2025 – The Resident Judge of Port Phillip (2025)

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Posted on February 17, 2025 | Leave a comment

Well, Scheherazade may have been able to spin out her story over One Thousand and One Nights, but Mary-Mathilda, the mistress of plantation owner Mr Bellfeels, and the mother of his only sons, takes only one very long night to tell her story. But it’s a very long night, and the story takes over 513 pages. Alone in the Great House on the plantation, she has called the police station on a Sunday night to confess to a crime. The Constable is dispatched to house to “pacify Miss Bellfeels” until the Sergeant, whom she has known since childhood, can arrive to take her statement. This is the story of that night, and the conversation that flows back and forth between Miss Bellfeels and first the Constable and then the Sergeant, before they take her statement about a crime that she has committed.

The story is set post-WW2 in Barbados, called Bimshire by the locals. The world, and Britain in particular, was happy enough to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 2007 but the reality is that even after the expanded Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, plantations continued in British colonies, with former slaves designed ‘apprentices’ until 1838, and then subjected to a form of indentured labour after that.

Mary Gertrude Matilda was born ‘free’ on the plantation, presumably in the early 20th century. Her mother, who also lived on the plantation was probably born ‘free’ too, but the power relations of the plantation still held sway. Mr Bellfeels, the plantation owner, had taken Mary’s mother as one of his -what do you call it? Not a lover, not a mistress, nor a concubine- perhaps sex-slave (?) and Mary is only a very young girl when Mr Bellfeels corners mother and daughter in a church-yard. Still mounted on his horse, runs his whip up and down Mary’s body, claiming ownership when she is a bit older. By the time she is an adolescent, he has raped her, just as he did her mother, and he continues to abuse her, albeit more as mistress than slave, setting her up in a house on the plantation where she bears his only son. With the malicious irony of the oppressor, the boy is baptized Wilberforce (who had campaigned for the abolition of slavery) and Mary Matilda occupies an ambiguous place in Bimshire society: shunned by white planter society, and treated with a mixture of deference and scorn by black society.

Mary has a hoe, that she used in the fields as a field-worker before she was sequestered away in the Great House. She has kept this hoe carefully sharpened, and it doesn’t take much imagination to know what she has used it for. The Sergeant, who has secretly been infatuated with Mary Matilda since they were children together knows too, and he is reluctant, but obligated, to take her statement. And so the story weaves around, backward and forwards, over Bellfeels’ abuse of both Mary and her mother over decades, the control of workers on the plantation, the birth of Wilberforce which places her in a different category to the other field-workers, leading eventually to Mary Matilda’s crime. It is a very slow telling.

Much of the book is dialogue, in a Barbadian patois, with Mary Matilda’s meandering narrative, interspersed with conversation with first the Constable, then the Sergeant. The book is told in three very long parts, with nary a chapter heading anywhere. This felt rather oppressive, especially reading as part of a compendium of Clarke’s writing on an e-reader, with no way of knowing how much longer the chapter or the book was going to continue for. For me, it made it feel even longer.

This book won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Giller Prize and Ontario’s Trillium Book Award. It is a striking book but too long and too slow for most readers -including myself- I would say.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: hard copy from my own bookshelves, supplemented by an e-reader version while I was on holidays.

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Posted in Book Reviews 2025

Posted on February 15, 2025 | Leave a comment

Rear Vision (ABC) For about a fortnight after Trump’s victory, I couldn’t bear to listen to any news about America at all. I’m glad that I didn’t realize the inauguration was even happening so I missed that completely. But now, even though I’m horrified, I can bear to listen, watch and read again. Rear Vision replayed an episode from 2015, before Trump won his first term. It’s called A Tsunami of Trumpness, and the little wave then is nothing to what we have seen now. Trump’s grandfather arrived in 1885 – an immigrant, eh? – and made his money from North West mining. His father Fred built the family wealth further by taking advantage of the New Deal to become a builder and mortgage guarantor. Donald made his money from real estate and casinos, starting by refurbishing a hotel with his trademark glitz, using the political connections and credit from his father. He wasn’t particularly successful, but he knows the power of his own celebrity to gain free publicity because he is too big to fail.

The Rest is History The Nazis: Hitler’s Triumph (Part 3) This episode starts off with Horst Wessel. I’d heard of the song, but nothing about who Horst Wessel was. He was a streetfighter and member of the the SA, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. He was shot by 2 communists in 1930 and virtually deified by Goebels. The German economy was crippled by the withdrawal of US banking from Europe, something that happened gradually but inexorably. It was estimated that 1/4 of the population was living in a house with unemployment (actually, I think that the figure in Australia was even worse at 1/3 unemployment). Both the Communist and Nazi parties were increasing their members. The Weimar Republic virtually committed suicide as the governing coalition collapsed and, spurred by their fear of communism, Hindenburg and the army decided to rule by decree. Chancellor Heinrich Bruning cut spending and worked on evoking deflation and the first of a string of elections was held. This was the Nazi’s big moment, going from 12 seats to 107. They weren’t fringe any more. The violence of the streets and language was brought into mainstream politics. Electors had to hold their nose to vote for Hindenburg, who was the mainstream candidate. He won 53% of the vote, while Hitler won 37%. The very conservative Von Papen became Chancellor, and he called another election. This time the Storm Troopers were not banned, and the Nazis won 230 seats, against the 89 held by the Communists. Hindenburg refused to make Hitler Chancellor because of his violence. Von Papen wanted to dissolve Parliament and rule by decree but Von Papen lost a vote of no-confidence and so they had yet another election. This time both the Communist and Social Democrat parties improved their share of the vote, but they refused to work together. On 30 January 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor to head a coalition government with Von Papen as Vice-Chancellor.

