Try this reading list if you want to understand the Middle East

The greatest problem of writing historically is that the story has not ended

By Robert Fisk

".....So here was the first truly eloquent warning of what was to come, and Hirst completed the narrative of Antonius's all too accurate predictions, the first author, I believe, to counter the trashy novel Exodus with which Leon Uris graced the Jewish state – much to Ben Gurion's delight, though he should have known better – by deconstructing "terrorism" without romanticising the Palestinian refugees and their "resistance" movements. In this same context, one must remember the work of Israel's "new historians", who created a complementary narrative. Benny Morris was the most prominent Israeli researcher to prove that it was indeed Israel's intention to evict the Palestinians from their homes in their tens of thousands in 1948 – the fact that Morris has since gone completely batty by claiming the Israelis didn't ethnically cleanse enough of them does not detract from his seminal work.

F R Leavis allegedly once began a sentence with the words: "As any fit reader of poetry will know ..." So I suppose we have to say that "any fit reader" of the Middle East must read Edward Said. One of his best books, by the way, is about music, although orientalism will always be on the set-book list. He did for the Middle East narrative philosophically – and historically – what Antonius did politically....."