.972mag.com/
Haaretz www.haaretz.com/
Times of Israel www.timesofisrael.com
Jpost www.jpost.com
Arutz 7 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/
Arab and Palestinian News sites (in English)
https://www.aljazeera.com/middle-east/
Books
As and when the situation calms we encourage you to engage with long-form works to inform and develop your understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For extensive reading lists on a wealth of topics we recommend the bibliographies found here: https://israeled.org/bibliographies/ To explore the role of narratives in the Israel-Palestinian conflict and for works that specifically address the competing narratives we recommend the four books below:
The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Contested Histories, Neil Caplan
Israeli and Palestinian Narratives of Conflict: History’s Double Helix, Robert Rotberg
Israel/Palestine (Hot Spots in Global Politics), Alan Dowty
Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine, Sami Adwan
The two lists below are a selection of books (fiction and non-fiction) that our educators at UJIA have highlighted. They are by no means exhaustive.
Israeli Narratives:
- Letters to My Palestinian Neighbour, Yossi Klein Halevi
- The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, Shlomo Avineri
- A History of Zionism, Walter Laqueur
- Israel: A History, Anita Shapira
- The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow, Gil Troy
- Israeli Poetry: A Contemporary Anthology, Bargad, Warren, Chyet, Stanley F.
- The Road Not Taken: Early Arab-Israeli Negotiations, Itamar Rabinovich
Palestinian Narratives:
- Where the Line is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine, Raja Shehadeh
- Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, Raja Shehadeh
- A Land Without Borders: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Nir Baram
- I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity, Izzeldin Abuelaish
- If I Were Another: Poems, Mahmoud Darwish
- I Saw Ramallah, Mourid Barghouti
- The Lemon Tree, Sandy Tolan
- Mornings in Jenin, Susan Abulhawa
- Ishmael’s Oranges, Claire Hajaj
- Dancing Arabs, Sayed Kashua
- The Lady from Tel Aviv, Raba’I Al-Madhoun
- Palestine +100: Stories from a century after the Nakba, Basma Ghalayini