Reading list

Free Palestine: A Verso Reading List

A reading list on the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation.

Verso Books 1 August 2024

In the past year, over 40,000 people have been killed in Israel’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza. The region has faced the destruction of homes, bakeries, hospitals, roads, schools, and all infrastructure required to sustain collective life. And the past weeks have seen over 1,000 killed in Israel’s strikes against Lebanon.

The following books offer useful resources for the international Palestinian solidarity movement in understanding the history of the occupation, and situating it within a wider context of anti-colonial struggles around the world.

Our Autumn 2024 publishing includes new editions of Ilan Pappe's Ten Myths About Israel and Eyal Weizman's Hollow Land, a paperback edition of The Palestine Laboratory, new work from Gideon Levy and Adam Raz, and The Verso Palestine Pamphlets.

The Verso Palestine Pamphlets

The genocide in Gaza reached its one year mark without any end in sight. In the face of this destruction, rigorous analysis of Palestine's history and present has never been more important:

The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth

by Andreas Malm

Israel’s pulverization of Gaza since October 7, 2023 is not only a humanitarian crisis, but an environmental catastrophe. Far from the first event of its kind, the devastation Israel has inflicted ...

Moral Abdication

by Didier Fassin

Translated by Gregory Elliott

Providing a record of the first six months of the war waged by the Israeli army after the 7 October attacks and drawing on a rich range of international sources, Didier Fassin examines how most Wes...

The Violence of Israeli Occupation

The Killing of Gaza

by Gideon Levy

Translated by David B. Green

Gideon Levy is one of the most respected critics of Israel's apartheid policies against the Palestinian people. He is the outspoken award-winning journalist who has been writing on the conflict for...

The Palestine Laboratory

by Antony Loewenstein

Winner of the 2023 Walkley non fiction journalism prizeFinalist for the 2023 Moore Prize for Human Rights WritingIsrael's military industrial complex uses the occupied, Palestinian territories as ...

An Army Like No Other

by Haim Bresheeth-Zabner

The Israeli army, officially named the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), was established in 1948 by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, who believed that ‘the whole nation is the army’. In ...

Loot

by Adam Raz

Translated by Philip Hollander

During the 1948 War, Israeli fighters and residents alike plundered Palestinian homes, shops, businesses, and farms. This bitter truth was then suppressed or forgotten over the coming years.Tens of...

Hollow Land

by Eyal Weizman

Politicide

by Baruch Kimmerling

Ariel Sharon is one of the most experienced, shrewd and frightening leaders of the new millennium. Despite being found both directly and indirectly responsible for acts considered war crimes under ...

Palestinian Voices

A Child in Palestine

by Naji al-Ali

Introduction by Joe Sacco

A Child in Palestine collects the work of one of the Arab world’s greatest cartoonists, Naji al-Ali, known as ‘the Palestinian Malcolm X’. Discovered in the 1950s, he was revered throughout the reg...

Mural

by Mahmoud Darwish

Introduction by John Berger

Translated by John Berger and Rema Hammami

Mural is the testimony of one of the most important and powerful poets of our age.Mahmoud Darwish was the unofficial laureate of Palestine. One of the greatest poets of the last half-century, his w...

In Search of Fatima

by Ghada Karmi

Born in Jerusalem, Ghada Karmi and her family were forced out of their home in 1948. They shared the fate of the thousands of Palestinians who, in the Nakba, were dispossessed and driven from land ...

Return

by Ghada Karmi

“The journey filled me with bitterness and grief. I remember looking down on a nighttime Tel Aviv from the windows of a place taking me back to London and thinking hopelessly, ‘flotsam and jetsam...

Stone Men

by Andrew Ross

“They demolish our houses while we build theirs.” This is how a Palestinian stonemason, in line at a checkpoint outside a Jerusalem suburb, described his life to Andrew Ross. Palestinian “stone m...

Palestine Speaks

Edited by Mateo Hoke and Cate Malek

For more than six decades, Israel and Palestine have been the center of one of the world’s most widely reported yet least understood human rights crises. In Palestine Speaks men and women from the ...