The Rest is Politics (US edition). Trump’s Insurrection: The Fall of the Capitol I listened transfixed on the radio while driving down to the beach, unable to believe what I was hearing. I saw the photographs in this most widely-photographed event. Anthony Scaramucci and Katty Kay go through the day, hour by hour, discussing what Trump was doing, what the politicians in Congress were doing, what the crowds outside were doing. For me, the most telling phrase was Trump saying “Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.” (see transcript of Jan 6 speech) For me, the WE is fundamental. Anthony and Katty speculate about what the rioters thought they were doing, and what I think they were doing is they were supporting Trump, who was going to march down there with them. It’s really important that we don’t forget the shock of this day, no matter how much Trump wants to rebrand it a “day of love”. We saw it, we heard it.

The Daily (NYT) The episode today is a long read from the NYT magazine: Opioids Ravaged a Kentucky Town. Then Rehab Became Its Business. The former coal-mining town of Louisa, Kentucky was at the heart of the opioid crisis, but then a Christian-based rehabilitation service Addiction Recovery Care moved into town. It was able to access Medicaid for rehabilitation services, and it formed a whole network of services and enterprises for recovering addicts including coffee shops, schools, panel beaters, aged care. This, of course, attracted more addicts which has changed the profile of the town. Many of the recovering addicts are ambivalent about Tim Robinson, the CEO and himself a recovering alcoholic, and his power, while at the same time acknowledging that he has changed their life. The story traces through two women working as aged care nurses who share a trailerhome, and it highlights the precariousness of addiction recovery.

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Posted in Podcasts 2025

Tagged fascism, germany, History, hitler, Politics

Posted on February 15, 2025 | Leave a comment

My friend Fiona and I went to ‘The Round’ in Whitehorse Road to see Joe Camilleri and the Black Sorrows last night. Quite a weird experience. Looking around, the audience was predominantly over-60 and in our faces you could still see the 20 and 30 year olds that we once were, but it was as if a computer-program had aged us all.

The video above is from last year, but the lineup was the same last night. Why lookee- there’s James Black from Rockwiz on keyboards and for a 76-year-old, Joe Camilleri sounded good (better than in the videoclip, I think), supported by a great drummer and guitarists.

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Posted in Things I've seen recently

Posted on February 12, 2025 | 1 comment

If nominative determinism was a real thing, this book would be about a wealthy woman, her affluent son and their convention-shattering lives. Instead, Mary Fortune worked all her life as a writer and died in poverty, and her son George Fortune spent much of his adult life in jail.

However, ‘Mary Fortune’ is a wonderful name for a writer, even though she always wrote under many other pseudonyms, especially Waif Wanderer and W.W. Although many in literary bohemia knew her real name, it was not widely broadcast. Between 1855 and 1920 she wrote articles, serialized novels, poetry and short stories in various local periodicals, particularly the long-running and popular Australian Journal. From 1868 she contributed a column called ‘The Detective’s Album’, featuring a male detective Mark Sinclair, under the initials W.W. This eventually amounted to over 500 narratives and formed the basis of her book The Detective’s Album, published in 1871 and the first book of crime short stories published in Australia, and the first detective collection by a woman in the world. In her Ladies Page columns, writing variously as Mignon, Nemia, Nessuno and Sylphid, she was both journalist and flâneur (flâneuse) walking the streets and observing – an unusual thing for a woman- and she wrote lively descriptions of Melbourne life, similar to those being penned by Marcus Clarke at the same time, but from a woman’s perspective. She wrote a fictionalized memoir in the 1880s, Twenty Six Years Ago but there is little other personal correspondence. When you read her lively, whip-smart writing you find yourself wondering why you haven’t heard of her before.

She was born Mary Helena Wilson in Ireland, and emigrated with her father to Canada probably in the early years of the Great Famine. They were Protestant, and her father worked as an engineer. In 1851, aged 18 she married surveyor Joseph Fortune, who was to give her that very rather theatrical surname. When the gold rushes erupted in Australia in 1851, her father left, and in 1855 so did she, leaving her husband behind. She and her three year old son George, travelled to Scotland, then on to Australia to find her father, no easy feat in this raucous colonial colony where identities could be erased and redrawn easily. A woman leaving with her child, especially the only child of an only child in a fairly prosperous family, was unusual but she lived an unusual life. She had a second illegitimate child while living on the goldfields, and said nothing of her earlier marriage when she married policeman, Percy Rollo Brett, claiming widow status. The marriage did not last long and they separated, throwing Mary onto her own resources, first on the goldfields, and then in Melbourne.

In the introductory chapter, the authors write:

When the search behind this biography began, little was known beyond her name: Mrs Fortune. To find her meant following her lead as a detective writer, seeking the clues hidden in her vast bibliography. A process of literary detection began. Her game was to drop self-referential fragments- names and events from her life- into her writing. Reading an author through their work can be a trap: the biographical fallacy- the assumption that writing always derives from life. Such was not true in Mary Fortune’s case, for she had a wild imagination. She could write as vividly of a vampire or a vengeful Roma sorceress as of the Victorian goldfields. Yet even at her most sensational her default mode was realist, fed by a tenacious memory. She held grudges interminably and rehashed them in print. Details repeat through the decades of her work, and – thanks for the increasingly digitised world of archives and newspapers- they can be investigated and explained. (p. 4)

Despite the availability of her work in digital form, few readers are likely to immerse themselves in Mary Fortune’s prolific output, and thus to a certain extent we have to take on trust that Mary’s writing does throw light onto her biography. I, for one, think that the authors have identified sufficient parallels and repetitions between Mary’s life and her literary output to validate this as a way of proceeding. That said, though, without Mary’s writing, it would have been a rather thin biography.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this biography, and one which the authors bring out really well, is the paradox that Mary Fortune built her literary reputation (albeit under a nom-de-plume) on criminal activity through her ‘Detective’s Album’ columns, while her only son was completely enmeshed in the criminal system as perpetrator and prisoner. George Fortune’s life, from the age of fourteen was a series of arrests and imprisonments, starting with his arrest for stealing a hat in July 1871. From here he was committed to industrial schools, farm placements, youth imprisonment at Pentridge and eventually long stints in jail in both Victoria and Tasmania. There was no glamour in his criminal history of crime and recidivism.

