#Yossi Klein-Halevi

[almondemotion]

In the Bleak Midwinter

That is what it feels like today. Almost at the Earth’s halfway point, the shortest day on the horizon and darkest before the dawn to anoint another cliché. This morning I listened to Donniel and Yossi discussing the killing of the three escaped hostages Alon, Samar and Yotam. Before that, a different Hartman Podcast with  Yehuda Kurtzer talking with Cochav Elkayam-Levy about the newly created…

[jewish-microwave-laser]

A majority of Israelis supported the Oslo Accords. Partly the changing mood was a result of the intifada: a growing number of Israelis had concluded that the price for absorbing the territories was too high, that occupation undermined Israel's Jewish and democratic values, that the Jewish people hadn't returned home to deprive another people of its sense of home. And so if the right's policies had led to the intifada, then the left's policies ought to be given a try. The 1970s and '80s had been the decades of Greater Israel, and the '90s seemed about to become the decade of Peace Now.

There was also, as Rabin noted, the changing international atmosphere. During the Sebastia showdown of 1975, much of the public had supported Gush Emunim as an expression of its contempt for the UN's Zionism-racism solution. But Israel was no longer being instantly demonized, and Israelis responded with a readiness to take risks for peace.

from "Part Five: End of the Six-Day War (1992–2004)" in Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi, p. 481

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Yossi Klein Halevi

Many, perhaps most, of the campus protesters are likely not antisemitic. They may have Jewish friends or be Jewish themselves. But that is irrelevant: They are enabling an antisemitic moment.

What is under assault is the integrity of the mid-20th century Jewish story, of a people rejecting the self-pity of victimhood and fulfilling its most improbable dream: renewing itself, in its broken old age, in the land of its youth. The shift from the lowest point Jews have known to the reclamation of power and self-confidence is one of the most astonishing feats of survival not only in Jewish but world history. It is that story that is being distorted and trivialized and demonized on liberal campuses. 

I recently completed a lecture tour of some of the most Jewishly problematic campuses, from Columbia to Berkeley. In meetings with Jewish students, I was repeatedly told about a pervasive atmosphere of hostility toward Israel, even among many otherwise apolitical students. While the protests are an immediate threat to Jewish well-being on campus, the far deeper problem is the impact of the anti-Zionist campaign, linking the name “Israel” with racism and genocide. The vulgar protesters are a small minority, but they are shaping the attitudes of a whole generation. 

By focusing only on the immediate threat of the protests, we risk repeating the mistake we’ve made over the last decades of failing to adequately confront the systematic assault on our story.

We are losing a generation, but we haven’t yet lost. Like other radical movements, anti-Zionism could go too far in its righteous rage, potentially alienating the majority. Perhaps that process has already begun. 

The challenge of our generation is to defend the story we inherited from the survivor generation. We need to tell that story with moral credibility, in all its complexity, frankly owning our flaws even as we celebrate our successes, acknowledging the Palestinian narrative even as we insist on the integrity of our own. 

We desperately need new strategies to counter the anti-Zionist assault. A good beginning would be the creation of a brain trust, composed of community activists, rabbis, journalists, historians, public relations experts, that would devise both immediate responses to the current crisis and a long-term strategy, emulating the decades-long patient work of the anti-Zionists. 

The Jews are a story we tell ourselves about who we think we are; without our story, there is no Judaism. It is long past time to mount a credible defense of our mid-20th century story, which continues to sustain us as a people. 

[eretzyisrael]

by Yossi Klein Halevi

How is it possible that, in much of the international community, there is “understanding” for the mass atrocities of October 7? That on parts of the left there is greater outrage against Israel’s response to the Hamas massacre than to the massacre itself? That those who feel most vulnerable on liberal American campuses are not Hamas supporters but Jews? That anti-Zionists who call for turning Israelis into a defenseless minority within “Greater Palestine,” “from the river to the sea,” are chanting their hateful slogans with even greater vigor and moral self-confidence?

One answer was inadvertently provided by Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas. Speaking last month on Palestinian TV, Abbas sought to explain the origins of the Holocaust. The Nazis, he said, were not antisemitic, but opposed the Jews “because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money… In [Hitler’s] view, they were engaged in sabotage, and this is why he hated them.” In other words: the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves.

