A bibliography and key quotes on this important topic:
In this article I do two things: I list 40 very helpful and mostly quite recent volumes dealing with the Jews; the modern state of Israel and its situation in the Middle East; Zionism; antisemitism; the Palestinian conflict; and related issues. I then offer key quotes from seven of the books to give you a feel for the books and to tempt you to purchase and read some of them.
40 vital books on Israel and the Jews
Some of these books are penned by Jews; some by Messianic Jews; some by Christians; and some by those who are neither Jewish nor Christian.
Abdul-Hussain, Hussain, The Arab Case for Israel: And Other Essays from a Distant Conflict. Wicked Son, 2026.
Acho, Emmanuel and Noa Tishby, Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew. Simon Element, 2024, 2025.
Brown, Michael, Christian Antisemitism: Confronting the Lies in Today’s Church. Charisma House, 2021.
Brown, Michael, Our Hands are Stained with Blood: The Tragic Story of the Church and the Jewish People. Destiny House Publishers, 1992, 2019.
Burmawi, Danny, Islam, Israel and the West: A Former Muslim’s Analysis. Gerasa, 2025.
Chafets, Ze’ev, Double Vision: How the Press Distorts America’s View of the Middle East. William Morrow, 1985.
Dershowitz, Alan, The Case for Israel. John Wiley, 2003.
Dershowitz, Alan, Defending Israel. Hot Books, 2019, 2023.
Dershowitz, Alan, Palestinianism: The Newest Attack on Peace, Human Rights, and Democracy. Skyhorse, 2025.
Dershowitz, Alan, The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies: And How to Refute Them with Truth. Skyhorse, 2024.
Frantzman, Seth, The October 7 War. Wicked Son, 2024.
Friedman, David, One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Humanix Books, 2024.
Gabriel, Mark, Islam and the Jews. Charisma House, 2003. Gilder, George, The Israel Test. RVB, 2009.
Hammer, Josh, Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West. Radius Boog Group, 2025.
Harris, David, Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford University Press, 2025.
Journo, Elan, What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Post Hill Press, 2018, 2023.
Karsh, Efraim, Palestine Betrayed. Yale University Press, 2006.
Klein, Aaron, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Israel. Regnery, 2019.
Levy, Bernard-Henri, Israel Alone. Wicked Son, 2024.
Murray, Douglas, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West. HarperCollins, 2025.
O’Neill, Brendan, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation. Spiked, 2024.
Phillips, Melanie, Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege. Wicked Son, 2026.
Pipes, Daniel, Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated. Wicked Son, 2024.
Prager, Dennis and Joseph Telushkin, Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism. Touchstone, 1983, 2025.
Rausch, David, A Legacy of Hatred: Why Christians Must Not Forget the Holocaust, 2nd ed. Baker, 1984, 1990.
Ryvchin, Alex, ed., The Anti-Israel Agenda: Inside the Political War on the Jewish State. Gefen Publishing, 2017.
Ryvchin, Alex, The 7 Deadly Myths: Antisemitism from the Time of Christ to Kanye West. Academic Studies Press, 2023.
Ryvchin, Alex, Zionism: The Concise History. Connor Court, 2019.
Senor, Dan and Saul Singer, The Genius of Israel. Constable, 2023.
Sieff, Martin, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East. Regnery, 2008.
Simon, Jake Wallis, Israelophobia. Constable, 2023.
Simon, Jake Wallis, Never Again: How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself. Constable, 2025.
Smith, Mark, Israel Disarmed. Bombardier Books, 2024.
Spencer, Robert, Antisemitism: History and Myth. Bombardier Books, 2025.
Spencer, Robert, The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace. Bombardier Books, 2023.
Stern, Sol, A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism and Jew Hatred. Encounter Books, 2011.
Tishby, Noa, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth. Free Press, 2021.
Ungar-Sargon, Batya, The Jews and the Left. Broadside Books, 2026.
Yousef, Mosab Hassan, Son of Hamas. SaltRiver, 2010.
Quotes
Abdul-Hussain (p. 15):
In 2004, when I arrived in America, I felt that the sky was the limit. I got my hands on everything Israeli and Hebrew that I could find. I became fluent enough to be able to read Hebrew and listen to Israelis debating in their native language. My biggest surprise was that, unlike most Arabs and I had thought, the Israelis were not obsessed with killing Arabs. The Jews around the world had a story of their own, one that made sense. They were persecuted in most countries, with everything Jewish threatened: their heritage, their culture, their language, their ability to practice their religion without fear.
In a lawless world that had sat back and watched one third of Jews killed in less than a decade, Zionism was a project to protect Jews by returning them to their native land. Jews needed sovereignty: a government with muscles that could protect them and offer them refuge when they needed it….
ISLAM, ISRAEL AND THE WEST: A Former Muslim's Analysisby Burmawi, Danny (Author)
Burmawi (pp. 175-176):
My concern here is to expose the dangerous illusion that the real chasm lies between Judaism and Christianity – an illusion believed not only by many Jews, but also by many Christians, who imagine that Islam, by revering Jesus, stands closer to them than the Jews who rejected him.
