Professor Jonathan Gribetz has published Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy (Princeton University Press, 2024).  In this work, Gribetz tells the story of the PLO Research Center from its establishment in 1965 until its ultimate expulsion from Lebanon in 1983 and explores why the PLO invested in research about the Jews, what its researchers learned about Judaism and Zionism, and how the knowledge they acquired informed the PLO’s relationship to Israel.

This “meticulously researched and exquisitely crafted analysis of writings produced by scholars and publicists associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center … raises fascinating questions about how occupied peoples understand the occupier and throws abundant new light on the PLO’s shifting concepts of Jews, Judaism, Zionism, and Israel over the two decades of the Research Center’s existence” (Derek Penslar, Harvard University).