Understanding Zionist ideology and dismantling Israeli myths

The Jewelers of the Ummah

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Can we return to worlds destroyed by colonial violence? In a series of letters to her father, her great-grandmothers, and her children—and to thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt—Ariella...

Ten Myths About Israel

by Ilan Pappe

In this groundbreaking book, the outspoken and radical Israeli historian Ilan Pappe examines the most contested ideas concerning the origins and identity of the contemporary state of Israel. This h...

Towers of Ivory and Steel

by Maya Wind

Afterword by Robin D.G. Kelley

Foreword by Nadia Abu El Haj

Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, ...

Friends of Israel

by Hil Aked

Friends of Israel provides a forensically researched account of the activities of Israel's advocates in Britain, showing how they contribute to maintaining Israeli apartheid. The book traces the hi...

The Invention of the Jewish People

by Shlomo Sand

Translated by Yael Lotan

A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first ce...

The Invention of the Land of Israel

by Shlomo Sand

Translated by Geremy Forman

What is a homeland? When does it become a national territory? Why have so many people been willing to die for such places throughout the twentieth century? What is the essence of the Promised Land?...

The Idea of Israel

by Ilan Pappe

In this groundbreaking work, Ilan Pappe looks at the continued role of Zionist ideology. The Idea of Israel considers the way Zionism operates outside of the government and military in areas such a...

Plowshares into Swords

by Arno Mayer

In this authoritative text, Arno J. Mayer traces the thinkers, leaders and shifting geopolitical contexts that shaped the founding and onward development of the Israeli state. He recovers for poste...

Blaming the Victims

Contributions by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, G.W. Bowersock, Noam Chomsky, Norman G. Finkelstein, Muhammad Hallaj, Rashid Khalidi, Peretz Kidron and Elia Zureik

Edited by Christopher Hitchens and Edward W. Said

Since the 1948 war which drove them from their heartland, the Palestinian people have consistently been denied the most basic democratic rights. Blaming the Victims shows how the historical fate of...

International Solidarity with Palestine

Peace Under Fire

Foreword by Edward W. Said

Edited by Ghassan Andoni, Huwaida Arraf, Nicholas Blincoe, Hussein Khalili, Marissa McLaughlin, Radhika Sainath and Josie Sandercock

The last two years have been the most brutal in the entire thirty-six year history of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip; indeed the most violent since the creation of Isr...

Letters to Palestine

Edited by Vijay Prashad

Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s seven-week bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza in the summer of 2014, resulted in half a million displaced Gazans, tens of thousands of destroyed home...

The Case for Sanctions Against Israel

Contributions by Ra'anan Alexandrowicz, Merav Amir, Hind Awwad, Mustafa Barghouthi, Omar Barghouti, Dalit Baum, Joel Beinin, John Berger, Angela Davis, Nada Elia, Marc H. Ellis, Noura Erakat, Neve Gordon, Ran Greenstein, Ronald Kasrils, Jamal Khader, Naomi Klein, Paul Laverty, Mark LeVine, David Lloyd, Ken Loach, Haneen Maikey, Rebecca O'Brien, Ilan Pappe, Jonathan Pollak, Laura Pulido, Lisa Taraki, Rebecca Vilkomerson, Michael Warschawski and Slavoj Žižek

Edited by Audrea Lim

In July 2011, Israel passed legislation outlawing the public support of boycott activities against the state, corporations, and settlements, adding a crackdown on free speech to its continuing bloc...

A Historical Perspective: from the Balfour Declaration to the present crisis

The Balfour Declaration

by Bernard Regan

On November 2, 1917, the British government, represented by Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, declared that they were in favor of 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish ...

Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

by Norman G. Finkelstein

First published in 1995, this acclaimed study challenges generally accepted truths of the Israel-Palestine conflict as well as much of the revisionist literature. This new edition critically reexam...

