Where to start

Gilbert, Martin. Israel: A History, London: Doubleday, 1998.

Schulze, Kirsten. The Arab-Israeli Conflict, London: Pearson Education, 2008.

More suggested reading

Arian, Asher. Politics in Israel: The Second Republic, Michigan: CQ Press, 2005.

Avineri, Shlomo. The Making of Modern Zionism: Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Bregman, Ahron and Jihan El-Tahri. Israel and the Arabs: An Eyewitness Account of War and Peace in the Middle East, New York: TV Books, 2000.

Eldar, Akiva and Idith Zertal. Lords of the Land: The War over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007, translated by Vivian Eden, New York: Nation Books, 2009.

Friedman, Thomas. From Beirut to Jerusalem, New York: Harper Collins, 1995.

Gilbert, Martin. The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 9th Edition, Oxford: Routledge, 2008.

Laqueur, Walter and Barry Rubin. The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, New York: Penguin Books, 2008.

Morris, Benny. 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2008.

Nusseibeh, Sari and Anthony David. Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life, London: Picador, 2008.

Oren, Michael. Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Ross, Dennis and David Makovsky. Myths, Illusions and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East, Viking, 2009.

Sachar, Howard. A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, New York: Knopf, 2007.

Sayigh, Yezid. Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Shindler, Colin. What Do Zionists Believe?, London: Granta Books, 2007.

Tessler, Mark. A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994.