The Middle East — From Israel's Founding to the War in Gaza

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

David Fromkin

The essential starting point for understanding why the Middle East looks the way it does. Fromkin traces the decisions made by British and French officials during and after World War I that dismantled the Ottoman Empire and drew the borders of the modern Middle East — borders designed to serve European imperial interests rather than the peoples living inside them. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine without adequately accounting for the Arab population already there, is a central document in Fromkin's account. His argument — that the modern Middle East's instability is not ancient or inevitable but was engineered, in specific rooms, by specific people, for specific strategic reasons — is the foundation on which every other book in this syllabus rests. You cannot understand Israel's founding without understanding what Britain promised to whom, and when, and why. Fromkin gives you that.

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

Rashid Khalidi

Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia and the descendant of a mayor of Ottoman-era Jerusalem — a family whose history is woven through the events he describes. The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is the first major general history of the conflict told explicitly from the Palestinian perspective, and it is the most important Palestinian-perspective book a Western reader can encounter. Khalidi's central argument — that the conflict is best understood as a settler colonial project, in which an indigenous population has been systematically displaced by a combination of Zionist settlement, British facilitation, and American support — is one that most Israeli historians reject and most Palestinian scholars affirm. His evidence is archival and meticulous. His argument is serious and contestable. Both things are true simultaneously.

Read this alongside entry 03 — Shavit's My Promised Land is the Israeli liberal counterpart to Khalidi's Palestinian account. The same events; two entirely different moral frameworks. Reading them together is the point.

My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

Ari Shavit

Shavit is one of Israel's most prominent journalists and a committed Zionist who is nonetheless unflinching about what the founding of Israel required and what it cost. My Promised Land is simultaneously a love letter to Israel and the most honest reckoning with its founding available from an Israeli author writing for a general audience. Shavit's account of the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from the city of Lydda — which he names directly as a war crime while also arguing that the creation of Israel required it — is one of the most morally serious passages in contemporary political writing. This is not a comfortable book for anyone. Zionists will be troubled by Shavit's honesty about 1948. Critics of Israel will be troubled by his continued belief in the Zionist project despite that honesty. That discomfort is precisely why it belongs here, alongside Khalidi.

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Ilan Pappe

Pappe is an Israeli-born historian who was a professor at the University of Haifa before emigrating to the UK following sustained pressure from Israeli academic and political institutions over his work. His central argument — that the displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 was not an accidental consequence of war but a deliberate, planned campaign of ethnic cleansing executed by the Haganah and other Zionist military forces — is one of the most contested claims in the historiography of the conflict. Mainstream Israeli historians dispute it. Palestinian historians largely affirm it. The historical record Pappe draws on — including Israeli military archives and the testimony of Palestinian survivors — is genuine, and his interpretation of that record is the subject of serious scholarly debate rather than dismissal. What makes this book essential is precisely that it forces engagement with the most uncomfortable version of a historical argument that is not going away: that what happened in 1948 was not a tragic byproduct of war but a policy. Whether you accept that argument or reject it, you need to be able to engage with the evidence seriously.

Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Michael Oren

The 1967 war — in which Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in six days and captured the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights — is the pivot point of the modern conflict. Everything that follows: the settlements, the occupation, Oslo, the Intifadas, Hamas, Gaza — is downstream of 1967. Oren, who later served as Israel's ambassador to the United States, wrote the definitive account of the war from a perspective broadly sympathetic to Israel's decision-making while remaining genuinely rigorous about the historical record. His access to Israeli military and intelligence archives is unmatched. Read this alongside Khalidi to understand the same pivotal moment from two entirely different vantage points.

Hamas: A Beginner's Guide

Khaled Hroub

You cannot understand October 7 without understanding Hamas — what it is, where it came from, what it wants, and how it has governed Gaza since 2007. Hroub is a Palestinian academic who writes about Hamas with the rigor of a scholar rather than the advocacy of a partisan. His account traces Hamas's origins in the Muslim Brotherhood, its relationship to Palestinian nationalism, its shift from military resistance to governance, and the contradictions embedded in an organization that is simultaneously a political party, a social services provider, and a military force responsible for deliberate attacks on civilians. This is not a book that excuses October 7. It is a book that makes October 7 intelligible — and intelligibility is not the same as justification. You need this book to evaluate any political position on how to respond to what happened.

