Free Palestine: A Verso Reading List

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

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 ...

The New Intifada

Introduction by Noam Chomsky

Contributions by Salman Abu Sitta, Ali Abunimah, Ghassan Andoni, Omar Barghouti, Nidal Barham, Azmi Bishara, Robert Fisk, Muna Hamzeh, Hussein Ibish, Jennifer Loewenstein, Nancy Murray, Allegra Pacheco, Mouin Rabbani, Glenn E. Robinson, Sara Roy, Edward W. Said, Ahdaf Soueif, Mayssoun Sukarieh, Gila Svirsky and Alison Weir

Edited by Roane Carey

Frustrated by the failure of the peace process to end the Israeli occupation, and outraged by Ariel Sharon’s invasion, with one thousand armed guards, of the Al-Aqsa holy site in East Jerusalem, th...

The Palestine Laboratory

by Antony Loewenstein

Shortlisted for the 2023 Moore Prize for Human Rights WritingShortlisted for the 2023 Walkley non fiction journalism prizeIsrael's military industrial complex uses the occupied, Palestinian territ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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...

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 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...

The Myths of Liberal Zionism

by Yitzhak Laor

Foreword by José Saramago

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 ...

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 Last Resistance

by Jacqueline Rose

In The Last Resistance, Jacqueline Rose explores the power of writing to create and transform our political lives. In particular, she examines the role of literature in the Zionist imagination: her...

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...

Twilight of History

by Shlomo Sand

Translated by David Fernbach

On its publication in 2009, Shlomo Sand’s book The Invention of the Jewish People met with a storm of controversy. His demystifying approach to nationalist and Zionist historiography provoked much ...

A Time to Speak Out

Contributions by Julia Bard, Geoffrey Bindman, Emma Clyne, Stan Cohen, Howard Cooper, D. D. Guttenplan, Abe Hayeem, Anthony Isaacs, Gabriel Josipovici, Francesca Klug, Tony Klug, Richard Kuper, Michael Kustow, Antony Lerman, Antony Loewenstein, Mike Marqusee, Jeremy Montagu, Anthony Rudolf, Donald Sassoon, Lynne Segal, Richard Silverstein, Gillian Slovo, Eyal Weizman and Sami Zubaida

Edited by Anne Karpf, Brian Klug, Jacqueline Rose and Barbara Rosenbaum

In A Time to Speak Out, a collection of strong Jewish voices come together to explore some of the most challenging issues facing diaspora Jews. With articles on such topics as international law, th...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

How I Stopped Being a Jew

by Shlomo Sand

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...

If I Am Not for Myself

by Mike Marqusee

If I Am Not For Myself is a passionate, thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be Jewish in the twenty-first century. It traces the author’s upbringing in 1960s Jewish-American suburbia,...

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...

Reflections on Anti-Semitism

by Alain Badiou, Eric Hazan and Ivan Segré

Foreword by Shlomo Sand

Translated by David Fernbach

Since the beginning of the War on Terror, Israel has become increasingly salient to imperial strategy and ever more aggressive in its policies toward the Palestinians. In this context, a key ideolo...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

Hollow Land

by Eyal Weizman

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The Myths of Liberal Zionism

by Yitzhak Laor

Foreword by José Saramago

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

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 Girl Who Stole My Holocaust

by Noam Chayut

Translated by Tal Haran

“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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

The Least of All Possible Evils

by Eyal Weizman

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

by Antony Loewenstein

Shortlisted for the 2023 Moore Prize for Human Rights WritingShortlisted for the 2023 Walkley non fiction journalism prizeIsrael's military industrial complex uses the occupied, Palestinian territ...

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...

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...

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...

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

The Militarisation of Israel

Palestinian Voices

Understanding Zionist ideology and dismantling Israeli myths

Solidarity with Palestine

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

Memoir

Reflections on Anti-Semitism

Reflections on Imperialism and Settler Colonialism

Reflections on the Middle East