Abbas was widely condemned as an antisemite, including by some on the left. Yet Abbas’s sensibility informs the response of many progressives to the events of recent weeks. Israel, they say, effectively provoked the massacre with its occupation of the Palestinians, its racism and colonialism and apartheid, perhaps with its very existence. Once again, that is, the Jews have brought tragedy on themselves.

Blaming Jews for their own suffering is an indispensable part of the history of antisemitism. Whether as the Christ-killers of pre-Holocaust Christianity or as the race-defilers of Nazi Germany, Jews were perceived as deserving their fate. Invariably, those who target Jews believe they are responding to Jewish provocation.

What makes this moment more complicated is that, unlike in the past, Jews do indeed have power. We are no longer innocent. We are occupying the Palestinians in the West Bank. As the war intensifies, civilian casualties are rising in Gaza. And expansion of West Bank settlements undermines the long-term possibilities of a two-state solution.

But this moment does fit the historical pattern of antisemitism in the ease with which much of the world has, over the last decades, erased the Israeli understanding of the conflict and how we got to this point. A systematic and astonishingly successful campaign on the left has negated the Israeli historical and political narrative.  As a result, one of the world’s most complicated moral and political dilemmas has been turned into a proverbial passion play, in which The Israeli plays the role of Judas (in place of The Jew), betraying his destiny as noble victim and becoming the victimizer.

The Jewish state has been transformed into the sum of its sins, an irredeemably evil society that has lost its right to exist, let alone defend itself.

To blame the occupation and its consequences wholly on Israel is to dismiss the history of Israeli peace offers and Palestinian rejection. To label Israel as one more colonialist creation is to distort the unique story of the homecoming of an uprooted people, a majority of whom were refugees from destroyed Jewish communities in the Middle East. To brand Israel an apartheid state is to confuse a national with a racial conflict, and to ignore the interaction of Arab and Jewish Israelis in significant parts of the society. To understand Israel and its security dilemmas only through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian power dynamic is to ignore its vulnerability in a hostile region, and the Iranian-allied terror enclaves pressing against its borders.

[faircatch]

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This video is from 5 years ago and still relevant.

[youareprobablywrong]

Book Suggestion

Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi

This book is written from a very human perspective from an Israeli. He explains his perspective, and why it is so difficult for him, and others, to find a solution. It is written for Palestinian's. There is also a website where a free Arabic version can be downloaded, and Halevi encourages reader responses from Muslims and Arabs. There simply needs to be more engagement like this.

[joemerl]

"Both the nihilist and the mystic share the same starting point: This world of suffering and death is absurd. But where the nihilist surrenders to the madness, the mystic seeks an alternative reality."

— Yossi Klein Halevi 

[a-very-tired-jew]

Dropout Discord historical revisionism and denialism

A few days ago someone in the discord lamented over the fact that Hank Green endorsed a certain podcast.

Fig. 1. User dislikes that Hank Green will be getting a show on Dropout because they apparently endorse a podcast that "spreads lies against Palestinians". The podcast in particular is the Ezra Klein show, which I will admit I don't listen to. However, the two attached photos are quotes from a guest on the podcast and the "lies" that the show spreads.

Fig. 2. Klein's guest, Yossi Klein Halevi, states that Palestinian leaders, to his knowledge, have not accepted Jewish indigeneity nor has there been acceptance of a Jewish majority state.

