Reading list

Free Palestine: A Verso Reading List

A reading list on the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation.

Verso Books17 November 2023

Free Palestine: A Verso Reading List

Israel has declared a “complete siege” on Gaza and launched hundreds of strikes, following an eruption of unrest in the region over the weekend.

The following books offer a history of the occupation, situated in a wider context of anti-colonial struggles around the world.

Free ebooks and other resources

We have made the following books (from the wider reading list below) free to download: Ten Myths About Israel, Palestine Speaks (note: this book is not available in North America from Verso), Blaming the Victims, The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, The Punishment of Gaza.

The Militarisation of Israel

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Palestinian Voices

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Understanding Zionist ideology and dismantling Israeli myths

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Solidarity with Palestine 

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

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Memoir 

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Reflections on Anti-Semitism

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Reflections on Imperialism and Settler Colonialism 

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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...
Shattered Hopes
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

The New Intifada

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...
Paperback
The Palestine Laboratory
WINNER OF THE 2023 WALKLEY NON-FICTION JOURNALISM PRIZEShortlisted for the 2023 Moore Prize for Human Rights WritingA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Republic, WiredIsrael's military industrial com...
Hardback
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 ...
Politicide
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 ...
Paperback
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, ...
Paperback
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...
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...
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 Idea of Israel
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
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

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 Last Resistance
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...
Paperback
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...
Twilight of History
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

A Time to Speak Out

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

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...
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
Stone Men
“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

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...
Paperback (2017)
Return
“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...
Hardback
In Search of Fatima
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
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
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
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
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
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
IIn 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 Holoca...
Peace Under Fire
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
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

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...
Traces of History
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
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

Civil Imagination

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
From the tunnels of Gaza to the militarized airspace of the Occupied Territories, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel’s mechanisms of control and its transformation of Palestinian towns, villages and road...
Paperback
Race, Place, Trace
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
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...
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...
The Palestine Laboratory
WINNER OF THE 2023 WALKLEY NON-FICTION JOURNALISM PRIZEShortlisted for the 2023 Moore Prize for Human Rights WritingA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Republic, WiredIsrael's military industrial com...
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 ...
Ebook
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 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...
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 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...
In Search of Fatima
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

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 PRIZEShortlisted for the 2023 Moore Prize for Human Rights WritingA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Republic, WiredIsrael's military industrial com...
Hardback
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
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...
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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