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The Fundamentals...

These are the books EVERYONE should have

Recommended Reading on Palestinian/Israeli Conflict

Understanding the Palestinian-Israel Conflict

By: Phyllis Bennis

If you have ever wondered "Why is there so much violence in the Middle East?", "Who are the Palestinians?", "What are the occupied territories?"

or "What does Israel want?", then this is the book for you. With straightforward language, Phyllis Bennis, longtime analyst of the region, answers basic questions about Israel and Israelis, Palestine and Palestinians, the US and the Middle East, Zionism and anti-Semitism; about complex issues ranging from the Oslo peace process to the election of Hamas. Together her answers provide a comprehensive understanding of the longstanding Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict - Norman Finkelstein

This acclaimed study surveys the dominant popular and scholarly images of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Finkelstein opens with a theoretical discussion of

Zionism, locating it as a romantic form of nationalism that assumed the bankruptcy of liberal democracy. He goes on to look at the demographic origins of the Palestinians, with particular reference to the work of Joan Peters, and develops critiques of the influential studies of both Benny Morris and Anita Shapira.

The General's Son - Miko Peled

In 1997, a tragedy struck the family of Israeli-American Miko Peled: His beloved niece Smadar was killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem. That tragedy propelled Peled onto a journey of discovery. It pushed him to re-examine many of the

beliefs he had grown up with, as the son and grandson of leading figures in Israel's political-military elite, and transformed him into a courageous and visionary activist in the struggle for human rights and a hopeful, lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

In his iconoclastic and controversial study, Norman G. Finkelstein moves from an interrogation of the place the Holocaust has come to occupy in global

How did a term, once used accurately to describe the most virulent evil, become a charge flung at the mildest critic of Israel, particularly concerning its atrocious treatment of Palestinians?

The Holocaust Industry - Norman Finkelstein

culture to a disturbing examination of recent Holocaust compensation settlements. It was not until the Arab–Israeli War of 1967, when Israel’s evident strength brought it into line with US foreign policy, that memory of the Holocaust began to acquire the exceptional prominence it has today.

The Politics of Anti-Semitism - Cockburn & St. Clair

Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, the print and online journal CounterPunch has become a must read for hundreds of thousands a month who no longer believe anything they read in the mainstream press beyond the sports scores.

Zionism,Militarism, and the Decline of US Power

James Petras

Following in the train of two highly successful books addressing the influence of Israel on US Middle East policy and the onerous effects of support for Israeli interests that have resulted,

etras pursues this theme to illustrate how the conjunction of Israeli domestc influence in the US, spurring and combined with US militarism, has now led to a decline in U.S. power around the world.

The New Intifada - Roane Carey

Frustrated by the failure of the peace process to end the Israeli occupation, and outraged by Ariel Sharon’s invasion, with one thousand armed guards, of the Al-Aqsa holy site in East Jerusalem, the Palestinian

population of Israel and the Occupied Territories rose up in September 2000. A new intifada has raged ever since.

Inside Hamas -

Zaki Chehab

What is the real nature of Hamas? Since its astonishing victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections, this has become the most hotly contested question in the Middle East. How does Hamas really

operate? What personalities lie beneath the black-and-green uniforms? Inside Hamas is an acclaimed account of Hamas by a world-renowned journalist with unprecedented sources within the secretive militant organization.

The Israel Lobby - Mearsheimer & Walt

The Israel Lobby," by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Gov, was one of the most controversial articles in recent

memory. Originally published in the London Review of Books in March 2006, it provoked both howls of outrage and cheers of gratitude for challenging what had been a taboo issue in America: the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy.

The Mis-Education of The Negro

Carter G. Woodson

This should be required reading for every person of color. Woodson’s work helps us understand that African peoples are truly mis-educated. We largely receive an Eurocentric or White middle class, elitist education

that fails to serve the needs of our community.

This mis-education creates a serious identity crisis on the part of African American youth and causes many African American “educated” people to spend more time trying to reach the consumer American Dream rather than working toward a real self-determination agenda of African peoples.