The Forever War

Dexter Filkins

Filkins is the premier American war correspondent of his generation and the only American journalist to have reported from the Taliban's Afghanistan in the 1990s, the ruins of the World Trade Center on September 11, and the American wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The Forever War — which won the National Book Critics Circle Award — is the essential ground-level counterpoint to every policy-level account of America's post-9/11 wars in the region. Where the policy books tell you what officials decided, Filkins tells you what those decisions looked like at the level of the human beings living through them: soldiers, civilians, insurgents, translators, children. The geopolitical and the human cannot be separated in an honest account of these conflicts. Filkins refuses to separate them.

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

Robert Fisk

Fisk spent more than four decades as the Middle East correspondent for The Independent, based in Beirut, speaking Arabic, reporting from every major conflict in the region from the Lebanese Civil War to the American invasion of Iraq. The Great War for Civilisation — over a thousand pages, covering five decades — is the most comprehensive journalistic account of the modern Middle East available in English, and the most relentlessly critical of Western, and specifically American and British, foreign policy in the region. Fisk is not a neutral observer. He is openly critical of Israeli policy toward Palestinians and openly critical of American military intervention. His perspective is a corrective to accounts that treat American intentions as inherently benevolent. Read him alongside Oren and Shavit as a necessary counterweight.

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

Steve Coll

The definitive account of America's decades-long covert relationship with Afghanistan and the forces that eventually produced al-Qaeda and September 11. Coll spent years with access to CIA documents and senior intelligence officials to reconstruct how the United States armed and funded the mujahideen against the Soviet Union, then walked away from Afghanistan after the Soviets left — leaving behind the weapons, the networks, and the grievances that Osama bin Laden would organize into the most consequential terrorist attack in American history. The central argument is not that America caused 9/11 — it is that American foreign policy in the region operated with a time horizon too short to see the consequences of its own decisions. That pattern — short-term strategic logic producing long-term catastrophic outcomes — is the through-line of the entire Deep Dive tier.

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

Thomas Ricks

Ricks covered the Pentagon for the Washington Post and later the Wall Street Journal, and Fiasco is the most rigorous and damning account of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and the catastrophic management of the occupation that followed. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with military officers, civilians, and Iraqis, Ricks documents how the Bush administration went to war based on intelligence it knew was contested, disbanded the Iraqi army against the advice of experienced commanders, and failed to plan for the insurgency that any serious analyst could have predicted. The book's central argument — that the Iraq War was not a good idea executed poorly but a fundamentally misconceived operation at every level — is supported by evidence that is difficult to refute. Essential reading for any voter trying to evaluate candidates who claim experience in foreign policy judgment.

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt

The most controversial book in this syllabus and the most important for understanding the domestic American politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mearsheimer and Walt — two of the most prominent realist foreign policy scholars in the United States — argue that American policy toward Israel has been shaped less by genuine strategic interest and more by the organized political influence of pro-Israel advocacy groups, to a degree that has sometimes harmed both American and Israeli long-term interests. The book was rejected by its original publisher after enormous pressure and was ultimately published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It was immediately accused of antisemitism by many critics and defended as rigorous political science by others. The Obsidian Library presents it here not as the final word but as the book that asks the question most directly: who shapes American policy toward Israel, and in whose interest? Every voter should have an answer to that question.

Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

Kim Ghattas

Ghattas was born in Lebanon and has covered the Middle East for the BBC for decades. Black Wave is the essential account of how the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the simultaneous rise of Saudi Wahhabism exported a more rigid, more political, and more weaponized form of Islam across the region — and how that export transformed societies that had been considerably more pluralistic and secular. This is the book that directly challenges the religion-as-cause narrative by showing that the religious extremism Americans associate with the Middle East is not ancient and immutable but was deliberately cultivated, funded, and exported for political purposes by two rival states competing for regional dominance. Religion was the vehicle. Power was the destination.

Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War

Anthony Shadid

Shadid spoke Arabic fluently and spent years in Iraq before, during, and after the American invasion, reporting from inside Iraqi communities rather than from inside the Green Zone. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for his Iraq coverage and died in Syria in 2012 while on assignment. Night Draws Near is the essential complement to Ricks's policy-level account of the Iraq War — where Ricks documents what American officials decided, Shadid documents what Iraqis experienced. His central argument is quiet but devastating: the Iraqis the United States claimed to be liberating had a far more complicated relationship to American intervention than American officials were willing to acknowledge, and the gap between what America thought it was doing in Iraq and what Iraqis understood it to be doing was the space in which the insurgency grew.

