Highly Recommended Reading:

The history of Israel/Palestine is complicated, vexed, contested. What counts as true is endlessly, and often violently, disputed. I think it's intellectually lazy to conclude simply that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Still, it is true that the story of this part of the world has many sides. Below are some honest, if imperfect, attempts to represent them:

• Excerpts from journalist Eric Black's Parallel Realities or Mike Shuster's NPR series, The Mideast: A Century of Conflict. For an even quicker review, you might want to refer to PBS's nutshell History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, an interactive timeline annotated with Israeli and Palestinian views on the history of the region, or Vox's "cardstack," "Everything You Need to Know About Israel-Palestine," or Vox's "10-minute history" video, "The Israel-Palestine conflict." (It might also be worth looking at Nation columnist Eric Alterman's "Can We Talk," which ends with a reference to the PRIME Shared History Project, whose textbook can be previewed here and here. Those looking to go deeper still, historically and academically speaking, may wish to read Gilbert Achcar's "The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives" at OpenDemocracy.)

Also:

• Edward Said, "Bombs and Bulldozers" (The Nation 8 & 15 September 1997). Though the occasion for which this piece was written is long past, its complaint about what Said calls the "bulldozers of forgetfulness" is still timely (and relevant to Habiby's novel), as is its reminder that "there was always another people in Palestine, [and] every village, kibbutz, settlement, city and town [in Israel] has an Arab history also."
• In a similar vein, see Adina Hoffman’s “What Lies Beneath,” a profile of Jawad Siyam and the politics of archaeology in Israel.