Mary Fortune had been married to a policeman, and in many ways she mined this connection for the rest of her life. She may have herself been a ‘fizgig’, a police informant. The ambiguous relationship between law and crime lies at the heart of any number of detective series, and it is given an extra frisson in relationships between police and informants, especially women informants. However, her literary career and her son’s criminality came into collision when she published a column in the Ladies Pages of the Herald, where she wrote as ‘Nemia’, that described her visit to Pentridge jail in Melbourne to visit a young, unnamed man. Soon after, for fear that ‘Nemia’ would be linked to the prisoner George Fortune, Mary was sacked from the Herald. She would not return to the newspaper for several years, and then only with fiction.

Mary Fortune lived in the ambiguous space between ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ Bohemia. Other writers knew her, and she conducted a long rivalry with Marcus Clarke whose Peripatetic Philosopher columns were a masculine version of own columns. She would ever only be a contributor, and an anonymous one at that, while her rival Clarke became ‘conductor’ of the Australian Journal in 1871, and as a result her presence in the journal declined. But she was a denizen of ‘lower’ Bohemia as well, with constant money worries, arrests for drunkenness, and a stint in the Benevolent Asylum in North Melbourne before shifting as a lodger between various charitable women. Her son predeceased her, dying in jail in Tasmania, and she died penniless and for many years forgotten.

But not by Lucy Sussex, who had first encountered Mary Fortune when she was working as a researcher for Professor Stephen Knight at Melbourne University, who was researching the history of Australian crime fiction. She wrote her PhD and a subsequent book on the Mothers of Crime Fiction, and a novel based on her search for Fortune called The Scarlet Rider. She edited and published a selection of Mary’s memoirs and journalism in 1989 as The Fortunes of Mary Fortune. Megan Brown completed her PhD on Mary Fortune, and they have co-presented at various conferences. In a closing chapter, Sussex describes an academic joust with another historian whom she dubs ‘Rival Researcher’ who took a rather malicious glee in obscuring her sources, and interactions with Melbourne historian Judith Brett, a descendant of Mary’s policeman ‘husband’, who helped her to start to look at Mary’s son George as a narrative thread in piecing together Mary’s life.

I’m always interested by books that are a collaborative venture because, to me, writing seems such an individual and personal endeavour. The authors only present separately in their closing chapter, yet I wonder if the seams between the authors can still be detected (the book has infected me, now I’m playing detective too!) The introduction frames the authors’ search as a game of literary detection and certainly the conclusion, which evokes the academic rivalry of A. S. Byatt’s Possession, returns to this topic. This theme of literary detection runs subtly through the narrative, reappearing when the authors interview current-day detectives and undertake computer-based forensic linguistic testing of Mary’s writing style to clarify her authorship of individual stories. While cautioning against the perils of applying modern day diagnoses to peoples’ behaviour in the past, they do so nonetheless, suggesting that George Fortune today might be diagnosed with Anti Social Personality Disorder. The reference to Nicola Gobbo as police informer was instructive for me as a Melburnian, but it will date the text and soon be irrelevant. I wonder if these eruptions of current-day commentary reflect the preferences of one of the two authors, or whether they both saw these present-day parallels. Likewise, the introduction of subheadings on just three occasions seemed to jar a little from what was otherwise a flowing narrative, and perhaps reflects the joint authorship- but I don’t know.

Mary Fortune’s good fortune was to have two biographers in Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown who have worked hard over so long to bring her name, and her full-rounded life story before 21st century readers. Their biography is deeply researched, readable and imbued with admiration and sympathy for a trail-blazing woman writer, whose writing is still brisk and lively today.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Review copy from Black Inc., with thanks

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Posted in Book Reviews 2025

Tagged Book reviews, book-review, books, fiction, Writing

Posted on February 5, 2025 | 2 comments

Each time I picked up this book, the line from Amazing Grace sprang into my mind “Bright Shining as the Sun”. Orr didn’t refer to this in the three epigraphs that open the book: instead he quoted religious philosopher Thomas Merton (so, related I guess.)

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mind and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness…This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud…As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now what I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this. But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking round shining like the sun.

This book isn’t set in Louisville: instead, it’s in the small South Australian rural town of Selwyn, population 300. We’ve all been to towns like this: the pub, the school, the IGA, pharmacy, an indifferent restaurant, the fish and chip shop, the icecream shop. We see people like those who live in Selwyn when we watch ABC programs like ‘Back Roads’ or ‘Rosehaven’ and we see them, unfortunately, when floods and fires in rural towns are being reported in the news. Within a few pages, you relax into the presence of the main protagonist, Wilf Healy, the 80 year old Selwyn personality, living at the pub since his wife died. He has ended up being bus-driver, vegetable deliverer, postman -only some of which he is paid for- and he knows everyone, their stories, and their histories. Selwyn is a dying town, with nothing for its young people, and it’s a place that people escape from, rather than come to. His brother Colin escaped to a different world in America, another brother had died, and here we have Wilf, still in Selwyn, his niece Orla dying of cancer, and her son Connor drifting aimlessly through life, with vague dreams of becoming a musician, but lazy, self-centred and without purpose.

The pace of this book is slow, and you find yourself slowing down to match it. Nothing much happens. The schoolkids he picks up on the bus, day after day, have a future as flat as the farmland around town. There’s Sienna, his first pick up, constantly wedded to her phone. There’s Luke, who is writing an interminable horror story, Trevor a quiet boy, struggling with his sexuality, and Darcy, insolent and indulged. There’s nothing for kids to do except hang around the Scoop n’ Smiles ice-cream shop which is selling kids more than ice-cream. There’s no heavy plot-development here, instead life just goes on with people doing the best they can, sometimes succeeding, other times not.