Not by Omission

by Amnon Kapeliouk

Introduction by Noam Chomsky and Irene Gendzier

In this book, first published in Hebrew in 1975 and now available in English for the first time with an introduction by Noam Chomsky, Amnon Kapeliouk traces the policies and attitudes that led to t...

Israel and Palestine

by Avi Shlaim

With characteristic rigor and readability, Avi Shlaim reflects on a range of key issues, transformations and personalities in the Israel–Palestine conflict. From the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the...

The Punishment of Gaza

by Gideon Levy

Israel’s 2009 invasion of Gaza was an act of aggression that killed over a thousand Palestinians and devastated the infrastructure of an already impoverished enclave. The Punishment of Gaza shows h...

Shattered Hopes

by Josh Ruebner

President Barack Obama’s first trip abroad in his second term took him to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank, where he despondently admitted to those waiting for words of encouragement, “It is ...

Reflections on Anti-Semitism

Erasing Palestine

by Rebecca Ruth Gould

The widespread adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism and the internalisation of its norms has set in motion a simplistic definitional logic for dealing with social problems that has impo...

Beyond Chutzpah

by Norman G. Finkelstein

In Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein moves from an iconoclastic interrogation of the new anti-Semitism to a meticulously researched exposé of the corruption of scholarship on the Israel–Palestine...

The Holocaust Industry

by Norman G. Finkelstein

In his iconoclastic and controversial study, Norman G. Finkelstein moves from an interrogation of the place the Holocaust has come to occupy in global culture to a disturbing examination of Holocau...

Reflections on Imperialism and Settler Colonialism

Traces of History

by Patrick Wolfe

Traces of History presents a new approach to race and to comparative colonial studies. Bringing a historical perspective to bear on the regimes of race that colonizers have sought to impose on A...

Potential History

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.Azoulay ...

Our History Is the Future

by Nick Estes

In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenou...

Race, Place, Trace

Edited by Susan Slyomovics and Lorenzo Veracini

This edited collection celebrates Patrick Wolfe’s contribution to the study and critique of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination. The chapters collected here focus on the settler-co...

Imagined Communities

by Benedict Anderson

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and tran...

Civil Imagination

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Translated by Louise Bethlehem

The photograph is not just an image but an event, one in the longer sequence of a photographic moment. Challenging given definitions of photography and of the political, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls...

Reflections on the Middle East

Loved Egyptian Night

by Hugh Roberts

Loved Egyptian Night fundamentally reassesses the Arab Spring, refuting the stories the Western powers fed to the world. There is no doubt that the toppling of Ben Ali in Tunisia in January 2011 an...

Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire

by Deepa Kumar

In this incisive account, leading scholar of Islamophobia Deepa Kumar traces the history of anti-Muslim racism from the early modern era to the “War on Terror.” Importantly, Kumar contends that Isl...

The Apocalypse and the End of History

by Suzanne Schneider

In this authoritative, accessible study, historian Suzanne Schneider examines the politics and ideology of the Islamic State (better known as ISIS). Schneider argues that today’s jihad is not the r...

The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan

by Tariq Ali

The NATO occupation of Afghanistan is over, and a balance-sheet can be drawn. These essays on war and peace in the region reveal Tariq Ali at his sharpest and most prescient.Rarely has there been s...

Carbon Democracy

by Timothy Mitchell

With the rise of coal power, the producers who oversaw its development acquired the ability to shut down energy systems, a threat they used to build the first mass democracies. Oil offered the Wes...

Behind Enemy Lies

by Patrick Cockburn

In this urgent and timely book, Patrick Cockburn writes the first draft of the history of the current crisis in the Middle East.Here he charts the period from the recapture of Mosul in 2017 to Tur...

From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine

This free ebook provides important grounding for the urgent discussions taking place across the Palestine solidarity movement — published in collaboration with Haymarket Books.

From the River to the Sea

Edited by Sai Englert, Michal Schatz and Rosie Warren

In the final months of 2023, as this ebook is published, Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. Israeli officials have repeatedly made their intentions to do so extremely clear; talking of collec...

Filed under: reading-list, versoreadinglists