Fig. 2. Halevi claims that the average Palestinian does not see Israel as a legitimate country and that the Holocaust is a lie, which is pushed by its media and leaders. Let's look at these claims. The first purports that no Palestinian leader has accepted Jewish indigeneity to the region. Doing a Google dive finds that no leader has accepted this, but nor have they outright denied it from what I can tell (if they have I will edit this with examples). Other leaders have said that the Jews Zionists are outright invaders in the area (looking at you Faisal), and the terrorist groups have said this type of rhetoric as well. Acceptance of a Jewish majority state has always been an issue in the MENA region. Other blogs have gone over this more in depth than I will here, but it has to do with a combination of historical antisemitism and reducing Jews to second class citizens. Jews are now "uppity" because they have their own country and rights that they didn't have in many of the other places they used to live (Westerners if you don't understand this and you're mad about this statement, you really need to look into the history of Jews as dhimmis and laws made against us). These next two claims I can see where people get upset and decry them as a lie. This gets a bit into semantics and how people think though. Halevi states that the average Palestinian thinks Israel is an illegitimate country based upon Zionist myth and the Holocaust lie/exaggeration. Many of the individuals in this particular server, and in other spaces, will likely go "But I know a Palestinian and they acknowledge the Holocaust was real! This is a lie." However, Halevi is not talking about the individual, they're talking about averages and generalizations and how the populace is influenced by their leaders and media. It is correct to state that Arafat never denied the Holocaust happened. However, members of the PLO during his tenure often did on their own. The current chairman of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas, is a known Holocaust denialist/revisionist who wrote their PhD dissertation the Holocaust as a lie. He has repeatedly blamed the Jews for the Holocaust and played down the number of deaths. Abbas pushes the Zionist/Hitler conspiracy based upon the Haavara Agreement, makes false claims that less than 1 million Jews died, that the Allies made up the 6 million number, and that the gas chambers did not exist. There's a lot more nuance to things like the Haavara Agreement than I, an ecologist, can parse, so I leave that to my betters. However, just know that a small agreement like that does not support the claim that Zionists orchestrated the mass killing of Jews to steal land from Palestinians. That is outrageously antisemitic and relies upon a number of conspiracies. If we look at other leaders we will see denialism and revisionism as well. Hamas and its leadership has long denied that the Holocaust happened and they were upset when the UNRWA tried to include it in textbooks in Gaza back in 2009. Remember, Hamas is in charge of Gaza and their leaders are therefore Palestinian leaders for the area. Their denialism goes all the way back to the 00s where they issued the following statement in response to a conference on the Holocaust held in Stockhold at the time:

"This conference bears a clear Zionist goal, aimed at forging history by hiding the truth about the so-called Holocaust, which is an alleged and invented story with no basis. . . . The invention of these grand illusions of an alleged crime that never occurred, ignoring the millions of dead European victims of Nazism during the war, clearly reveals the racist Zionist face, which believes in the superiority of the Jewish race over the rest of the nations." -This quote is originally from their old website palestine.info.org This sentiment and denialism is not new. I have posted an excerpt of this particular article in the past.

Fig. 4. Excerpt of Martha Gellhorn's article from 1961 The Arabs of Palestine - a camp leader states revisionism and conspiracy. Martha Gellhorn's 1961 article titled The Arabs of Palestine documents Holocaust denialism and revisionism throughout it. The excerpt posted above is from her time interviewing one of the camp leaders while being escorted by a Secret Service agent. It takes the Haavara Agreement into conspiracy territory and alleges that Jews (not event Zionists, just outright Jews) worked with Hitler to kill their own people. Hell, it actually doesn't go full Haavara conspiracy because the leader does not state this was done to force the Jews to emigrate to Palestine and "steal their land" as the article moves on after this section. I highly recommend reading Gellhorn's article as it highlights many of the sentiments that we see to this day, and it was written in 1961. Holocaust denialism and revisionism have been ever present. Some things have changed, such as other nations normalizing their relations with Israel and recognizing them, but others have not. And in the end, this is another example of young activists who think they're informed on a subject they recently became passionate about showing that they are in fact not as informed as they think.

[hero-israel]

Yossi Klein Halevi still has hope. So do I.

[borealisthegreat]

The air was thick with New England humidity and I shifted uncomfortably, hands turning sticky against the cover of my book: Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein HaLevi. I had struck up a conversation with a protester in my town square, my own Palestinian neighbor, an elderly man with anxiety folded deep into his face. To him I was a sad and troubled youth, clinging to a myth woven by foremothers’ religious zeal and the colonial ambitions of my forefathers.

“You aren’t Israeli,” he reassured me. You aren’t the object of my fear.

He told me that he had been displaced from Jerusalem and asked if I thought that was right. I said simply, “No”, and at his jolted expression wondered how many times he had heard a different answer. I didn’t intend to lay singular claim to our land, or to create in my neighbor a token, waving the flag of his torment as if to say, “You see? He believes us! We aren’t so bad after all.” I sought, and still seek, an understanding; if not with him, then of him. In turn, I offered whatever I could of myself and those I hope to represent.

“Do you know what the word ‘Jew’ means?” I asked, and he challenged me in turn.

“Do you know what ‘Palestinian’ means?”

