Robert Draper’s ‘To Start A War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq’ is a stunning, thorough account that is not only historically indispensable, but is also an up-to-date warning that the U.S. could be tricked into a war with Iran, with some of the same culprits responsible.

The new book ‘Blood and Oil” is an alarming portrait of Mohammed Bin Salman, the unstable, murderous 35-year-old who rules the oil-producing kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Salman Abu Sitta was uprooted from his family lands near Beersheba during the Palestinian Nakba in 1948 and the trauma has informed his entire life as a refugee and scholar. “I looked back at the smoldering ruins, at the meadows of my childhood, golden with the still-unharvested wheat. What had we done to them? Who were these Jews anyway?”

Susan Abulhawa’s new novel, Against a Loveless World, “has given readers of Palestinian writing a beautiful new horizon within which to imagine freedom.”

Samir Naqqash is perhaps the most prolific modern Iraqi-Jewish writer, yet his work was ignored for decades by the Israeli academy. The recent Hebrew publication of his novel “Shlomo the Kurd, Me and the Time,” which was originally written in Arabic, will hopefully change that.

Hellbent on crafting an umbilical cord between itself and a biblical, mythical 2000-year old past, Israel has erased the ancient history of Palestinians. A review by Sam Bahour of Keith Whitelam’s “The Invention of Ancient Israel.”

Historian Susan Reverby’s riveting biography of Alan Berkman is a magnificent book. Berkman was imprisoned in the 60s, convicted for his political work in the underground as a leader of an offshoot of the Weather Underground. On regaining his freedom he devoted his life to public health and helping those the system abandoned.

Naim Mousa writes, “[Inside Arab Music’s] greatest achievement is its ability to accurately reflect Arabic culture as a whole.”

In a book dismissing the Palestinian refugee issue, Israeli authors Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz totally absolve adherents of the Zionist ideology from any historic responsibility for planning and executing a strategy in which dispossessing Palestinians from the land was premeditated intention. The authors are hasbarists.

Helena Cobban reviews, “The Movement and the Middle East,” Michael R. Fischbach’s look at the roots of the politically progressive Palestinian-rights activism we see in today’s United States.