Enemies and Neighbors is a big, textured, and, crucially, balanced account of over 100 years of the Israel-Palestine conflict, published on the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration (the famous pledge made by the British government on Nov. 2, 1917 expressing sympathy for a national Jewish home in Palestine). 2017 also marks the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War in June 1967, during which Israel seized its current borders. Much of the existing...

"Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for the school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos-the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad's fate. It is every...

"A Woman on Her Own, the latest book by Israeli writer Ilana Hammerman, is an episodic book, marrying stories of protest and more personal interludes on larger moral issues at play in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Though Hammerman is an activist, the reader will not find her arguing with Israeli settlers, tearing down blockades, or getting arrested. Hers is a much more personal, moving, and everyday kind of activism. She smuggles Palestinians...

Winner at the Sundance Film Festival, 5 broken cameras is a deeply personal, first-hand account of non-violent resistance in Bil'in, a West Bank village threatened by encroaching Israeli settlements. Shot almost entirely by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat, who bought his first camera in 2005 to record the birth of his youngest son, the footage was later given to Israeli co-director Guy Davidi to edit. Structured around the violent destruction of each...

In the year 721, the Muslim Empire was vast. Across the empire Jews and Christians were minorities motivated by a desire to obtain the most favorable status. Their quest for an elevated status within the empire did not hinder cultural exchanges as can be determined with the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, nor prevent the occurrence in the 11th Century of the massacre of Jews in Granada and the persecution and forced conversion of Jews & Christians under...

In 1945, the world discovers the horror of the Nazi camps. In 1948, the birth of Israel aroused anger and bitterness among Arabs and Muslims, but triggered joy and exultation throughout the Jewish world. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or fled with the hope of a future return. Within just a few decades, the vast majority of Jews living in the Muslim world would leave Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Morocco and Tunisia.

"Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba-the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people-and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Many years later, in...

"Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor is one Israeli's powerful attempt to reach beyond the wall that separates Israelis and Palestinians and into the hearts of "the enemy." In a series of letters, Yossi Klein Halevi explains what motivated him to leave his native New York in his twenties and move to Israel to participate in the drama of the renewal of a Jewish homeland, which he is committed to see succeed as a morally responsible, democratic state...

Arab stereotype portrays the Jew as a brutal, violent coward. The Jewish stereotype portrays the Arab as a primitive creature of animal vengeance and cruel desires. In this monumental Pulitzer Prize–winning work, revised in 2002, David Shipler delves into the origins of these prejudices that have been intensified by war, terrorism, and nationalism.

Shipler examines the process of indoctrination that begins in schools, the far-ranging

...