A Growing Resource on Lebanon and Palestine

Nov 8

Chloe Kattar joined us on This Is Not a Watermelon podcast in October 2025 to contextualize the Israeli war on Lebanon. Better known through her Instagram account @leb.historian which has gained a large audience since Lebanon's 17 October Revolution, Kattar later provided us with an extensive reading list to learn more about the history of Lebanon’s (and Palestine’s) geopolitics. We’ve since grown that list to include more books and some films.

The conversation with Chloe Kattar focused on Israeli propaganda and the Zionist expansionist agenda, as well as on the ways in which these imperial narratives are disseminated. Kattar gives us a quick history of Israel's aggressions on Lebanon which started decades before October 7. She dismantles vague terms weaponized by the Israeli occupation such as "Hezbollah Infrastructure," clarifies the ambiguities of the "Dahiyeh Doctrine," and explains the impact of drones and psychological warfare on a civilian population. To complement topics discussed in the interview, Kattar shared ten books on each of Palestine and Lebanon for anyone wanting to deepen their understanding of the history of these countries, and the Zionist agenda in both.

Books on Lebanon

The Origins of the Lebanese National Idea 1840-1920
Carol Hakim

“In this fascinating study, Carol Hakim presents a new and original narrative on the origins of the Lebanese national idea. Hakim’s study reconsiders conventional accounts that locate the origins of Lebanese nationalism in a distant legendary past and then trace its evolution in a linear and gradual manner. She argues that while some of the ideas and historical myths at the core of Lebanese nationalism appeared by the mid-nineteenth century, a coherent popular nationalist ideology and movement emerged only with the establishment of the Lebanese state in 1920. Hakim reconstructs the complex process that led to the appearance of fluid national ideals among members of the clerical and secular Lebanese elite, and follows the fluctuations and variations of these ideals up until the establishment of a Lebanese state. The book is an essential read for anyone interested in the evolution of nationalism in the Middle East and beyond.”

Via UC Press

The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History and Violence in 19th Century Lebanon
Ussama Makdissi

“Focusing on Ottoman Lebanon, Ussama Makdisi shows how sectarianism was a manifestation of modernity that transcended the physical boundaries of a particular country. His study challenges those who have viewed sectarian violence as an Islamic response to westernization or simply as a product of social and economic inequities among religious groups. The religious violence of the nineteenth century, which culminated in sectarian mobilizations and massacres in 1860, was a complex, multilayered, subaltern expression of modernization, he says, not a primordial reaction to it. Makdisi argues that sectarianism represented a deliberate mobilization of religious identities for political and social purposes. The Ottoman reform movement launched in 1839 and the growing European presence in the Middle East contributed to the disintegration of the traditional Lebanese social order based on a hierarchy that bridged religious differences. Makdisi highlights how European colonialism and Orientalism, with their emphasis on Christian salvation and Islamic despotism, and Ottoman and local nationalisms each created and used narratives of sectarianism as foils to their own visions of modernity and to their own projects of colonial, imperial, and national development. Makdisi's book is important to our understanding of Lebanese society today, but it also makes a significant contribution to the discussion of the importance of religious discourse in the formation and dissolution of social and national identities in the modern world.”

Via UC Press

Colonial citizens: Republican rights, paternal privilege & gender in French Syria & Lebanon
E. Thompson

“French rule in Syria and Lebanon coincided with the rise of colonial resistance around the world and with profound social trauma after World War I. In this tightly argued study, Elizabeth Thompson shows how Syrians and Lebanese mobilized, like other colonized peoples, to claim the terms of citizenship enjoyed in the European metropole. The negotiations between the French and citizens of the Mandate set the terms of politics for decades after Syria and Lebanon achieved independence in 1946. Colonial Citizens highlights gender as a central battlefield upon which the relative rights and obligations of states and citizens were established. The participants in this struggle included not only elite nationalists and French rulers, but also new mass movements of women, workers, youth, and Islamic populists. The author examines the "gendered battles" fought over France's paternalistic policies in health, education, labor, and the press.”