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

Lawrence Wright

Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the decade leading up to September 11 is the finest piece of narrative nonfiction written about the origins of al-Qaeda and the American intelligence failures that allowed the attacks to happen. More relevant to this syllabus is what Wright documents about the ideological and political conditions that produced al-Qaeda: the repression of Islamist movements in Egypt, the American support for that repression, the radicalization of men who had tried and failed to achieve political change through legitimate means, and the role of American foreign policy — specifically in Saudi Arabia and Egypt — in generating the grievances that bin Laden weaponized. This is not an argument that America deserved 9/11. It is an argument that American foreign policy helped create the conditions for it, and that understanding those conditions is essential to preventing what comes next.

Orientalism

Edward Said

Said's 1978 book is the foundational text for understanding how the West has constructed its image of the Middle East — and how that image has served political purposes regardless of its accuracy. His argument: Western scholarship, literature, and media have systematically portrayed the Arab and Muslim world as exotic, irrational, backward, and in need of Western management — a portrait that conveniently justifies imperial intervention while obscuring the political and economic interests driving it. Orientalism is not an easy book and it is not an uncontested one — many scholars have challenged aspects of Said's argument. But it is indispensable for understanding why the religion-as-cause narrative is so persistent and so useful to so many powerful actors. If you want to understand why American politicians keep reaching for civilizational language when discussing the Middle East, Said gives you the intellectual history of that reflex.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story

Nathan Thrall

Thrall is an American Jewish analyst who spent years at the International Crisis Group working on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama — which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2024 — uses a single devastating event, a school bus accident in the West Bank in 2012, to illuminate the entire architecture of the occupation: how it works, what it costs Palestinian civilians in daily life, and how thoroughly invisible that cost is to most American readers and most American politicians. The book is not polemical. It is observational, meticulously reported, and almost unbearable in its specificity. It belongs in the Counterpoint tier because it challenges the abstraction through which most Americans — including most American politicians — discuss Palestinian life under occupation. You cannot vote intelligently on American policy toward the West Bank without understanding what the West Bank actually looks like for the people living in it.

The Punishment of Gaza

Gideon Levy

Levy is an Israeli journalist who has spent decades covering Gaza and the West Bank for Haaretz, Israel's oldest daily newspaper, and who has become one of the most prominent and most criticized voices in Israeli public life for his insistence on documenting Palestinian civilian experience. The Punishment of Gaza — a collection of his reporting — is the counterpoint from inside Israeli civic life: the argument that Israeli policy toward Gaza has constituted collective punishment of a civilian population, made by an Israeli journalist drawing on Israeli sources and Israeli law. This is not an external critique of Israel. It is an internal one, which makes it considerably harder to dismiss as antisemitism or outside agitation. It belongs here as the most direct challenge to the framing — common in American political discourse — that Israeli military operations in Gaza are categorically different from the civilian harm they produce.

The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump

Max Blumenthal

Blumenthal is a polarizing figure and this is a polarizing book — it belongs in the Counterpoint tier precisely because it makes the strongest possible version of the argument that American counterterrorism policy has consistently made the threats it claims to be fighting worse. His central argument: the "war on terror," as executed by the United States across three administrations, systematically strengthened jihadist movements by destroying the state structures that contained them, arming factions that later turned against American interests, and generating the civilian casualties that served as al-Qaeda's and ISIS's most effective recruitment tools. This is not the mainstream American foreign policy position. It is the position that a significant portion of the global south, and a growing portion of the American electorate, holds. You should be able to evaluate it on its merits.

The Arabs: A History

Eugene Rogan

Rogan's comprehensive history of the Arab world from the Ottoman period to the present is the counterpoint to every narrative — from any direction — that treats Arab peoples as passive objects of history rather than as political actors with their own aspirations, decisions, and agency. The standard American framing of Middle Eastern conflicts tends to center American, Israeli, or Islamist actors while treating Arab populations as backdrop. Rogan restores Arab political agency to the story — the Arab nationalist movements, the pan-Arab projects, the specific decisions made by Arab leaders, and the structural forces that constrained them. This is the book that makes it impossible to sustain the lazy narrative that the Middle East's problems are the result of either Western interference alone or Islamic extremism alone. The history is more complicated, and the people in it made choices.