Stop Doomscrolling About Israel and Palestine—Read These Books Instead

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The Israeli author Etgar Keret’s fantastical, funny, and very short stories have long offered insight into the anxieties that simmer in his own society. We spoke a couple of days ago, and Keret told me that in the past three weeks since the war began between Israel and Hamas, he has been turning to more ephemeral forms of writing, even shorter than his usual work. He calls them “war notes”: short thoughts, observations, and outlines of stories jotted down quickly, as if meant to be shoved deep in a pocket or thrown away. This reflex—to process the violence and the emotion it provokes through writing—is well established when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many, many bookshelves could be filled with works that either explain the modern history of the region or offer an individual entry point into what living through such daily tension and pain has felt like. Without attempting to be comprehensive or authoritative—a fool’s errand if there ever was one—I thought I would suggest just a few of my own favorites. At the very least, I prescribe these titles as antidotes to the quick and dirty ways people are communicating about the war on social media.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

For readers who want to follow the twists and turns of Israeli-Palestinian enmity back to the late 19th century and the birth of Zionism (good luck!), there are quite a number of history books, though many come laden with a baked-in perspective. One of the big books I feel comfortable recommending is by the (then) left-leaning Israeli historian Benny Morris, who had previously done work exposing the facts of Palestinian expulsion in 1948, when the state of Israel was founded. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 is a good, relatively evenhanded way to gain an information-packed overview. For more of a sense of the fault lines within Israel since its founding—religious versus secular, Ashkenazi versus Sephardi, Arab versus Jew—I would also point to Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. Shavit, an Israeli journalist (who resigned from his position as a columnist at Haaretz after sexual-harassment allegations against him in 2016) covers the most difficult parts of Israel’s history while also providing, in a cogent narrative voice, a sense of why the country means so much to its Jewish citizens.

But these books that attempt to tell the whole story—with rare exception, like Shavit’s—tend to get so hopelessly tangled in the back-and-forth of history that the humans at the center of them end up disappearing. Better, I think, to look for thoughtful memoirs. I found two by Palestinian writers particularly affecting. Sari Nusseibeh, a retired philosophy professor who was also president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, wrote Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life in 2007; he recalls growing up as the scion of a prominent Jerusalem family whose roots in the city go back to 638 and describes trying to eke out a difficult existence as a moderate. Raja Shehadeh’s entire oeuvre is worth reading, but I particularly loved his 2017 book, Where the Line Is Drawn: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships, and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine. He recounted, with great empathy, his attempts to maintain relationships with close Israeli friends, and how the occupation got in the way. A new book (published this week) captures what life is like for Palestinians in the West Bank: Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy. It follows a Palestinian father’s search for his 5-year-old son, who was in a bus crash outside the city. At one level, this is a granular look at the bureaucracy Salama must deal with under occupation, but Thrall takes a much wider view, speaking with all of the Israelis and Palestinians who intersect with this unbearably sad story.

And then there is fiction—and I’ll restrict myself, though it’s hard, to just a few very recent ones. I’d recommend Keret’s latest collection, Fly Already, in which his stories get darker and more poignant, and two others from young Israeli writers: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s Waking Lions, a noirish story involving an African immigrant to Israel who is killed in a hit-and-run accident, and Iddo Gefen’s Jerusalem Beach, a set of slightly surreal stories—including one about an army unit that is recruiting 80-year-olds—that capture emotional truths about the country. Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses is a multigenerational saga that tells a story of Palestinian exile with great pathos and attention to character. And I was partial to Isabella Hammad’s second novel, Enter Ghost, about a British-Palestinian actress who goes to the West Bank to stage a production of Hamlet.

I could go on and on—and, before the emails start pouring in, I just want to emphasize what a small selection this is. Let me end by recommending some poems, which, like Keret’s war notes, return us to language in its most elemental form: capable of soothing, provoking, and hopefully, occasionally, bringing catharsis. I’d select two poems, by two long-gone masters who found endless inspiration in wandering around the holy city of Jerusalem. Mahmoud Darwish’s “In Jerusalem” (“You killed me … and I forgot, like you, to die”), and Yehuda Amichai’s “Jerusalem” :

Etgar Keret Is Searching for Signs of Life

What to Read

The Study of Human Life, by Joshua Bennett

Bennett’s collection is divided into three sections, and the last revolves explicitly around his first child, born a year before the book’s release. The whole thing, though, is a meditation on what it means to create life—or to sustain it—in a world hostile to your existence. In the first third, Bennett writes about growing up in Yonkers, trapped by poverty and racism and low expectations, and about getting out—while knowing that he might not have, and that others didn’t. The second is an assemblage of speculative fiction, imagining the resurrection of Malcolm X and a young Black man killed by police. The last is similarly concerned with omnipresent danger and injustice (Bennett fears for his son), but it’s also about love’s redemption; as a father, he overflows with joy and wonder. Altogether, the book is a tender celebration of vulnerability and the strength that blooms quietly in its presence. An ode to tardigrades, microscopic invertebrates that can endure extreme temperatures, seems incongruous, but actually proves Bennett’s later thesis: “God bless the unkillable / interior bless the uprising / bless the rebellion … God / bless everything that survives / the fire.”  — Faith Hill

From our list: 10 poetry collections to read again and again

Out Next Week

📚 A Shining, by Jon Fosse

Your Weekend Read

Jesmyn Ward: She Who Remembers

“The Georgia men wake everyone in the drenched dark. The pain of the march simmers through me, and I wipe at my mud-soaked clothing, swipe at the threads of soil in my wounds—all of it futile. We are tired. Even though the Georgia men threaten and harass and whip, we chained and roped women plod. “Aza,” I say, sounding the name of the spirit who wore lightning: “Aza.” Every step jolts up my leg, my spine, my head. Every step, another beat of her name: Aza.”

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