UCLA professor Saree Makdisi, an American of Palestinian and Lebanese descent, does with this book what few in the West have managed: he successfully conveys the daily, grinding reality of Israel's occupation, its weight and omnipresence in the lives of all Palestinians.

"Because the destruction is routine, it generally takes place outside of the view of the global media," Makdisi writes. Instead we see only the clashes, effectively "decontextualizing the violence on both sides [and eclipsing] the deadly effects of the Israeli apparatus of bureaucracy and control."

Originally published in 2008, Palestine Inside Out was revised a year ago, but little has changed since Makdisi first traveled the region, gathering facts and figures, tales and memories. From capricious rules at hundreds of West Bank road blocks, to the economic and health care disasters caused by the blockade of the Gaza Strip, little has changed for the millions of people living under Israeli control, where even the simplest of acts - grocery shopping, going to school, visiting loved ones - are routinely made difficult, if not impossible, by the mechanisms of the occupation.

 Makdisi is a thorough scholar and skilled writer, weaving trenchant statistics with evocative detail and often devastating personal stories, and he is uncompromising in his rejection of violence against civilians, Israeli or Palestinian. He draws heavily from the work of Israeli human rights organizations, and recognizes the many Israelis working toward conflict resolution - but to the extent that his scholarship occasionally fails, it is with regard to Israeli society, as he falls into a handful of easy misrepresentations that might make it hard for some Jewish readers to remain open to his message: Zionism, for instance, was not (as he suggests) a reaction to the Holocaust, but rather a national liberation movement with its roots in the 19th century, and Sephardi Israelis do not, by any stretch, think of themselves as "Arab Jews."

It would be a pity, however, to let such details stand in the way of all Makdisi has to offer. The genuinely horrifying statistics (more than a thousand Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces since 2000, for instance) and the heart-rending tales of lives conducted almost entirely according to the considerations (if not the whims) of others must serve to awaken our conscience at this time of year like no other, and remind us of the imperative to remember that we, too were once "strangers in a strange land," yearning for freedom.

Please read Palestine Inside Out.

Emily L. Hauser is an American-Israeli  freelance writer who has studied and written about the contemporary Middle East since the early 1990s, and is an active member of a Chicago-area Conservative congregation. She blogs at Emily L. Hauser In My Head and can be followed on Twitter. She also crossposts at Angry Black Lady Chronicles (despite being only an Angry Lady and not at all Black) and atheist-interfaith blog NonProphet Status. All recommendations are entirely her own.