Via Columbia Press

A House of Many Mansions, The History of Lebanon Reconsidered
Kamal Salibi

“Today Lebanon is one of the world's most divided countries - if it remains a country at all. But paradoxically the faction-ridden Lebanese, both Christians and Muslims, have never shown a keener consciousness of common identity. How can this be? In this outstanding book a famous Lebanese historian examines in the light of modern scholarship the historical myths on which his country's warring communities have based their conflicting visions of the Lebanese nation. The Lebanese have always lacked a common vision of their past. From the beginning Muslims and Christians have disagreed fundamentally over their country's historical legitimacy: Christians on the whole have affirmed it, Muslims have tended to emphasise Lebanon's plave in a broader Arab history. Both groups have used nationalist ideas in a destructive game which at a deeper level involves archaic loyalties and tribal rivalries. But Lebanon cannot afford these conflicting visions if it is to develop and maintain a sense of political community. In the course of his extremely lively exposition, Salibi offers a major reinterpretation of Lebanese history, and provides remarkable insights into the synamic of Lebanon's recent conflict. He also gives a masterly account of how the imagines communities which underlie modern antionalism are created.”

Via Bloomsbury Press

All honourable men: the social origins of war in Lebanon
Michael Johnson

“Ethnic conflict is a pervasive feature of the modern world, yet while there are many studies of the social construction of difference, there are few that deal with the emotional content of ethnic violence. Drawing on sociological and psychoanalytic theory and using comparative examples from other parts of the world, Michael Johnson examines the history of confessional or ethnic identity in Lebanon and the civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s. He demonstrates that far from being residues of a traditional society, the values of ethnic honor and shame are peculiarly modern phenomena. He explains the horrors of ethnic warfare in terms of social threats to patriarchal authority in sexually repressive families. These threats fuel a style of violence in which shame acquires its own dynamics.”

Via Abe Books

La guerre du Liban; De la dissension nationale au conflit régional (1975-1982)
Samir Kassir

“1975 : le Liban entre dans la guerre. Il y restera quinze ans, pendant lesquels il occupera presque continuellement le devant de l'actualité. Durant ces quinze années, les tentatives d'explication n'ont pas manqué. Des dizaines de livres et d'innombrables articles ont été consacrés à ce conflit multiple qui, parfois, paraissait insaisissable à l'entendement. Mais rares sont ceux qui ont gardé longtemps leur pertinence, comme cet ouvrage qui se veut une histoire de la guerre du Liban, en sa première période. Salué par les spécialistes à sa parution, en 1994, il s'est imposé comme une référence irremplaçable. Ni une simple chronique ni un essai thématique, encore moins une œuvre polémique, le livre de Samir Kassir se distingue de l'abondante littérature disponible par une démarche historique centrée sur l'événement et ses significations. Reconstituant méthodiquement la chronologie, il en fournit, à chaque séquence, les différentes clés de lecture, recherchées dans la dynamique même de la société libanaise aussi bien que dans l'environnement régional, loin de toute généralisation et de tout anachronisme.”

Via Actes Sud

A history of modern Lebanon
Fawwaz Trabulsi

“This is the first history of Lebanon from the Ottoman Empire to the modern period. Based on previously inaccessible archives, it is a fascinating account of one of the world's most fabled countries. Starting with the formation of Ottoman Lebanon in the 16th century, Traboulsi covers the growth of Beirut as a capital for trade and culture through the 19th century, it's independence and experiences as a republic, before moving onward to Lebanon's development in the late 20th century and the conflicts that led up to the major wars in the 1970s and 1980s and beyond. This is a stunning history of Lebanon over five centuries, bringing to life its politics, its people and the crucial role that it has always played in world affairs.”

Via Pluto Books

Citizen Hariri, Lebanon's Neoliberal Reconstruction
Hannes Bauman

“Rafiq Hariri was Lebanon’s Silvio Berlusconi: a ‘self-made’ billionaire who became prime minister and shaped postwar reconstruction. His assassination in February 2005 almost tipped the country into civil strife. Yet Hariri was neither a militia leader nor from a traditional political family. How did this outsider rise to wield such immense political and economic power? Citizen Hariri shows how the billionaire converted his wealth and close ties to the Saudi monarchy into political power. Hariri is used as a prism to examine how changes in global neoliberalism reshaped Lebanese politics. He initiated urban megaprojects and inflated the banking sector. And having grown rich as a contractor in the Gulf, he turned Lebanon into an outlet for Gulf capital. The concentration of wealth and the restructuring of the postwar Lebanese state were comparable to the effects of neoliberalism elsewhere. But at the same time, Hariri was a deeply Lebanese figure. He had to fend against militia leaders and a hostile Syrian regime. The billionaire outsider eventually came to behave like a traditional Lebanese political patron.”

