I didn’t collect stamps or coins like normal folks. Through a half-century’s haunting of used book stores and library book sales, I’ve accumulated over a thousand non-fiction books on our Jewish homeland of Israel, ancient and modern.
Beyond the joy of collecting and reading and re-reading my favorites, I have this obsession that if we “Zionists” could just get our fellow grassroots US Jews who lack interest in Israel to read a couple stirring accounts of what Krauthammer rightly called the miraculous event of our time, our people’s historic homeland’s sovereign rebirth, they’d become Zionists too.
And all of us sometimes fall prey to the malevolent myths perpetrated by those who don’t mean Jews well – from “King David was as real as King Arthur” to “Israel’s a colonial settler state oppressing ‘Palestinian’ natives.” Reading good Israel books is the antidote.
Two places to get these mostly “used” Israel books are Amazon and AbeBooks.com.
In 1939 Britain, Trustee of the Palestine Mandate to rebuild there the “Jewish national home” with “close settlement of Jews on the land,” reneged by slamming Palestine’s gates to us Jews before, during and after the Holocaust. Palestine’s Jews – in acts of stirring courage by them and survivors themselves – responded with sailing survivors in rickety ships into the teeth of the British blockade. Few accounts of 20th century defiance of imperial injustice are more moving.
The underground Irgun and LEHI fought in their own ways against British efforts to stifle Jewish immigration to the land of Israel, including bombing the British offices wing of the King David Hotel, the Acre Fortress prisoner escape, assassinations and more. The Altalena tragedy during the 1948 War culminated their separate existence.
Israel successfully threw back the instant Arab invasion of 1948, but that war was suspended by UN-imposed ceasefire with Jordan in historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria. When Jordan renewed fighting in 1967, Israel ousted it from all areas west of the River, restoring Jewish control to our people’s entire historic homeland. Among the most gripping of Jewish history books are those on the 1967 Six Day War.
Following WW II and global awareness of the Holocaust’s magnitude and of Palestinian Jews’ struggle for independence and to bring home survivors languishing in European DP camps in the face of Britain’s anti-Jewish Palestine blockade, and of Arab nations’ threats to annihilate Israel should Partition by voted by the UN, young US Jewish vets volunteered to aid in bringing home Jews and in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Here are some moving books about that.
How did they do it? Outnumbered in every way, barred by the British from openly importing arms until the Mandate’s last day, the land of Israel’s Jews threw back and then some the instant invasion for its destruction of the armies of multiple Arab states. If there’s an acid test of actual statehood, throwing back an invasion begun the day your state declared independence is it. Here are stirring books.
Of all Israel’s wars the one that I always was most reluctant to read about was the Yom Kippur War. I knew the Israelis, almost overwhelmed at the start, had won in the end incredible victories on both fronts, but still . . . . But reading the books here changed my mind. They pulled off one of history’s most astonishing turn-arounds. And it truly was a War of Atonement, with lasting lessons into the future.
The world today is obsessed with imposing on Israel a “two-state solution” – i.e., a Palestinian Arab state inside the land of Israel, Palestine west of the River – no peace deal, no recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, just a Palestinian Arab state in addition to eastern Palestine, judenrein Jordan. There is a less fatal to our Jewish homeland alternative, internal autonomy for Palestinian Arabs in areas of Judea-Samaria with Israeli external security control. Amb. Friedman spells it out.
Two giants of the Zionist movement with whose classic books grassroots US Jews should be familiar are Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann. So here are quick looks at Herzl’s Jewish State and his Diaries, and Dr. Weizmann’s autobiography, Trial and Error.
What’s wrong with American Jews? These books address that. Psychiatrist and historian Kenneth Levin’s The Canary on the Couch analyzes our understandable but inappropriate responses to rising antizionism and antisemitism. Jacobs & Goldwasser’s Betrayal collects essays on failure of Jewish leadership. My Here & Now has a chapter enumerating recent anti-Israel actions by us here.
The books (and DVD) that I include here are on recent unearthings that should be of interest to our grassroots – King David’s palace, the Pool of Siloam and Pilgrimage Road in the City of David, Ritmeyer’s detective work on the Temple Mount in general reader and more detailed versions, and Mike Pompeo and David Friedman’s tour through Samaria, Jerusalem and Judea along Route 60: The Biblical Highway. Come along.
If you’re perplexed over Americans’ declining support for our people’s homeland of Israel in the wake of Hamas’ devastating attack and the IDF’s response, reflect on our decades of averting our eyes from mainstream media incessant ubiquitous blaming of Israel, currently of perpetrating “genocide” in Gaza. Sha shtil’s not the answer. These books reveal how devastating decades of miscoverage have been and what we must do.
No, we weren’t exiled by Rome and were gone for close to 2000 years. These books movingly document our tenacious continuous homeland physical presence, which Parkes rightly confirmed wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”
Philly ZOA has its own selected list of books about Zionism, Israel and the Middle East.