Up From Slavery

Booker T. Washington

Nineteenth-century African American businessman, activist, and educator Booker Taliaferro Washington’s Up from Slavery is one of the greatest American autobiographies ever written. Its mantras of black economic empowerment, land ownership, and self-help inspired generations

of black leaders, including Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan. In rags-to-riches fashion, Washington recounts his ascendance from early life as a mulatto slave in Virginia to a 34-year term as president of the influential, agriculturally based Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. \

,Must Read!!

The Black Jacobins

C. L. R. James

In 1789 the French colony of Saint Domingue was the most profitable real estate in the world. These profits came at a price: while its sugar plantations supplied two-thirds of France’s overseas trade, they also stimulated the greatest individual

market for the slave trade. The slaves were brutally treated and died in great numbers, prompting a never-ending influx of new slaves. The French Revolution sent waves all the way across the Atlantic, dividing the colony’s white population in 1791. The elites remained royalist, while the bourgeoisie embraced the revolutionary ideals.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas

Frederick Douglas

In 1845, just seven years after his escape from slavery, the young Frederick Douglass published this powerful account of his life in

bondage and his triumph over oppression. The book, which marked the beginning of Douglass’s career as an impassioned writer, journalist, and orator for the abolitionist cause, reveals the terrors he faced as a slave, the brutalities of his owners and overseers, and his narrowing escape to the North. It has become a classic of American autobiography.

The Souls of Black Folk

W.E.B. DuBois

With a dash of the Victorian and Enlightenment influences that peppered his impassioned yet formal prose, the book’s largely autobiographical chapters take the reader through the momentous and moody maze of Afro-American life

after the Emancipation Proclamation momentous and moody maze of Afro-American life after the Emancipation Proclamation: from poverty, the neo-slavery of the sharecropper, illiteracy, mis-education, and lynching, to the heights of humanity reached by the spiritual “sorrow songs” that birthed gospel and the blues.

The Counter Revolution of 1776

Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America - Gerald Horne

The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed

almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt.

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

Douglas A. Blackmon

In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of

the most shameful chapters in American history—an “Age of Neoslavery” that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Douglas A. Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude shortly thereafter.

The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual

Harold Cruse

Electrified a generation of activists and intellectuals. The product of a lifetime of struggle and reflection, Cruse's book is a singular amalgam of cultural history, passionate disputation, and deeply considered analysis of

the relationship between American blacks and American society. Reviewing black intellectual life from the Harlem Renaissance through the 1960s, Cruse discusses the legacy (and offers memorably acid-edged portraits) of figures such as Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin, arguing that their work was marked by a failure to understand the specifically American character of racism in the United States.

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BLOOD BROTHER: Jonathan Daniels and His Sacrifice for Civil Rights

Rich & Sandra Wallace

Jonathan Daniels, a white seminary student

from New Hampshire, traveled to Selma, Alabama, in 1965 to help with voter registration of black residents. After the voting rights marches, he remained in Alabama, in the area known as “Bloody Lowndes,” an extremely dangerous area for white freedom fighters, to assist civil rights workers. Five months later, Jonathan Daniels was shot and killed while saving the life of Ruby Sales, a black teenager.

The Black History of the White House

Clarence Lusane

he untold history, racial politics, and shifting significance of the White House as experienced by African Americans, from the generations of enslaved people who helped to build it or were forced to work there to its first black First

Family, the Obamas. Clarence Lusane juxtaposes significant events in White House history with the ongoing struggle for democratic, civil, and human rights by black Americans and demonstrates that only during crises have presidents used their authority to advance racial justice. He describes how in 1901 the building was officially named the “White House” amidst a furious backlash against President Roosevelt for inviting Booker T. Washington to dinner, and how that same year that saw the consolidation of white power with the departure of the last black Congressmember elected after the Civil War.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Edward E. Baptist

As historian Edward Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after

In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Until the Civil War, Baptist explains, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable.

The New Jim Crow

Michelle Alexander

This book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely

redesigned it. By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness. In the words of Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, this book is a "call to action."