I remembered looking down from the Old City’s rooftops at rows of colorful stalls, rich scents and ancient tongues filling the air. My cousins and I had wanted to explore, but our bubbe refused.

“That’s the Palestinian Shuk,” she said. My cousins, Jewesses of the most orthodox variety, nodded and turned away. Their histories are in Hebrew. They know this land by its holiness, its interim inhabitants by their etymological root, plishtim: literally, “invaders”.

I wasn’t raised on reverence, and my parents, with whom I once had a screaming debate about the Renaissance, don’t smooth over history for my easy comprehension. I know where the Palestinian Arabs’ name comes from, and I know where they come from. I know the same of my fellow Americans. I live on native Naumkeag land, but I wouldn’t forcibly uproot Mr. Payne next door to “liberate” it. I wouldn’t tear down this society in place of another.

My neighbor rejected my etymology, and I allowed him to, even if it did challenge my historical understanding, because my very existence challenged his.

I asked him again about my people’s name.

“I know what a Jew is,” he said, and I shook my head.

The word “Jew” comes from the Hebrew Yehudi, which became the Ancient Greek Ἰουδαῖος, then Latin Iudaeus, then French Giu. In Arabic we are Yahud—a slur. Etymologically, all mean “Judean”.

Again, my words went unheard as my neighbor reformed them in his image. Us, pretenders; I, an indoctrinated figure of tragedy.

“To solve our conflict, we must recognize not only each other’s right to self-determination but also each side’s right to self-definition.” These are Klein HaLevi’s words, words I held close to my heart as I stood before a man suddenly deaf. I’m trying, I wanted to scream.

Months earlier, I had spoken at my town’s ceasefire resolution. My father’s address was met with silence, but a few hijabis clapped as I scrambled, heart pounding, to my seat. When the resolution was passed, as we knew it would be, and I stood adamantly between a room of cold faces and the waterfalls of my frustration, one of them came to me. 

“You are so brave,” She smiled, glassy-eyed. Her keffiyeh was a color I had never seen before, green like the Jordan, and I could feel its waters and the weight of her understanding choking me as she tangled our fingers.

Looking upon my Palestinian neighbor in the center of our shared town, my silver tongue withered. I’m trying. Please understand. Let me understand.

I’m sure he misread my tears.

[st-just]

Listening to the Ezra Klein Show interview with Yossi Klein Halevi and, like, wow he really does just come out and explicitly say 'I don't really care if the methods are violent or nonviolent, or if people are motivated by antisemitism, anything that would result in Israel not having a Jewish majority is an existential threat' huh.

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Purple sweet potatoes and Hamas in town.

From the river to the sea. Which river? Oh, that river. Yes, that's what I thought.

Are they representatives of Hamas? It’s hard to tell. I suspect their intentions are mostly benign, The actions of people Aspiring to do the right thing, To stand in solidarity With the oppressed Nevertheless, They Shouted From the river to the sea… X Yesterday, I visited Sheffield to buy some purple sweet potatoes. Those powerful antioxidant secrets of Okinawan longevity are not…

[jewish-microwave-laser]

Is it possible, as anti-Zionists insist, to separate Zionism from Judaism? Is Zionism mere "politics," as opposed to Judaism, which is authentic "religion"?

The answer depends on what one means by Zionism. If it refers to the political movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century, then certainly, there are forms of Judaism that are independent of Zionism. In the era before the establishment of Israel, Jews vehemently debated the wisdom of the Zionist program. Marxist Jews rejected Zionism as a diversion from the anticipated world revolution. Ultra-Orthodox Jews rejected Zionism as a secularizing movement, while some insisted that only the messiah could bring the Jews home.

But if by "Zionism" one means the Jewish attachment to the land of Israel and the dream of renewing Jewish sovereignty in our place of origin, then there is no Judaism without Zionism. Judaism isn't only a set of rituals and rules but a vision linked to a place. Modern movements that created forms of Judaism severed from the love of the land and the dream of return all ended in failure.

By the time the state was established, anti-Zionism had become peripheral in Jewish life. Aside from a vocal fringe, most ultra-Orthodox Jews made their peace with the Jewish state. Israel's declaration of Independence was signed by representatives of almost the entire spectrum of the Jewish community—from ultra-Orthodox to Communists. That document attests to the legitimacy, within the Jewish people, of the state created by Zionism.

