Reading list

Books on how to kill a war machine

 A reading list on the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation, and an end to all wars.

Verso Books16 July 2025

Books on how to kill a war machine

Protesters of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza are facing arrest, while other activist groups are being proscribed as terrorists. 

These books offer useful resources for the international Palestinian solidarity movement in understanding the acquiescence of Western governments to the destruction of Gaza, methods for resistance, and how we ended up in the era of ‘forever wars’.

*Title inspired by To Kill A War Machine, a documentary by Rainbow Collective.

The Verso Pamphlets:

Short, urgent interventions answering pressing questions about Palestine. What is the history of Western involvement in Palestine? What is the relationship between Palestine and imperialism? How is the fight for Palestinian liberation bound up with the struggle for an inhabitable Earth?

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Palestinian Artists, Poets, & Novelists

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The Violence of the Israeli Occupation

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The War Machine: How It Works & How to Fight It

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International Palestine Solidarity & its Suppression

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A Historical Perspective: from the Balfour Declaration to Today

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Reflecting on the Middle East

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Dismantling Zionist Ideology

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From The River to the Sea

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

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Resisting Erasure
Why has Palestine become a defining fault line of contemporary politics?Challenging mainstream narratives that reduce Palestine to ancient hatreds, humanitarian tragedy, or legal abstractions, Resi...
Moral Abdication
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 Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth
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 ...
Men in the Sun

Men in the Sun

First published in 1962, Men in the Sun is both a classic of Arab literature, and of what Kanafani himself would term 'resistance literature'.Three Palestinian men embark on a brutal and treacherou...
Paperback

Forthcoming

Mural

Mural

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...
A Child in Palestine
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...
The Killing of Gaza

The Killing of Gaza

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
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
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

Loot

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
How does Israel extend its control over Palestinian lands? From the tunnels of Gaza to the militarized airspace of the Occupied Territories, Eyal Weizman unravels the mechanisms of control and how ...
Palestine Speaks
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 ...
Paperback
War and Money

War and Money

Maurizio Lazzarato’s War and Money explores the connections between capitalist expansion, international economic conflict, and war, via an analysis of the imperialism of the American dollar. He exa...
The Spoils of War
Fully updated from the original edition. As the retreat from Kabul shows, America goes to war not to bring democracy, or glory, but in the pursuit of profit. In The Spoils of War, leading Washingto...
Behind Enemy Lies
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...
Potential History
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 ...
Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire
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...
Direct Action
A vibrant, groundbreaking history of American radicalism since the SixtiesWhat happened to the American left after the Sixties? This engrossing account traces the evolution of disruptive protest ov...
The Case for Sanctions Against Israel

The Case for Sanctions Against Israel

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...
Friends of Israel
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...
Letters to Palestine
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...
Blaming the Victims

Blaming the Victims

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...
Erasing Palestine
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...
Pacification
In his new book, critical theorist Mark Neocleous engages in a sustained critique of the theory and practice of pacification. Combining philosophical analysis with historical detail, Neocleous anal...
Road to October 7
In Road to October 7, Erik Skare argues that Palestinian Islamism is far more complex and dynamic than generally assumed. The phenomenon has continuously developed through disputes between moderate...
The Balfour Declaration
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
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

Not by Omission

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
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
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...
Loved Egyptian Night
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...
Unholy Kingdom
In recent years the ruling family in Saudi Arabia, the House of Saud, has promoted the oil-rich kingdom as an open, liberalizing nation that has invested in culture, tourism, and social innovation ...
Carbon Democracy
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...
The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan
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...
The Apocalypse and the End of History
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...
Yemen in Crisis
The democratic promise of the 2011 Arab Spring has unraveled in Yemen, triggering a disastrous crisis of civil war, famine, militarization, and governmental collapse with serious implications for t...
The Jewelers of the Ummah
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
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
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, ...
The Invention of the Jewish People

The Invention of the Jewish People

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

The Invention of the Land of Israel

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
Ilan Pappe’s pioneering work, first published in 2014, is a devastating critique of the conceptual foundations of the Israeli state. Divorced from material and political realities, blind to the vio...
Plowshares into Swords
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...
Beyond Chutzpah
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...
Paperback
The Holocaust Industry
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...
From the River to the Sea
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...
The Myths of Liberal Zionism
Yitzhak Laor is one of Israel’s most prominent dissidents and poets, a latter-day Spinoza who helps keep alive the critical tradition within Jewish culture. In this work he fearlessly dissects the ...
Letters to Palestine
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 Girl Who Stole My Holocaust

The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust

“She took from me the belief that absolute evil exists in this world, and the belief that I was avenging it and fighting against it. For that girl, I embodied absolute evil ... Since then I have be...
Hardback
The Case for Sanctions Against Israel

The Case for Sanctions Against Israel

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...
Blaming the Victims

Blaming the Victims

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...
The Punishment of Gaza
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...
The Least of All Possible Evils
The principle of the ‘lesser evil’—the acceptability of pursuing one exceptional course of action in order to prevent a greater injustice—has long been a cornerstone of Western ethical philosophy. ...
The Palestine Laboratory
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 ...
Friends of Israel
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...
Erasing Palestine
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...
Not by Omission

Not by Omission

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...
The Idea of Israel
Ilan Pappe’s pioneering work, first published in 2014, is a devastating critique of the conceptual foundations of the Israeli state. Divorced from material and political realities, blind to the vio...
How I Stopped Being a Jew
Shlomo Sand was born in 1946, in a displaced person’s camp in Austria, to Jewish parents; the family later migrated to Palestine. As a young man, Sand came to question his Jewish identity, even t...
Ten Myths About Israel
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...

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