Wilf is a man who stayed: his brother left. He has a nostalgic dream of returning to Louth, the small off-shore island where he grew up with his brothers and a violent father but there are too many strings holding him to Selwyn. To stay or to go? Is he a man unfulfilled, cocooned in his small-town life and hemmed in by obligations? Or is he rich in connections, true to himself and his upbringing, “shining like the sun” just as the people around him do too?

This is a gentle book, steeped in nostalgia, and Orr captures small town life and dialogue perceptively. It’s generous in its approach to people, and respectful of our shared humanity, with all its foibles.

You can find reviews at:

ANZLitLoversLitBlog https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/04/02/shining-like-the-sun-2024-by-stephen-orr/

Whispering Gums https://whisperinggums.com/2024/10/11/stephen-orr-shining-like-the-sun-bookreview/

Inreview https://inreview.com.au/inreview/books-and-poetry/2024/04/18/book-review-shining-like-the-sun/

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

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Posted in Book Reviews 2025

Posted on February 2, 2025 | Leave a comment

History Extra How Roman Roads Transformed Europe. You know, I don’t think that I’ve ever been on a Roman road, although would I have recognized it if I was? (I haven’t travelled much in Europe, just in England and a bit in the south of Spain). Catherine Fletcher, author of The Roads To Rome: A History notes that there were eight main roads heading out of Rome itself during Roman times, and that they weren’t always straight if there was a big geographical problem in front of it. Romans could travel 30 miles a day on a Roman road, and they were later used in the Crusades as a way of quick army deployment. Napoleon dreamt of a road to Moscow, and Fascists were rather attracted to them too.

The Coming Storm Season 2: Episode 5 The Photocopier. Somehow or other Gabriel Gatehouse gets an invitation of a meeting of a start-up called Praxis that is full of all the tech-bros who are planning to start up a new state, with no bureaucracy but governed by block chain. Praxis, and other groups like it, draw on the book The Sovereign Individual by William Rees-Mogg in the 1990s which predicts the fall of the nation-state and the rise of the cybereconomy. (Yes, the father of the politician Jacob Rees-Mogg). There’s a connection with Jeff Giesea (former Trump supporter but no longer) and Peter Thiele, both tech entrepreneurs- this is all rather scary stuff.

The Rest is History Episode 295 The Rise of the Nazis: The Beer Hall Putsch Nazi Germany haunts all popular leaders in a democracy. Hitler didn’t win outright- he was given power because he was the biggest party in a systerm of horse-trading. How far back do we have to go to find the origins of Nazism? Historian Richard Evans looks to Bismarck in 1871, who built force, violence and the army into the German constitution. There was the theory of ‘germandom’ where Germans had the right to be united under the one Reich although Germany was a late-comer to imperialism. A sense of pan-Germanism arose, expressed through a ‘Band of Brothers’, Boy Scout sort of mentality. The Social Democrats were the biggest party but were never really trusted. During the 1880s and 1890s Darwinism had emphasized life as struggle and weakness, and this fed into a disdain for weakness. Judaism came to be seen as a racial rather than religious category, and antisemitism increased. The Germans didn’t think that they had started WWI. and they didn’t believe that they were defeated as such, even though they had lost the war. In 1919 Hitler was still in the army and started giving lectures for the National Socialist Workers Party, which he was good at, and he became their star speaker. In particular he used medical imagery for his anti-semitism (e.g. poisoning the blood etc). The Weimar republic at that time was headed by a monarchist but the fear of revolution, heightened by the Spartacist Uprising, helped to unite a society that might otherwise fractured. Germany had borrowed heavily to fight the war, because they assumed that they would win, and when they defaulted on their French loans, the French govt took over the Ruhr. All groups in German society, both left and right, had their own militias, and there was a general anti-government sentiment. At the Beer Hall riot, Ludendorf was influential but Hitler, who did not at this stage see himself as a leader, took the rap. The court case was manipulated in that Hitler had a choice of location and judge, and it provided an opportunity for Hitler to give a four-hour speech. At this stage there was a capitulation of all of the forces that should have been guardrails against Hitler. The President died, and there were elections at which the Nazi party received 3% of the vote. It started to work on increasing its presence amongst farmers and northerners but no one really thought that the Nazi Party could take power unless there was an unforeseen calamity. And then the Depression hit.

Rear Vision How to end conflict- the art of peacemaking Peacemaking is front of mind in Gaza and Ukraine (neither of which I have high hopes for). The current day UN and United States definition is that peace = not fighting, however, in many other traditions peace is seen as a way of living together so that each has dignity. In medieval times, war was a way of settling rights, and it always ended in negotiation and compromise- but without blame between Christian nations. This changed with Versailles, when the idea of war guilt was introduced (which arguably, led to WW2). After WW2 there was the creation of the United Nations, and the idea of mediation between warring parties either through the UN or a sponsor nation. This doesn’t always work, especially as it tends to involve the imposition of democratic structures prematurely e.g. Rwanda. South Africa and Ireland are examples where good leadership was able to bring about peace, where it was recognized that you are negotiating with your enemy (not your friend) and that risk and compromise is inevitable. Some of the speakers spoke about the need to include people who have been designated ‘terrorists’ into the peace negotiations, otherwise they will just act as spoilers.

In the Shadow of Utopia In rounding out his first season after THREE YEARS of broadcasting- what a long-term commitment!- Lachlan Peters gives a roughly one-hour summary of everything that has gone before, both as a form of revision for those who have been listening to the whole series, and as a quick catch-up for those who are joining it here. Season One Recap: Cambodian history from Angkor to Independence is a really good episode, although I do wonder whether it moved too quickly for those who weren’t familiar with it. He has been talking throughout about the concept of a ‘hurricane’ leading to Pol Pot, with pressure coming from foreign pressures, combining with internal patterns. In going through his quick chronology, which he does very well, there are three underlying themes (i) geography with Vietnam on one side and what would become Thailand on the other (ii) the style of leadership stemming from God Kings and patronage and (iii) external factors like the Enlightenment in shaping French colonialism, Marxism and the Cold War. Well worth listening to.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged germany, History, hitler, holocaust, Politics

Posted on February 1, 2025 | 3 comments

It’s the first Saturday of the month- quite literally- and so it’s Six Degrees of Separation day. This meme, hosted by Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest involves her choosing a starting book, and then you linking six other books to it. This month she has chosen Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons, which I haven’t read (as usual: I have rarely read the book she chooses!) but I have seen the movie, if that counts.

