The best known books set in each country: Palestine

For people who come across this page out of context: I have been doing a series of posts researching the best known book set in each country in the world, and this is the 119th country on my list. “Best known” is assessed by the attention paid to each book on three major book-logging platforms, Goodreads, LibraryThing and StoryGraph. “Set in” is assessed by my own desk research, as far as that is possible. “Country” is as defined in this list. So I do not need to hear views on whether or not a particular place is a country; someone else has made that call, and you can complain to them.

I have been doing brief pen-portraits of each country in recent weeks, but that seems unnecessary here. The international statistical definition of Palestine consists of the Gaza Strip, under Egyptian control from 1948 to 1967, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem (including the Old City), under Jordanian control from 1948 to 1967. Both have been under varying degrees of Israeli control and occupation ever since. The technicalities of this are, like so much else, disputed, but here I will do as I did with Israel and disqualify books unless more than 50% of them is set on the right side of the old Green Line.

See here for methodology, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph.

Again, as with Israel: I disqualified the Bible. A lot of it is simply not sufficently narrative in format that you can reasonably describe it as being set in a particular locality, and a lot of the rest is set in places other than the Holy Land, and a lot of what is set in the Holy Land is the wrong side of the 1967 border for the purpose of this post. Otherwise it would have won this week’s list by a long way.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017	Rashid Khalidi	39,186	1,815	11,931
Mornings in Jenin	Susan Abulhawa	58,189	1,365	6,451
Against the Loveless World	Susan Abulhawa	34,056	547	10,466
Palestine	Joe Sacco	22,420	2,092	3,841
O Jerusalem	Laurie R. King	20,021	2,427	2,137
Jerusalem: The Biography	Simon Sebag Montefiore	13,951	2,803	1,117
Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City	Guy Delisle	17,792	925	2,174
Enter Ghost	Isabella Hammad	13,755	412	5,402

The geographical criteria have been particularly tricky to apply here, and I will accept correction if I have got any of the above wrong (or indeed if I have incorrectly disqualified any of the books I will mention below). I initially excluded The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine because a lot of it is set in Israel and a certain amount in Lebanon, but when I went back for a second look I realised that three solid chapters out of six cover mainly the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, and it’s (unsurprisingly) a repeating location for events described in the rest of the book. It was far ahead on StoryGraph and is this week’s overall winner. Khalidi has a Palestinian family background but was born in the USA.

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa seems to be more than 50% set in the Jenin refugee camp and in East Jerusalem, though the opening chapters are set in Ein Hod which is now in Israel, and other parts of the book are set elsewhere again. It’s this week’s winner overall on LibraryThing. Susan Abulhawa is from a Palestinian family, but was herself born in Kuwait.

Again, as far as I can tell more than half of Abulhawa’s novel Against the Loveless World is set in the West Bank, though the framing narrative has the protagonist in an Israeli prison cell and the story starts in Kuwait and Jordan.

Joe Sacco’s Palestine is on my bookshelves waiting for me to read it. I expect that it will be his usual compelling journalistic account of being embedded in a society while also being alien to it.

O Jerusalem takes young detective Mary Russell and old detective Sherlock Holmes to Jerusalem in 1919, under the British Mandate. Given that the built up sections of the city were mainly in the East, I’m awarding it a place on the list.

Jerusalem: The Biography is a massive 688-page history book about the city, and again, given the location of the Old City with respect to the Green line, I’m including it on the list. It’s this week’s LibraryThing winner.

Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City is another graphic novel travelogue, set in the east of the city with excursions to the West Bank and Gaza, so I think it definitely counts.

Enter Ghost is about a British actress producing Hamlet in the West Bank. Isabelle Hammad has a Palestinian family background, but was born and brought up in the UK.

Including the StoryGraph numbers gained us Enter Ghost at the cost of On Palestine, by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé.

I disqualified several books which at first looked like they should qualify geographically but did not do so. These included:

Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli, which is about a Palestinian woman investigating a war crime perpetrated in 1948; however the crime itself took place in what is now Israel and so does most of her investigation, so it fails my test.

Apeirogon, by Colum McCann, seems to have a number of different settings, but none of them occupies 50% of the book.

The Lemon Tree, by Sandy Tolan, is about the successive inhabitants of a house in Ramla/Ramle, which is in Israel.

Men in the Sun, by Ghassan Kanafani, is about Palestinian men trying to get to Iraq across the desert, but most of it is set after they leave their home country.

This was a particularly difficult set of statistics to assemble, for fairly obvious reasons.

Next up are Oman, Finland, Norway and Mauretania.

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The best known books set in each country: Palestine

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