In recent years there have been renewed attempts, especially on the fringes of the Diaspora left, to create a Jewish identity severed from Israel. But with nearly half the world's Jews living in a thriving Jewish-majority state, the debate has long since been resolved. If in the past one couldn't separate the land of Israel from Jewish life, today the same holds true for the state of Israel.

from "Need and Longing" in Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi, pp. 42–43

[arvidsgarden]

"It is terrifying to see how many resources Hamas diverted to build weapons rather than Gaza’s human capital — and how effectively it hid that from Israel and the world. Indeed, it is hard not to notice the contrast between Gaza’s evident human poverty and the wealth of weaponry Hamas has built and deployed.

"Hamas’s dream has long been the unification of the fronts surrounding Israel, regionally and globally. Israel’s strategy has always been to act in ways to prevent that — until this Netanyahu coalition of ultra-Orthodox and Jewish supremacists came to power last December and began behaving in ways that actually helped foster the unification of the anti-Israel fronts.

How so? The Jewish supremacists in Netanyahu’s cabinet immediately began to challenge the status quo on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which is revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and where one of Islam’s holiest sites, the Aqsa Mosque, stands. The Netanyahu government began taking steps to impose much harsher conditions on Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza held in Israeli jails. And it laid plans for a huge expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank to prevent a contiguous Palestinian state from ever coming into being there. This is the first Israeli government ever to make annexation of the West Bank a stated objective in its coalition agreement.

To reduce this incredibly complex struggle of two peoples for the same land to a colonial war is to commit intellectual fraud. Or as the Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi put it in The Times of Israel on Wednesday: “To blame the occupation and its consequences wholly on Israel is to dismiss the history of Israeli peace offers and Palestinian rejection. To label Israel as one more colonialist creation is to distort the unique story of the homecoming of an uprooted people, a majority of whom were refugees from destroyed Jewish communities in the Middle East.”

But here’s what’s also intellectually corrupt: buying into the Israeli right-wing settler narrative, now being spread far and wide inside Israel, that Hamas violence is so savage it clearly has nothing to do with anything settlers have done — so more settlements are just fine.

My view: This is a territorial dispute between two people claiming the same land which needs to be divided as equitably as possible. Such a compromise is the cornerstone for any success against Hamas. So, if you are for a two-state solution, you are my friend and if you are against a two-state solution, you are not my friend."

Thomas Friedman NY Times

[wouldnt-it-be-hilarious-if-i]

New additions to the Reading List (Judaism edition)

currently listening to: mirrorball by taylor swift

Okay.

So, I'm currently reading Woke Antisemitism by David L. Bernstein and definitely realizing I can't avoid reading about Israel and Zionism if I want to understand anything about this topic on a genuine level. The book is super interesting, and I think it's a great read with a lot of very hot takes that are definitely at times a bit...questionable at first but if you hear him out, the points do make a lot of sense. I'm not talking about the antisemitism points, which I already agreed with. But some of his takes on white privilege, black culture, and feminism are a bit interesting.

One topic does keep coming up in the book, likely because it's very important. While I understand the points that he's making about how anti-Zionism, while not inherently antisemitic (from what I understand, like I said, I still need to do research), is often used as a vehicle for pretty blatant antisemitism on the left. He also talks a lot about how the left allows antisemitism to run rampant because of some of the topics I named above, and I actually agree with him. I can definitely see how an oppressor/oppressed hierarchy leaves out a lot of grey areas that Jews would historically fall into. It's an interesting take, and I'm glad to read it and get closer to understanding a bit about what it must feel and be like to be Jewish today. Obviously, this is only one man's opinion, but I do value every opinion I read because it matters to me that I read about this from every angle that I possibly can so that I am well-informed on how to be a better ally. To add to that, this man isn't just some guy. He's extremely qualified to speak on these issues, not just because he's a Jewish person living in the world today experiencing these issues, but because of his education and experience as well.

In 2016, He was President and CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), Executive Director of The David Project ( from August 2010 to September 2014, and held senior roles with the American Jewish Committee (AJC). During his undergrad at Ohio State studying Philosophy and Jewish studies (he later goes on to get his masters in International Relations), he served on the National Jewish Student Leadership Board and was a huge pro-Israel activist on campus. Just after undergrad, he worked with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington. It goes on an on, and his work has been centrally about progressive values, diversity and inclusion. He has also written tons of articles about antisemitism in the left since at least the 80s, and did a 44 minute interview regarding his book with a talk show.