Dangerous Liaisons is an epistolary novel, and like probably everyone else, my mind leapt to other epistolary novels that I have read. But I’m going to start with a book that is not a novel at all: instead it is a collection of letters in Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag by historian Orlando Figes. Figes has drawn from an archive of over 1300 letters written between Lev Mischenko, imprisoned in a Soviet gulag, to his partner Svetlana Ivanova who lives outside. Figes provides maps, photographs, explanations, and explains not only the minutiae of labour camp life, but also the sweep of Soviet politics on the outside during the time that Lev was imprisoned (my review here).

An epistolary novel of a more modern kind is found in Susan Johnston’s From Where I Fell . By mistake, a woman sends an email to what she thinks is her husbands’ email address, only to receive a reply from 64 year old Chrisanthi Woods, from Schenectady, New York , and the email correspondence continues (my review here).

But the 64 year old woman Chris, who works at SUNY in student enrolments is a brusque and snippy woman, and a dead ringer for Olive Kitteridge, who features in several books by Elizabeth Strout (my review here). Olive and Chris would get on well, although on second thoughts they probably wouldn’t.

Olive Kitteridge lives in Maine, and another book that starts in Maine is Julie Cohen’s Together as 80 year old Robbie, married to his wife Emily for decades, wakes up in the morning and decides to die. He has been diagnosed with dementia, and as he finds himself sinking into a fog of confusion, he fears that he will let slip a secret that he has held for many years. The book then goes backwards as we learn this secret. (My review here).

Another book that goes backwards in Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch, which traces through four main characters in London in 1947, 1944 and 1941. The heart of the book is the 1944 section set in London during the Blitz. (My review here).

A similar book is Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual but this book takes the real-life tragedy of 168 people being killed at a Woolworths store in New Cross Road in a V-2 attack during WWII. Fifteen of those 168 were aged under 11. Spufford fictionalizes five of these children: sisters Jo and Valerie, Alec, Ben and Vernon. Spufford drops the bomb in the first pages, then jumps forward as if the five children were not killed. In fact, they were not even in the store. Instead, they lived lives untouched by that November 1944 attack- and this is the story of their lives. (My review here).

Novels feature heavy in my Six Degrees this month, with only one non-fiction. Next month’s book that Kate has selected is Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, and I won’t have read that either because it’s selected for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle in September.

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Posted in Six Degrees

Posted on January 30, 2025 | 1 comment

This book, co-written with his wife Sylvie Le Clezio in 2017 was another amongst the selection of books handed to Australian MPs by a number of prominent local writers. It is a memoir of the six years that Lyons spent based in Jerusalem as Middle East correspondent for the Australian, not a newspaper that I read often. He has worked for most of the media groups in Australia: Murdoch with the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald and now for the ABC as their Global Affairs Editor. I must say that I will now watch his reports from the Middle East in the wake of October 7 with added interest because, not only does this book deal with the swirling constellation of Middle East politics between 2009 and 2015, but also it highlights the heavy influence of the Israel lobby in Australia in shaping the news for an Australian and Jewish/Australian audience to reflect an even harder line here than in Israel.

The book is named for the large balcony in their apartment that overlooked a vista which encapsulated Palestinian/Israel history: Old City of Jerusalem, modern Jerusalem, the headquarters of the United Nations, and the concrete wall that separates Israel from the occupied West Bank. In front of their balcony was the ‘peace park’, where six days of the week Israelis would place their picnic baskets on the upper parts of the park, and the Palestinians would picnic on the lower parts. Except for Friday evenings, when on the sound of a siren announcing Shabbat, Israelis would leave the park and walk home for their Shabbat dinners. On cue, the Palestinians would appear carrying plates of kebabs and tabouli and move to the higher parts until, on Saturday evening, the Israelis returned, taking up their place on the top of the hill, and the Palestinians would move back down again.

In his opening chapter he declares that

As for my own perspective, I approach reporting of Israel from a ‘pro-journalist’ stance. I’m neither ‘pro-Palestinian’ nor ‘pro-Israel’. My home is in Australia, on the other side of the world. To use an old Australian saying, I don’t have a dog in this fight. (p. 12)

This is not, however, the conclusion that he comes to by the end of the book, which has documented the pervasiveness of Israel control, particularly in the West Bank, and trenchantly criticized the role of Benjamin Netanyahu in particular for making a two-state solution impossible. In spite of Israeli finessing to obscure the fact by withholding and withdrawing Palestinian residency status in the West Bank, the demographic tipping-point between Israelis and Palestinians has been reached: during Lyons’ stay the number of Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza equalled (or, depending on your sources, passed) the number of Jews in Israel and the West Bank. As he sees it, in coming years, there will be tragic consequences of this policy.

This tragedy now seems inevitable. Almost 3 million people in the West Bank cannot be denied all civil rights for more than 50 years without dire consequences and almost two million people in Gaza cannot be locked forever in the world’s largest open-air prison. One day many of those five million people will rise up. (p. 357)

As Middle East correspondent generally, his brief extended to countries beyond Israel. He was there to witness the Arab Spring uprisings and subsequent crackdowns in various countries and the political permutations in Iran, Egypt, Libya, Lebanon and Syria. His conclusion was that the Arab Spring failed because the step between dictatorship and democracy was too large, especially without the in-between establishment of independent institutions like police forces and civil services (p.355).