Via Hurst Publishers

Hezbollah: Mobilisation and Power
Aurelie Daher

“This book aims to provide some answers to various questions about the future of Hezbollah—and, by extension, of Lebanon. The approach chosen here is a study that is empirical as well as analytical, opening with a discussion about the mobilization of the party in its country of origin. If Hezbollah loses certain regional assets, it must be able to retain sufficient local support in order to preserve its position and strength. More than weaponry, it is the leverage provided by popular mobilization in its home country that will ensure its continued existence. Hence, the central issue that frames this book is discovering the nature of the relationship between Hezbollah and its public, and identifying both the structural and contextual elements that drive it.”

Via OUP

Lebanon: A Country in Fragments
Andrew Arsan

“Lebanon seems a country in the grip of permanent crisis. In recent years it has suffered blow after blow, from Rafiq Hariri’s assassination in 2005 to the 2006 July War, to the arrival of a million refugees fleeing war in Syria, and nationwide protests in 2019. This is an account not just of Lebanon’s high politics, with its endless rows, walk-outs, machinations and foreign alliances, but also of the politics of everyday life: all the stresses and strains the country’s inhabitants face, from electricity black-outs and uncollected rubbish to stagnating wages and property bubbles. Andrew Arsan moves between parliament and the public squares where protesters gather, between luxury high-rises and refugee camps, and between expensive nightclubs and seafront promenades, providing a comprehensive view of Lebanon in the twenty-first century. Where others have treated Lebanon’s woes as exceptional, a by-product of its sectarianism and particular vulnerability to regional crises, Arsan argues that there is nothing particular about Lebanon’s predicament. Rather, it is a country of the age—one of neoliberal economics, populist fervour, forced displacement, rising xenophobia, and public disillusion. Lebanon, in short, offers us a lens through which to look on our times.”

Via Hurst Publishers

Books on Palestine

Ottoman brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in early twentieth-century Palestine
Michelle Campos

“In its last decade, the Ottoman Empire underwent a period of dynamic reform, and the 1908 revolution transformed the empire's 20 million subjects into citizens overnight. Questions quickly emerged about what it meant to be Ottoman, what bound the empire together, what role religion and ethnicity would play in politics, and what liberty, reform, and enfranchisement would look like. Ottoman Brothers explores the development of Ottoman collective identity, tracing how Muslims, Christians, and Jews became imperial citizens together. In Palestine, even against the backdrop of the emergence of the Zionist movement and Arab nationalism, Jews and Arabs cooperated in local development and local institutions as they embraced imperial citizenship. As Michelle Campos reveals, the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine was not immanent, but rather it erupted in tension with the promises and shortcomings of "civic Ottomanism.""

Via Stanford University Press

Western imperialism in the Middle East 1914-1958
D.K. Fieldhouse (chapter on Palestine mandate)

“This chapter examines the British mandate in Palestine from 1918 to 1948 and why Palestine was arguably the greatest failure in the whole history of British imperial rule. The British, after thirty years of colonial rule, had failed to create a viable indigenous government of any sort in Palestine and could only evacuate the country and leave its future to be decided by civil war. The reasons for this failure are discussed based on the position and reactions of each of the three main actors: the Arabs, the Zionists, and the British. Any one of these might have blocked the road to an agreed inter-communal settlement.”