Judaism and Christianity may differ on the identity of the Messiah, but they share infinitely more than what divides them. Both confess the same God – the One who called Abraham, delivered Israel from Egypt, spoke at Sinai, and sent the prophets. Both affirmed the covenant, the law, and the hope of redemption. Their disagreement is real, but it takes place within the same story, inside the same moral universe, shaped by the same Creator and Judge. Christianity does not replace Israel; it grows out of it. Its roots are Jewish, its Scriptures Jewish, its moral vision Jewish. That is why, despite the break over Christ, Christians and Jews still speak the same theological language, still wrestle with the same history, still stand before the same God.
Dershowitz, Palestinianism (pp. 75-76):
I will not be frightened into inaction. Neither should you. We must expose the new Palestinianism and anti-Israelism for the dangers they pose not only to Israel and Jews, but to the entire world. We must introduce the term “Palestinianism” into the vocabulary of today’s dialogue as a word of derision, and we must distinguish it from support for the legitimate goals and interests of the Palestinian people; and we must do so without fear of being falsely accused of being anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, or anti-Muslim. We must expose the danger of Palestinianism for what it is: An evil return not only to the demonization of Jews and their nation-state, but also a frontal attack on peace, human rights, and truth, as well as the values of democracy and the rule of law.
Hammer (p. 258):
Western civilization’s cold civil war, roiling now for at least a century, necessarily ends up as a zero-sum game: One side must win and the other side must lose.
For nearly a century, traditionalist Jews and Christians have been losing to the forces of progressive wokeism, totalitarian Islamism, and global neoliberalism – and losing badly. Any chance that the West has of stemming this poisonous tide begins with a concerted Jewish-Christian alliance to build, fortify, and sustain an American institutional foothold in defense of the biblical values and ideals upon which our entire civilizational edifice developed in the first instance. If the West is to have any chance, the turnaround must commence with the special people that Abraham Lincoln described so long ago as “almost chosen”-Americans.
Harris (p. 1-2):
Antisemitism is among the world’s oldest, most enduring forms of virulent hatred. Indeed, some observers argue it is the oldest. Tragically, it has been an all-too-frequent factor in the millennia-long development of Western civilization.
Antisemitism has ebbed and flowed like a mutating malignancy into new forms and variations and proven stubbornly resilient. It has caused untold harm to Jews and Jewish communities throughout the centuries in which antisemites define the Jew as the enemy of all that is good and decent. The deicide charge, blood libels, inquisitions, ghettos, expulsions, pales of settlement, pogroms, forced conversions, discriminatory laws, and, most catastrophically, the Holocaust were the result.
At its heart, antisemitism has two distinguishing features. First, it is an elaborate conspiracy theory. It ascribes to Jews, a tiny percentage of the world’s population, extraordinary powers of evil intent and behavior—from plagues to economic depressions, from war to revolution. Second, it is an irrational and contradictory belief system. Jews are variously seen as capitalists and communists, White and non-White, manipulative insiders and unassimilable outsiders.
History teaches that antisemitism is a disease which begins with the Jews but does not end with them. Once antisemitism is unleashed, it knows no bounds and can attack the very fabric of society, making the Jewish people, some would say, the early warning system. This deadly strain of hatred often turns against other minority groups as well, not to mention foundational democratic values, beginning with equal rights and equal protection before the law. Therefore, antisemitism should be viewed as a universal human rights issue of importance to all, and not solely as a Jewish or Israeli concern.
Phillips (p. 1):
How should the Jewish world fight back against the lunacy that has engulfed the West since the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on October 7, 2023? How do you cope when a civilization is collapsing around your ears?
Diaspora Jews are currently reeling from a crisis of legitimacy and acceptance that is unprecedented in nature and scale even by the standards of their uniquely beleaguered history. Persecuted and murdered in one country after another throughout the past two millennia, they have never before faced simultaneous attacks across continents as they do today.
The starting gun for this campaign of demonization and attacks against Israel and diaspora Jews was fired by the biggest and most barbaric single attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust—the slaughter of some 1,200 women, children, and men in southern Israel and the kidnapping of more than 250 hostages on October 7, 2023.
Tishby in Acho and Tishby (pp. 181, 183):
Zionism is the Jewish people’s right to have self-determination and a state to govern, and anti-Zionism is denying that right….
Never mind that Israel is, in fact, a refugee state that was literally decolonized from Britain. Or that a majority of Israeli Jews are people of color, many of whom are from families that were ethnically cleansed from other parts of the Middle East. Or that Jews originate from the Land of Israel, derive our religion and our practices from the land, and—despite centuries of exile and displacement—have always kept an unbroken presence there. Or that it is not an apartheid, defined as a minority ruling over the majority and segregated based on race, nor is it an exclusively Jewish state, because Israeli Arabs are about 20 percent of the population and have held positions in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, since the first elections in 1949.
We can all agree that we don’t love every US government policy, yet people aren’t seriously calling to dismantle the United States, or Australia, or Canada, or literally any other country or state. People are, however, trying to dismantle Israel. Israel is the only country in the world whose right to exist is being questioned. It’s the only country that has a Wikipedia page dedicated to that question, as in: “The Legitimacy of the State of Israel.”
And note that a number of the books listed here I have written reviews of, or extensively quoted from, such as the works by Burmawi, Gabriel, Murray and Spencer.