However, his major emphasis is on Israel, and the politics that have shaped the United States response, which flies in the face of world opinion which is gradually hardening against Israel (and, I would suggest, has hardened even further in the last year). He writes honestly and persuasively about the power of the Israeli-lobby group, particularly the AIJAC (Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council) headed by Colin Rubenstein, in pressuring the Australian media and targetting particular journalists (including him) in their reporting. He writes about its influence on politicians, especially through the generous ‘study’ tours that are provided to MPs – several of whom have attended on multiple trips hosted by Melbourne property developer Albert Dadon- which give a one-sided view of the Israeli/Palestinian situation. He particularly focuses on Labor politicians- Rudd, Carr, Gillard- because of the mismatch between party policy, the views of party members, and Government policy- and the way that Israeli policy became caught up in the leadership ructions during the first decade of the 21st century. He highlights the importance of language used in reporting- for example, whether East Jerusalem is described as ‘occupied’ or not and whether ‘occupied’ has a capital ‘O’ or lower case ‘o’; or whether SBS should use the word ‘disputed’ territories.

As might be expected, this book was criticized by politicians and commentators who take a different line to him. But, as he says

…those who’d read my reports over these six years could have been confident that they were reading facts, not propaganda….That, in the end, is what journalists should do: report what’s in front of them. Then it’s over to the politicians and the public to decide what they do with that information. But without facts, they cannot know what they are dealing with (p.356)

Having read this book, and knowing his own personal and professional opinion, casts a different light on his dispassionate, fact-based reporting for the ABC, reporting that saw him named Journalist of the Year at the 2024 Kennedy Awards. On the one hand, it fills me with admiration that he’s even able to report so calmly and authoritatively. On the other hand, though, I’m now aware of the editorial pressure and careful vetting that would have gone into his reports- and no doubt, for this book. It stands the test of eight years well, especially the last 18 months, and is a sobering analysis of not just the ‘facts’ of Israeli/Palestinian conflict day after day, but the political and public relations filter that screens and shapes what we receive as readers and viewers- and our responsibility to question it.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: it was one of the 5 books given to MPs, but I have had it on reserve at the library for months previously.

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Posted in Book Reviews 2025

Tagged gaza, israel, middle-east, palestine, Politics

Posted on January 27, 2025 | Leave a comment

The Rest is Politics (US edition) With Trump’s pardoning of the January 6 rioters, it’s even more important than ever to resist his re-branding of the Capitol riots as a “day of love”. Anthony Scaramucci (who I don’t think I like very much) and the BBC’s correspondent Katty Kay are running a series, similar to the one they did on the 2016 election, How Trump Won the White House eight years after the event. In this present series, they are looking at the 2020 election which was won by Joe Biden, and which led to January 6 2021. Episode 1: Trump’s Insurrection: The Collapse of his Presidency looks at the circumstances that led to Trump’s defeat when a year earlier he looked invincible. First there was COVID, which Trump downplayed at first, delaying for 6 weeks which let to a million deaths. (A million!) Trump was a natural conspiracy theory fueller, and like a crazy uncle, he embraced the idea of bleach. Then there was the death of George Floyd which led to huge mobs of protestors on both sides, at a time when people were supposed to be isolating. In the midst of the riots Trump was sent to a “safe room” which led to accusations of being a scaredy-cat, which he countered by his walk to St John’s Chapel flanked by the military and bearing a bible. His instinct was to order police and troops to shoot at protestors- something to bear in mind as we head into his second presidency. Trump began calling for the elections to be delayed, but this didn’t happen. After the election Pelosi formed a secret committee to investigate possible scenarios where Trump would cause problems, and January 6th was identified as a problematic date then. After an initial flush of votes for Trump, the postal votes began to be tallied and Trump’s lead disappeared. Nonetheless, he went out in the early morning and claimed victory prematurely.

The History Listen The ABC is recycling its programs over the summer break, and this episode on John Friedrich Friedrich the Fraud was originally aired on 9 December 2023. From the ABC website “the former head of the Victorian Division of National Safety Council of Australia, was also once called Australia’s greatest conman. Back in the 1980s, he famously made $293 million of investors’ money disappear. When his fraud was uncovered, he went missing himself for sixteen days, prompting a nationwide manhunt and a media storm that reported both facts and the fictions.” In my mind, the controversy over Friedrich and the National Safety Council all gets mixed up with the mess that Victoria was in at the time. It seems incredible that Friedrich had this whole constructed persona that saw him able to apply for huge amounts of money fraudulently – and yet no-one can say where the money actually went.

Global Roaming I nearly always listen to Global Roaming each week, but I don’t usually record it here because most of the episodes are too current and ephemeral for me to want to recall them later. But over the summer break, Geraldine Doogue and Hamish Macdonald have been hosting a 6-part series AUKUS Investigated which leaves me thinking that we have been absolutely sold a pup that sees us paying US to beef up its submarine capacity for submarines that they could easily withhold from us because they find that they need them themselves. Episode 1 investigates how AUKUS came about – who spoke to who, what the true motivation was for going nuclear and whether the total secrecy around the deal was justified. (I can’t believe that a nuclear submarine is going to remain ‘invisible’ forever, which gets rid of that argument). Episode 2 Bang for Buck? explores what the scheme involves, what the key challenges are to making it work, and we get some cold hard facts about what it is really going to cost us. Episode 3: The China Question addresses the elephant in the room, which is that this whole thing is actually about China. Episode 4: The 51st American State? asks whether we are getting the short end of the stick with this deal, and sacrificing our sovereignty to boot (my answer- yes. We’re opening up for two big army bases on our soil just like Pine Gap) Episode 5: Radioactive Ripples what happens to the waste that will remain dangerous for generations of Australians to come? Is this just the introduction of Australia as nuclear dump for the rest of the AUKUS partnership? I bet the nuclear industry is salivating over this. Episode 6: Premier Peter Malinauskas is very enthusiastic about AUKUS, as he should be given that in theory the submarines will be built there. While I agree that we should have sovereign ship building capacity (just like we should have sovereign pharmaceutical-manafucturing capacity, too) I think that we should bite the bullet, devote more money to defence, and go it alone. This is a really good series, which raises lots of questions.