Via OUP

Confronting an empire, constructing a nation: Arab nationalists and popular politics in Mandate Palestine
W. C. Matthews

“In his rich, textured history of the Istiqlal Party, Weldon Matthews charts the ebullient and paradoxically fertile moment of the early 1930s in Palestinian Arab society, at once making major contributions to the understanding of British colonial policy in the territory and to the social and political history of the Palestinians. To this end, the British sought to efface the category "Arab" as a marker of political identity and created novel religious institutions (the Supreme Muslim Council, or SMC; the position of Grand Mufti of Palestine), which provided a channel for cultivating a measure of political stability while making the regime appear mindful of local religious sensibilities. The campaign reached its climax in a much recounted public meeting on non-cooperation convened by the Arab Executive in Jaffa during which the Nashashibi faction-commonly known as al-mu'arada-launched a failed bid to get SMC president and Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni to resign his posts. Here Matthews arguably misses a beat, concluding in part that the Istiqlal's ability to get the issue of non-cooperation on the national agenda attested to the growing place of public opinion in national politics.”

Via ProQuest

1948: The War for Palestine
Avi Shlaim and Eugene Rogan (ed.)

“By all accounts, the 1948 Palestine war was one of the most significant milestones in the modern history of the Middle East and remains one of the most intractable conflicts of modern times. Israelis call the 1948 war "The War of Independence" while Arabs call it al-Nakba or the disaster. The conventional Israeli version portrays 1948 as an unequal struggle between a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath, as a desperate, heroic, and ultimately successful battle for survival against overwhelming odds. In this version all the surrounding Arab states sent their armies into Palestine to strangle the Jewish state at birth and the Palestinians left the country on orders from their own leaders and in the expectation of a triumphal return. Since the late 1980s, however, a group of "new historians" or revisionist Israeli historians have challenged many of the claims surrounding the birth of the State of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war. The present volume was conceived as a contribution to the ongoing debate about 1948. The War for Palestine brings together leading Israeli new historians with prominent Arab and Western scholars of the Middle East who revisit 1948 from the perspective of each of the countries involved in the war. The result is a volume that is rich in new material and new insights and which enhances considerably our understanding of the historical roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Via Underground Books

The 1967 Arab-Israeli war: origins and consequences
Avi Shlaim, eds.

“The June 1967 war was a watershed in the history of the modern Middle East. In six days, the Israelis defeated the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies, seizing large portions of their territories. Two veteran scholars of the Middle East bring together some of the most knowledgeable experts in their fields to reassess the origins and the legacies of the war. Each chapter takes a different perspective from the vantage point of a different participant, those that actually took part in the war and also the world powers that played important roles behind the scenes. Their conclusions make for sober reading. At the heart of the story was the incompetence of the Egyptian leadership and the rivalry between various Arab players who were deeply suspicious of each other's motives. Israel, on the other side, gained a resounding victory for which, despite previous assessments to the contrary, there was no master plan.”

Via Amazon

Palestinian identity: the construction of modern national consciousness
Rashid Khalidi

“This foundational text now features a new introduction by Rashid Khalidi reflecting on the significance of his work over the past decade and its relationship to the struggle for Palestinian nationhood. Khalidi also casts an eye to the future, noting the strength of Palestinian identity and social solidarity yet wondering whether current trends will lead to Palestinian statehood and independence.”

Via Columbia University Press

The Hundred Years War on Palestine
Rashid Khalidi

“A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history. In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, ‘in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.’ Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.”

Via Shop Palestine

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Ilan Pappe

“Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called 'ethnic cleansing'. Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East.”

Via Simon and Schuster

On Palestine
Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pape

“Operation Protective Edge, Israel's most recent assault on Gaza, left thousands of Palestinians dead and cleared the way for another Israeli land grab. The need to stand in solidarity with Palestinians has never been greater. Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky, two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, discuss the road ahead for Palestinians and how the international community can pressure Israel to end its human rights abuses against the people of Palestine. On Palestine is the sequel to their acclaimed book Gaza in Crisis.”

Via Haymarket Books

Gaza: A History
Jean-Pierre Filiu

“Gaza has become synonymous with conflict and dispute. Though only slightly larger than Omaha, Nebraska, at 140 square miles, the small territory of Gaza has been a hot spot for bitter disputes between sparring powers for millennia, from the Ancient Egyptians up until the British Empire and even today. Wedged between the Negev and Sinai deserts on one side and the Mediterranean Sea on the other, Gaza was contested by the Pharaohs, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Fatimids, Mamluks, Crusaders, and Ottomans. Then in 1948, 200,000 people sought refuge in Gaza – a marginal area neither Israel nor Egypt wanted. It is here that Palestinian nationalism grew and sprouted into a dream of statehood, a journey much filled with strife. Though small in size, Gaza’s history is nothing short of monumental. Jean-Pierre Filiu’s Gaza is the first complete history of the territory in any language. Beginning with the Hyksos in 18th century BC, Filiu takes readers through modern times and the ongoing disputes of the region, ending with what may be in store for the future.”

