Library Guides: Israel-Palestine Library Resources: Background & Overviews

About This Section

This section highlights a variety of media that offer synopses or "crash courses" on the creation of the state of Israel, the Nakba, and the evolution of the political conflicts in the territories of Israel and Palestine. We have included select non-library resources, like maps, videos, and podcasts, to meet diverse learning preferences and types. For book-length overviews and feature-length documentaries, see the Books and Film sections, respectively.

Videos

1. This 10-minute PBS NewsHour video aired on October 13, 2023. It aims to provide historical context for the outbreak of violence in Israel and Palestine following Hamas's October 7th attack.

2. This Vox video, "The Israel-Palestine Conflict: a Brief, Simple History," breaks down the major events, dynamics, and challenges of territorial struggles from the end of the Ottoman Empire until 2016.

3. PBS produced a "Crash Course" video, The Conflict in Israel and Palestine, in 2015, available through Tulane University Libraries' subscription to Academic Video Online and on YouTube.

Articles

These encyclopedia and reference selections provide brief histories of Palestine, Israel, and regional conflicts and peace attempts:

Arab-Israeli Conflict (Encyclopedia of the Palestinians, 2017)
This article was co-written by Adina Friedman, faculty at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, and Charles D. Smith, professor emeritus of Middle East History at the University of Arizona. They approach the topic chronologically, with a focus on the major wars, uprisings, and peace negotiations that mark Israel-Palestine's history.
Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (The Routledge History of World Peace Since 1750, 2019)
Israeli professor Galia Golan is an activist in peace movements like Peace Now, Bat Shalom, and the International Women´s Commission for Palestinian-Israeli Peace. In this article, Golan examines why attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have failed, aiming to provide a usable history to understand the difficulties at hand and derive lessons for the future.
Modern Palestine (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, 2018)
Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian, political scientist, and politician, is Professor of History and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. In this article, Pappé provides an overview of the history of modern Palestine since the mid-19th century while also reflecting on the differences between Israeli Zionist and Palestinian historical narratives.

Podcasts

1948 (The Daily)
U.S. journalist David K. Shipler, a former Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times, discusses the "meaning and reality" of what happened in 1948 when the creation of the state of Israel was declared. He explains the divergent historical narratives told from Palestinian and Israeli perspectives.
Origins of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Empire, 2023)
The Balfour Declaration was published on November 9th, 1917, and stated the intent of the British government to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In this episode, the hosts of the British podcast Empire are joined by Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev to discuss the declaration and the ensuing British mandate for Palestine.
Palestine (Throughline, 2021)
On this episode of NPR's Throughline podcast, Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian-American Professor of History at Columbia University, provides a brief history of settlements and displacement in Israel-Palestine going back to the age of European colonialism.

Maps

A Note on Contested Language

Maps, like all other media and communication types, are not neutral. The two map series below offer informative visualizations on the background of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, yet employ differing language that manifests contested historical narratives. To give two examples:

The Truman Atlas refers to the violence surrounding the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948 as the "War of Independence." By contrast, the maps published by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) refer to the events of 1948 as the Nakba, which means "catastrophe" in Arabic and is the term used by Palestinians to describe their violent displacement and dispossession when the state of Israel was created.
The Truman Atlas labels the land that comprised the British Mandate for Palestine as "Palestine (Land of Israel)," marking the territory as Jewish people's indigenous homeland. The CJPME maps instead characterize the first half of the 20th century as a period of "Jewish colonization," framing the influx of Jewish migrants and refugees as a form of settler colonialism rather than a reclaiming of ancestral lands.

Both the Truman Atlas and CJPME maps are freely available on the web and do not form part of Tulane Libraries' collections. However, we chose to include them because they highlight important information while also illustrating the extent of conflicting language and accounts of the history of Israel-Palestine and the foundations for the conflict.

Map Series:

Maps of Israel/Palestine (Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East)
This series of maps, presented in chronological order and with links to further resources, was created by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME). The maps are drawn from a variety of web sources; CJPME selected them and created the annotations.
Truman Atlas of the Jewish-Arab Conflict
The Truman Atlas, available in Hebrew, Arabic, English, German, French, and Russian, charts the changing borders and territorial proposals made since 1915 in relation to Palestine and Israel. It was created by Shaul Arieli, a retired IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) commander and government negotiator in the Gaza Strip. Among other academic appointments, Arieli is a research fellow at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Timelines

Historical Timeline on the Question of Palestine (1855-2017)
This timeline highlights key moments to understand the fraught political statuses of Palestine and Israel and the struggle for Palestinian rights in text, video, and images. It was produced by the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

Select Chronology: Key Moments in the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1516–2021
Timeline from the textbook Arabs and Israelis: Conflict and Peacemaking in the Middle East, by Abdel Monem Said Aly, Shai Feldman, and Khalil Shikaki (Bloomsbury, 2nd ed., 2022). "Arabs and Israelis" is the first-ever university textbook on the history of the conflict to have been co-authored by an Israeli, a Palestinian, and an Egyptian, presenting a broader Arab perspective.

Find More Background

To find more background articles and videos through the library, try keyword searches in databases like these:

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics This link opens in a new window The Oxford Research Encyclopedia (ORE) of Politics offer synopses of key topics and themes in a wide range of subjects: contentious politics and political violence; governance and political change; groups and identities; history and politics; international political economy; policy and administration; politics and law; postmodern and critical politics; public opinion; world politics; quantitative and qualitative methodologies; and political anthropology, behavior, communication, economy, institutions, philosophy, psychology sociology, and values and ideologies.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies This link opens in a new window Oxford University Press has partnered with the International Studies Association (ISA) on the Oxford Research Encyclopedia (ORE) of International Studies. Articles cover a wide range of subjects: conflict studies, development, diplomacy, environment, ethics, foreign policy, human rights, identity, international law, international relations theory, pedagogy, gender and sexuality, quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and political communication, economy, geography, and sociology.
Credo Reference This link opens in a new window Credo Reference is a database that allows you to discover and access hundreds of reference books, such as encyclopedias and historical dictionaries, from high-quality publishers.
Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online is the most comprehensive video subscription available to libraries. It delivers more than 66,000 titles spanning the widest range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. More than 14,000 titles are exclusive to Alexander Street.

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