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Posted in Podcasts 2025

Posted on January 27, 2025 | Leave a comment

Before Christmas, a number of Australian writers put together a bundle on books on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, parcelled them up and gave them to Australian politicians for their summer reading. The books were endorsed by both Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) and the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA), and sent with a letter signed by more than 50 writers including Tim Winton, Michelle de Kretser, Charlotte Wood, Benjamin Law, Anna Funder, Trent Dalton and Hannah Kent. This book, written by historian and Arab scholar Rashid Khalidi, was one of the five books chosen, with other titles by John Lyons, Ilan Pappé, Kate Thompson, and Sara Haddad. Apparently, the parcel was opened by the staff of Liberal politican Dave Sharma, who re-packaged them and returned them to sender. It is his loss, but it is our loss too, as a voting public dependent on the knowledge and mindset of our politicians.

In the Afterword, written in April 2024 and post-October 7, Khalidi summarizes the thesis of the book, which he feels has been validated by current events:

…events in Palestine since 1917 resulted essentially from a multi-stage war waged on the indigenous Palestinian population by various great powers allied with the Zionist movement- a movement that was both settler colonialist and nationalist, and that aimed to replace the Palestinian people in their ancestral homeland. These powers later allied with the Israeli nation-state that grew out of that movement. Throughout this hundred years’ war, the Palestinians have fiercely resisted the usurpation of their country. … It is not a age-old struggle between Arabs and Jews, it has not been going on since time immemorial, and it is not simply a conflict between two national groups, two peoples. It is a recent product of the iruption of imperialism into the Middle East; the rise of modern nation-state nationalisms, both Arab and Jewish; of the necessarily violence European-style settler-colonial methods employed by the Zionist movement to “transform Palestine into the land of Israel”… and of Palestinian resistance, both non-violent and violent, to these methods. Moreover, this war has never been just between Zionism and Israel on one side and the Palestinians on the other, with the latter occasionally supported by Arab and other actors. It has always involved the massive intervention of the greatest powers of the age on the side of the Zionist movement and Israel: Britain until World War II, and the United States and others since then….Given these facts, in this war between colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed there has been nothing remotely approaching equivalence between the two sides, but instead a vast imbalance in favour of Zionism and Israel. (p. 256, 257)

Khalidi divides his book into six declarations of war against Palestine, not all of which involved actual troops on the ground. The First Declaration of War 1917-1939 goes through the lead-up to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which emerged from the philosemitic desire to ‘return’ the Hebrews to their biblical homeland (a sentiment which still animates Evangelical Christians today), and a rather more pragmatic desire to stop Jewish emigration to Britain. The people of Palestine had had their expectations raised for the possibility of Arab independence and self determination, promised by the British in 1916. But now they were to be ruled under British governance in the 1922 Mandate for Palestine, which incorporated the text of the Balfour Declaration verbatim, and amplified its commitments. It allowed for the creation of a Zionist administration parallel to that of the British mandatory government, tasked with exercising many of the functions of the sovereign state for the Jewish part of the population. However, as war threatened in 1939, there was a shift in London’s policy away from Zionism because Britain needed the support of Islamic countries in fighting the war. The United States took up the role of providing diplomatic cover and arms to Israel instead- a stance that it has maintained to this day.

The Second Declaration of War 1947-1948 describes the immediate aftermath of the Nakba, willed by the Zionist state-in-waiting, and caused by foreign interference and fierce inter-Arab rivalries (p. 58). The Zionist movement had mobilized American politicians and public opinion, prompted further by widespread horror at the Holocaust. The Palestinians

entered this fateful contest woefully unprepared both politically and militarily, and with fragmented and dispersed leadership. Moreover, they had little external support except from the deeply divided and unstable Arab states, still under the influence of the old colonial powers, and which had poor and largely illiterate populations. This was in stark contrast to the international standing and the strong, modern para-state built up by the Zionist movement over several decades. (p.70)

The Third Declaration of War in 1967- or the Six Day War- was prompted by the rise of militant Palestinian commando groups within the context of what has been called “the Arab Cold War”, where Egypt led a coalition of radical Arab nationalist regimes opposed to the conservative Saudi Arabia bloc. After a lightning first strike by the Israeli airforce, which destroyed most Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian warplanes on the ground, the Israeli forces decisively defeated the Egyptian and Jordanian armies, and occupied the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem. This defeat was followed by U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, drafted by the British permanent representative but actually crafted by the United States, which allowed for expanded Israeli boundaries on grounds of security (a stance that we are seeing played out on all sides of Israel today), walking away from the more limited boundaries in the 1949 agreement. It led to the rise of Fatah, founded in 1959 by a group of Palestinian engineers, teachers and other professionals, headed by Yasser Arafat. To co-opt and control this rising tide of Palestinian nationalism, the Arab League founded the PLO in 1964 , under Egypt’s leadership, but it was soon taken over by Fatah. By 1979 the Egyptians signed the Camp David agreement with the PLO. It’s interesting that Jimmy Carter who orchestrated the Camp David Accords initially called for a homeland for the Palestinians, but was pressured by Begin’s government, Sadat and local Jewish interests to abandon this push for a comprehensive settlement.

The Fourth Declaration of War was Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which, although it bombed Lebanon, had as its primary focus the Palestinians living there and the larger goal of changing the situation inside Palestine. Israel wanted to destroy the PLO in Lebanon and to weaken the Palestinian situation in West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem so that they could be annexed. The United States lent support to Israel, and the Arab regimes succumbed to American pressure by doing nothing practical to help the PLO beyond declaring their support. The PLO found itself isolated, largely because of the PLO’s own heavy handedness which led to the loss of support amongst Lebanese citizens who were caught up in the war. As a result, the PLO agreed to withdraw from Beirut. Even though the US government promised to protect Palestinian refugees remaining in Lebanon, the international forces supervising the evacuation withdrew as the last ship left. Massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps ensued. The lasting results of this 1982 war were the rise of Hezbollah (or Hizballah) and the first significant shift in opinions about Israel in the international media, and negative perceptions in America and Europe.