Via City Lights

Further Readings

By the afikra Community

A Woman Is a School
Céline Semaan

"A Woman is a School is the first memoir and cultural anthropological book by Slow Factory founder, Céline Semaan. As a war-survivor and child refugee sharing endangered and discredited ancestral knowledge of the Global South, particularly tales from Lebanon from 1948 to 2023—the book follows the tradition of the hakawati, the storytellers of the Levant, holding Indigenous knowledge and wisdom, Céline Semaan, a hakawati herself, documents what she has witnessed throughout her life and the lives of her family members, sharing her upbringing and cultures of resistance."

Via Slow Factory

A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon
Munira Khayyat

"This book offers a new understanding of Arabic’s global position as the basis for comparing cultural and literary histories in countries separated by vast distances. By tracing controversies over the use of Arabic in three countries with distinct colonial legacies – Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal – the book presents a new approach to the study of postcolonial literatures, anti-colonial nationalisms, and the global circulation of pluralist ideas."

Available via Princeton University Press

Memoirs of a Militant: My Years in the Khiam Women's Prison
Nawal Qasim Baidoun

'In order to carry on with life in prison, you must believe you will be there forever.' In this haunting and inspiring book, Nawal Baidoun offers us her first-person account of the life of a young woman activist imprisoned for four years, as well as the events leading up to her arrest and detention. Born into a nationalist family in Bint Jbeil, Lebanon, not far from the location of the prison itself, Baidoun, like so many others, found herself compelled to take up arms to resist the Israeli occupation. Her memoir skillfully weaves together two stories: that of the oppressive conditions facing ordinary people and families in South Lebanon, and that of the horrors of daily life and the struggle for survival inside the prison itself."

Via Interlink Books

Beirut Noir
Edited by Iman Humaydan

"Beirut is a city of contradiction and paradox. It is an urban and rural city, one of violence and forgiveness, memory and forgetfulness. Beirut is a city of war and peace. This short story collection is a part of a vibrant, living recovery of Beirut. It recovers the city once again through writing, through the literary visions of its authors. From within this collection of stories, a general attitude toward Beirut emerges: the city is viewed from a position of critique, doubt, disappointment, and despair. The stories here show the vast maze of the city that can't be found in tourist brochures or nostalgic depictions of Beirut that are completely out of touch with reality. Perhaps this goes without saying in a collection of stories titled 'Beirut Noir'. But the 'noir' label here should be viewed from multiple angles, and it takes on many different forms in the stories. No doubt this is because it is imbricated in the distinct moments that Beirut has lived through and how they are depicted in the stories.

Via Middle East Books

House of Stone
Anthony Shadid

"Published shortly after his untimely passing, the book follows well-known journalist Shadid’s efforts to reconstruct an estate built by his great-grandfather and destroyed during Israel’s incursion into Lebanon in 2006. Shadid creates a mosaic of past and present, tracing the house’s renewal alongside his family’s flight from Lebanon and resettlement in America. In the process, Shadid memorializes a lost world, documents the shifting Middle East, and provides profound insights into this volatile landscape."

Via Middle East Books

Pity The Nation: Lebanon at War
Robert Fisk

Recommended by Professor Eugene Rogan

“This is an account of war in the late-20th century both as historical document and as an eyewitness testament to human savagery. Written by one of Britain's foremost journalists, this book combines political analysis and war reporting: it is an epic account of the Lebanon conflict by an author who has personally witnessed the carnage of Beirut for over a decade. Fisk's book recounts the details of a terrible war but it also tells a story of betrayal and illusion, of Western blindness that had led inevitably to political and military catastrophe. Fisk's book gives us a further insight into this troubled part of the world.”

Though there are many recent works addressing Israel’s historic violence against Lebanon, Professor Rogan picked this one out as a classic for the beauty of the writing and the humanity behind the narrative.

Available via Amazon