Five Novels to Read about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

There is no way to absorb or understand — and never, ever to accept — the Hamas attack on Israel last week and equally difficult to process the Israeli response in Gaza. I always turn to books to try to understand the world I live in, and novels are often the best way to explore the human impacts of political, religious, and social events that shape the world. The five following novels are among my favorite books I’ve read in a lifetime of reading books (and one year of reading a book a day) and also are some of the best novels around which present the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that is realistic, humanistic, personal but also universal. The authors of each book offer their own glimmer of hope that we humans can find a way out of the nightmare of escalating and horrific violence in the Middle East.

In To the End of the Land by David Grossman (2010, translated by Jessica Cohen), Ora, an Israeli woman just over the age of fifty, sets out on a walk through the Galilee. Ora was supposed to hike with her younger son Ofer as a way of celebrating the end of his mandatory service with the IDF. But at the last minute Ofer re-enlisted in the army and now Ora walks accompanied by Ofer’s father, a man who is still recovering from his own military service decades earlier, when he was captured by the Egyptian forces and tortured.

Ora is terrified that Ofer will not make it through his 28-day re-enlistment alive. She reasons that by going out on her long and winding walk, the “notifiers” —…