His book heavily focuses on antizionism being used as a way to be antisemitic in the left, so I'm not even more interested in reading more about this subject than I was before so that I can understand his arguments more critically. I can't really form an opinion on something that I am neither affected by or know very little about, but I can say that his book is an incredibly insightful starting point (so far, I'm only on chapter 5 of 16) for anyone that wants an idea of different things to look into and research independently in order to gain a better understanding of the issues he's discussing (not just Zionism and Israel, but also Jewish life in the United States specifically).

Anyway, online, I found a few videos that explained the Israeli-Palestinian conflict really concisely, but I'd rather read about it a bit more than just depend on a few videos and documentaries on YouTube. I asked my friend about any suggestions she may have, and she told me that Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi was a good one (but warned that it wasn't a great intro book to everything), so I've added it to my list.

With that, here are a few books I found that (tentatively) seem to explain some things. I really want to have a well-rounded view of this subject, so I'm looking for books that discuss Israel and Palestine from all sides of the conflict. In this list, I'll separate Zionist related books from books that have to do with Israel, because from what I understand the two get conflated often even though they aren't interchangeable (as in the terms 'Jew', 'Israeli' and 'Zionist' are not often used today to mean their respective definitions, but rather the same thing, which they are not).

These books are a mixture of like textbook explanations and narrative accounts, since I like to get an idea of both the academic aspect of sensitive issues like this and the personal accounts from real people who are experiencing these things or who believe in specific things.

Books about Israel/Palestine and the conflict

Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi

Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Hardcover by Ilan Pappe

Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel by Roger Mattson

Blood Brothers: The Dramatic Story of a Palestinian Christian Working for Peace in Israel by Elias Chacour

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby

Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict by Oren Kessler

Books about Zionism

My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit

Zionism: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Stanislawski

A Short History of Christian Zionism: From the Reformation to the Twenty-First Century by Donald M. Lewis

A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel by Walter Laqueur

Notes:

I mostly chose the Short History of Christian Zionism so that I can examine my own bias in regard to Israel. I come from a conservative-lite, Catholic/Baptist, German (and African)-immigrant family, so when I was growing up, the only thing I learned about Israel was that it rightfully belonged to the Jews and was given to them after the Holocaust because of their suffering. My mom really stressed to me as a child and teenager that this was promised land.

That being said, I never learned anything about Palestine, or the conflict. A large portion of this was explained to me when I was like ten. If I did learn anything about Palestine, I think it was usually along the lines of, "Well, some people don't believe that, and they're very mad about it." Very they can stay mad sort of energy.

Now, this was my family's opinion. If I'm being honest, I didn't care one way or the other when this was explained to me as a child. But I did think, since this was the only real contact I had with the subject, that it was nice that Jews got to have Israel after so much suffering, and that they were very deserving of it since the Holocaust was so horrific. So, this was my thinking for many years until, honestly, I think when I got to college and met actual Muslims and Jews. At that point, I was actually incredibly shocked to learn that there was a whole conflict, it wasn't half as simple as it had been explained to me, and that conservative families straight up do not prepare their children for any real world understanding of international relations.

Anyways, so now here I am playing catch up to the rest of the world, per usual.

The title for The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi interests me because of the use of the words "settler colonialism." In a quick google search, I found that one argument is that "Jewish Israelis are 'settlers' who want to conquer more and more Palestinian land." I have no idea if this is true, but the term used in the title is a big part of why it's on the list, because you can immediately tell what the author's stance is and how the book may be framed. I chose My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit for similar reasons.

As I've said many times, I know very little about this and have no personal opinions about it as a result (meaning that I literally am not neutral, for or against anything rn because I need to do more research. My goal is just to understand rn.), so any titles that I choose are purely because of the reviews, popularity of the books, and/or any possible bias that I can detect naturally rather than from any real understanding of the issue. That's also why I chose a book on Christian Zionism as well, because I'm interested in how Evangelists have affected this issue as well and want to make sure I fully understand the thinking behind what I was taught as a child. Quite a few of the books I've chosen written by Israelis appear to be rather biased as well, so I think I'll be learning a lot historically and politically about this topic in such a way that I'll be able to really understand a lot of it from many different points of view.