Although news and social media might be taking up a lot of attention at present, sometimes our understanding of a complex situation might benefit from a deeper or longer read. Some of my favourite independent and radical publishers have made available free books about Israel and Palestine from their lists and I thought it might be useful to collect them all together in one place. Some are available until the end of October, others have different terms and conditions, so check out any of the ones that interest you soon.
Haymarket Books have made three ebooks free to read:
- Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions by Omar Barghouti
- Light in Gaza (edited by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing and Mike Merryman-Lotze)
- Palestine: A Socialist Introduction (edited by Sumaya Awad and Brian Bean)
All three are available from the Haymarket Books website here and you can also check out their Free Palestine reading list.
O/R Books have a free book about Israel and Palestine available from their website: Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel and Palestine’s Toughest Questions is edited by Jamie Stein-Weiner and features contributions from a wide range of activists, politicians and scholars from Israel and Palestine.
The ebook of Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s Ten Myths About Israel is available for free from Verso Books. They also have 20% off many of their other titles on Israel and Palestine.
Saqi Books are not offering free books about Israel and Palestine; however, all of their Palestinian titles are available with 25% off if you use the code ‘SaqiPalestine’. They will be donating all profits to Medical Aid for Palestinians. I can recommend the short story collection Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women and Pay No Heed to the Rockets by Marcello Di Cintio. They also have Classic Palestinian Cuisine by Christiane Dabdoub Nasser if you require food for the body rather than food for thought.
I am always loath to say that someone must read such and such book(s) before giving their opinion on any current events; no one needs to read 1,000 pages to know that atrocities are wrong and deserving of condemnation, after all. But in a world of hot takes and knee-jerk reactions, where headlines that go around the world in minutes take days to be walked back, there is benefit in listening to and sharing the stories of those with first-hand knowledge.
