Want to understand Gaza? Then read any of these books...

Unending war in the Middle East is not a subject that invites impartiality, writes Donald Macintyre. Controversial? Perhaps, but he should know – he was The Independent’s man on the front line for years and wrote an acclaimed book about Gaza. Who better to ask to unpick the challenge authors face when writing about the region? Plus, Don’s five favourite books for understanding the conflict better

The conflict has been the subject of numerous essential books (Anadolu/Getty/Amazon)

If a famous writer promotes a book by someone else, it’s bound to carry weight. But it’s a safe bet that if William Dalrymple had tweeted a recommendation of All That Remains, by the scholar Walid Khalidi, a mere month ago, he would not have got the thousands of responses he did this week. For most of them seem to demonstrate a thirst for knowledge about the deep origins of a conflict that exploded into the world’s attention with Hamas’s brutal massacre and kidnapping of so many Israeli civilians in their southern communities on 7 October.

Khalidi’s book is a monumental account of the villages whose Palestinian residents were driven or fled from their homes in what is now Israel in the war of 1947-8, in what Arabs call the nakba or “catastrophe”. It was the Palestinian Khalidi’s early work that helped open the door for those Israeli “new historians” like Benny Morris who in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 began to dismantle a pervasive myth that the 750,000 Palestinian refugees from that war were ordered to leave by Arab leaders.

So Dalrymple’s choice is apt for two reasons. It’s impossible to understand the creation of Israel without knowing of the long persecution of European Jews culminating in the murder of six million in the Holocaust. But it is also impossible fully to understand the roots of its conflict with the Palestinians without knowing about the enforced 1947-8 exodus from their homes in what is now Israel – the “victims of the victims” as the great Palestinian writer Edward Said once put it. And secondly, because the current order to Palestinians to leave northern Gaza for what has proved to be a desperately unsafe southern part, conjures for many of them the spectre of a second nakba.