Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 Audio CD – Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged by Ian Black (Author), Michael Page (Narrator) (Tantor Audio / Allen Lane/ Penguin Books/ Grove Press/ Atlantic Monthly Press)

Several people have criticized the supposed anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli bias of author. There is no doubt that Ian Black favors the Palestinians, and his positions are clear throughout the book. However this does does not deter from the significant value of Black's book.He makes use of a wide variety of sources, from Jews, Arabs, and others, and he certainly criticizes the Palestinians when appropriate. What is valuable about the book is that it takes into account so many aspects of the conflict, with their many ramifications, and uses deep and broad research and reading to support this conclusions. So, the author has a point of view, and at times it made me shake my head critically, but Black does a good job in illuminating the conflict. Even those who know quite a bit about the conflict and how it has developed over time, will learn from this book. The writing is fluid and interesting. A strength of the book is that Black makes use of fiction and poetry from Palestinians and Jews, which enriches his narrative. A book worth reading, even if you disagree with Ian Black's specific arguments or his general point of view.

In Enemies and Neighbors, Ian Black, who has spent over three decades covering events in the Middle East and is currently a fellow at the London School of Economics, offers a major new history of the Arab-Zionist conflict from 1917 to today.

Laying the historical groundwork in the final decades of the Ottoman Era, when the first Zionist settlers arrived in the Holy Land, Black draws on a wide range of sources-from declassified documents to oral histories to his own vivid on-the-ground reporting-to recreate the major milestones in the most polarizing conflict of the modern age from both sides. In the third year of World War I, the seed was planted for an inevitable clash: Jerusalem Governor Izzat Pasha surrendered to British troops and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued a fateful document sympathizing with the establishment of "a national home for the Jewish people." The chronicle takes us through the Arab rebellion of the 1930s; the long shadow of the Nazi Holocaust; the war of 1948-culminating in Israel's independence and the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe); the "cursed victory" of the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Palestinian re-awakening; the first and second Intifadas; the Oslo Accords; and other failed peace negotiations and continued violence up to 2017.