The Ezra Klein Show

What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? ... Arabs and Israelis by Abdel Monem Said Aly, Shai Feldman and Khalil Shikaki.

The first is Abraham Joshua Heschel's seminal work, The Prophets, which for me in the course of my rabbinate was an absolutely transformative book to help me understand not only our prophetic tradition but really what's demanded of us in a time of moral crisis.

My first recommendation is an essay that you can get online. It's by George Orwell and it's called Politics in the English Language.

The first is I think the best book ever written about Israel, which is A Tale Of Love And Darkness by Amos Oz, which is autobiographical, but it's really the biography of the state as he experienced it growing up.

And finally a book called The War of Return by Enad Wilf and Adi Schwartz, which makes a very strong case for why the key to peace is confining the Palestinian demand for refugee return to a Palestinian state and it lays out the history of the demand for the right of return, the legal aspects.

Nathan Thrall ... wrote a book ... called The Only Language You Understand, arguing that both Israelis and Palestinians tend to make their concessions under the threat of force.

I would always recommend Orientalism by Edward Said, which is so formative for me but really helps you to also understand even some of the premises of why Palestinians in the Arab world understand the way the West has looked at them.

I recommend a new book by Shibli Talhami, Michael Barnett, Mark Lynch, and Nathan Brown on The One State Reality.

I also recommend a book by my colleague, I mentioned it, Khalil Shakaki and Shai Feldman that captures what I was trying to get at Ezra in terms of the public opinion, where we see public opinion being softened towards each other and a two state solution. It's called Arabs and Israelis, Conflict and Peacemaking in the Middle East.

For a good primer and a good history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I recommend my colleague, Mark Tesler's book, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

I've written on this in my book, Barriers to Democracy.

And I want to start with A High Price, which is Dan Biman's history of Israeli counterterrorism policy. It's a little bit dated now and it was published about 10 years ago or so. But to my mind, it's one of the best serious interrogations of what Israel does or what its playbook is for dealing with terrorist groups, where it works and where it doesn't.

A second book I'd recommend is the Selected Works of Edward Said, a famous Palestinian-American intellectual. There's a lot in there that's not related to the conflict, but Said is one of the most articulate exponents ever to live of the Palestinian cause. And if you want to understand where Palestinians are coming from and how they feel about Israeli occupation, it's hard to do better than going to Said's work.

And the third book I'd recommend, since we spent so much time talking about the West Bank, is a book by an Israeli journalist named Gershon Gorenberg called The External Empire. I love Gorenberg's book because he really traces the history of how settlements emerged, the ways in which Israeli policy facilitated their development, and the ways settlers themselves pioneered this fundamental transformation to the conflict that was not necessarily - although at times it seemed like it was - part of Israeli strategic design. It's a really, I think, an essential insight into how things got to the point where they're at right now.