de Vries, David. (2010)

Website about this group: https://wearenotnumbers.org/ Amazon Kindle. £7.99

 “This is an urgent and necessary reckoning about what it means to live in the West today. As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West offered freedom and justice for all. Over the past twenty years he reported on the various Wars on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more. He won awards for his journalism and his fiction. But now, watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he comes to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie.” This incisive book takes aim at liberals who hide their eyes or wring their hands and do nothing. The author is an Egyptian journalist now residing in the US. He tells his own story and shares his thoughts in a poetic yet pointed way. A compelling read.

Asks: “Why must Palestinians prove their humanity?” Available on Amazon Kindle £9.99.

Interview about the book: https://mondoweiss.net/2025/02/palestine-and-politics-of-anti-appeal-an-interview-with-mohammed-el-kurd/

Relates Palestine settler colonialism to other settler colonialisms putting them into their political context of Capitalism, racism and dispossession, gender oppression and state violence. Easy to read.

Finkelstein is the son of parents who survived the Nazi concentration camps.

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A small book published in 1938, which tells the eye-witness story of what was happening in the thirties. This book was written by the husband of a friend of mine. A Jew, an economist and historian, who had been hauled up against the Senator McCarthy in the US for ‘un-American activities – i.e. he was left wing! It is an easy read from someone living there at the time. It is fascinating – you read how the British behaved towards the Arabs, making them scapegoats and shoving them out even then. 

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Vignettes of childhood in Gaza. Winner of the Creative Award at the 2022 Palestine Book Awards; also chosen as a 2021 Book of the Year by The White Review, Middle East Eye and The New Arab.

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Enlightening history, particularly of the pre – 1948 growth of Zionist colonisation abetted by the UK. It is extensive in its research together with testimonies by the author and his family members who were involved and active in much of the history as it has evolved for Palestinians.

UCPress ISBN: 9780520346253

Amazon Kindle £19.79.

Case studies of the construction of Palestine in popular culture and the media.

Morris has clearly exposed some of the Palestinian tragedy, but as Ian Pappe (2006) has stated in his book, Morris’s resources are limited to the Israeli military archives.

Pappe is an Israeli historian who has written extensively, sometimes with Noam Chomsky, about Palestine and Israel.

Very important for understanding the creation of the mythology and the recent history. 

Exposition of the origins of an imperialist concept.

 This is a very engaging easy reading book where Pappe has synthesised a lot of his previous writing, leading to where we are now – that is in the middle of the Israeli committed genocide.

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Using an impressive array of material from literature, archaeology and social theory, Edward Said explores the profound implications of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism for Middle-East politics today. He proposes that Freud’s assumption that Moses was an Egyptian undermines any simple ascription of a pure identity, and further that identity itself cannot be thought or worked through without the recognition of the limits inherent in it. Said suggests that such an unresolved, nuanced sense of identity might, if embodied in political reality, have formed, or might still form, the basis for a new understanding between Jews and Palestinians. Instead, Israel’s relentless march towards an exclusively Jewish state denies any sense of a more complex, inclusive past.

Shlaim, Avi. 2024. Genocide in Gaza: Israel, Hamas and the Long War on Palestine. Irish Pages Press. “In this book Avi Shlaim places Israel’s policy towards the Gaza Strip under an uncompromising lens. He argues that these recurrent attacks – what Israeli generals chillingly call “mowing the lawn” – are the inevitable result of Zionist settler colonialism whose basic objective is the elimination of the native population.”

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This book attends to the tragic fate of indigenous Palestinians, the ignorance of the grandfathers to see that this land was inhabited. It includes the author’s witnessing of the concentration camp in Gaza, where he had to endure hearing the screaming  of very young people enduring torture by the Israeli military, and his relief when this stopped after 1993.  Ari Shavit, however, believes that all of this was justified for the creation of Israel as a Jewish state.

Shehadeh, Raja. (2008) Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, Profile Books

Routledge,

This book looks at how the Occupation pervades the unconscious of both Palestinians and Israelis, bringing an incompatibility for Palestinian therapists with Israeli supervisors who are differently placed within it. The book demonstrates how Palestinian psychotherapy can unblock paths and connections that have been sealed for survival, bringing to visibility the impact of violent oppression. In doing so, psychotherapy becomes a tool for resistance. A must read for Group Analysts and psychotherapists interested in decolonising therapy.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. (2024) The Message. One World, Random House. Available on Amazon Kindle £9.99. Personal reportage and African-American solidarity with Palestine. Also looks at Dakar.

Only 500 copies printed as Michelin took Tzabar to court and stopped him from printing or distributing any more copies. One signed copy was available from Boojum and Snark books (Kanab, UT, USA) cost – 1,500 dollars! Listed here to make its existence visible.

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Wolfe, Patrick. (2016) Traces of History, Elementary Structures of Race, Verso

Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera. (2019) Incarcerated Children and the Politics of Unchilding. Cambridge University Press