The Fifth Declaration of War took place between 1987 and 1995, sparked by the first intifada which started in Gazan refugee camps in December 1987. In response, Israel’s “iron fist” policy provided further vision of violence and brutality, leading to a further erosion of support in the West. Spontaneous and bottom-up, like the 1936-9 revolt, it was local and flexible, and Khalidi considers it “an outstanding example of popular resistance against oppression and [it] can be considered as being the first unmitigated victory for the Palestinians in the long colonial war that began in 1917” (p.174) But the PLO leadership in exile in Tunisia tried to dominate this grassroots movement from a distance, and did not take advantage of the Palestinian presence at the United Nations. In 1988 the PLO issued the Palestinian Declaration of Independence which formally abandoned the PLO’s claim to the entireity of Palestine, accepted the principles of partition, a two-state solution and a peaceful resolution to the conflict. It accepted SC 242 and SC338 as the basis for a peace conference, but it didn’t go anywhere. The PLO did not understand the significance of Camp David, or the implications of the decline of USSR. During the Gulf War in 1990-91, the PLO supported Iraq, which made it a pariah amongst the other Arab states. At peace talks in Madrid in 1991 the PLO acquiesced to the Israeli insistence that there be no independent Palestinian representation, and Israeli control over what topics could be discussed. Further attempts in 1992 were stymied by the tension between the PLO based in Tunisia, and Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. However in 1993 a secret track of negotiations resulted in the Declaration of Principle between Israel and the PLO that was signed on the White House lawn in September 1993. With this Declaration, Israel recognized the PLO (but importantly, NOT Palestine- just the PLO) and the PLO recognized the State of Israel. At the Oslo I accords the Palestinian negotiators were out of their depth, and signed up to what Khalidi characterizes as

a highly restricted form of self-rule in a fragment of the Occupied Territories, and without control of land, water, borders, or much else (p. 200)

An Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, or Oslo II, completed this ruinous work by dividing both regions into a patchwork of areas A B and C, with over 60% of the territory Area C under complete, direct and unfettered Israeli control. Khalidi believes that this was a trap, because Israel was able to control PLO movements and held all the power. The PLO was made responsible for security for Israel and the US continued to provide most of the diplomatic muscle.

The Sixth Declaration of War between 2000 and 2014 saw the establishment of roads, permits and checkpoints within the fragmented West Bank. Hamas had been established in 1987, promoting itself as a more militant Islamist alternative to the PLO, and claiming again the whole of Palestine, not just the occupied area. Hamas emerged out of the Muslim Brotherhood, and at first Israel was happy to indulge it as a way of splitting the Palestinian national movement. The Second Intifada erupted in 2000, caused by the worsening situation for Palestinians after Oslo and the intense rivalry between the PLO and Hamas, but prompted by Sharon’s visit to the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount). Violence soon escalated, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide bombers attacked inside Israel. As the body responsible for security, the PLO suppressed the Hamas attacks, leading to further enmity between the two groups. It was a setback for the Palestinian cause, and Israeli troops re-occupied. In 2005 Arafat died, and was replaced by Mahmoud Abbas. There were further Israeli ground offensives in 2008-9, 2012 and 2014 and regular Israeli incursions into Palestinian areas of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. At the parliamentary elections in January 2006, Hamas ran candidates, emphasizing reform and changes. Hamas gained control of the Legislative Assembly, but both Israel and the Us rejected any Hamas participation in a Palestinian Authority government. Hamas violated the rules of war by using imprecise missiles shot from Gaza into civilian areas in Israel. In response, Israel’s third attack on Gaza in 2014 followed the Dahiya doctrine that the sources of missiles were not to be considered as villages, but as military bases, against which disproportionate force, damage and destruction could be applied.

I’ve gone into this much detail because firstly, I needed to summarize it for my own purposes, and secondly because the Israeli/Palestinian conflict seems to be just one continuous, undifferentiated war. In his conclusion, Khalidi talks about three approaches which can expand the way in which the reality in Palestine can be understood. The first is to compare it with other settler-colonial experiences e.g. Native Americans, South Africans, (Australian indigenous peoples, although he doesn’t mention it) or the Irish. Of course, it is hard to establish this colonial nature, given the Biblical dimension of Zionism, particularly in America where terms like “colonial”, “settler” and “pioneer” have particular resonance. The second lens involves focusing on the gross imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians, a characteristic of all colonial encounters. Khalidi rejects the ‘David vs Goliath’ characterization of the conflict, where Israel wants peace but claims that “there is no partner for peace”. Instead, he points out that the Zionist movement and the state of Israel have always had the big battalions on their side (Britain before 1939, US and Soviet support 1947-8; France and Britain in the 1950s and 1060s, and unlimited US support from the 1970s to today). The third, and perhaps most important lens, is that of inequality. There is a contradiction in modern Zionism in that a modern, democratic Zionism has an illiberal and discriminatory essence against the Palestinians. Under Trump the United States became the mouthpiece of the most extreme government in Israel’s history. Khalidi argues that any future negotiations must reject the formula of United States control of the process, and that henceforth the US must be treated as Israel’s partner. He suggests that in the future, China and India may have more say, and that Europe and Russia, which are both geographically closer to the Middle East than America is, may play a larger role.

Khalidi is not just a commentator: he and his family have been participants in the events that he describes here. As a member of the Palestinian educated elite, he includes first-person narratives and his own recollections of events. In this regard, the book is quite similar to Raja Shehadeh’s We Could Have Been Friends My Father and I (my review here). However, this book is more analytical than Shehadeh’s in his division of six separate declarations of wars as a framing structure, and less shaped by his own family history. Khalidi himself was involved in creating the proposal for a Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority (PISGA) in 1992, elected by the Palestinian residents of the West Bank, Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and those displaced and deported by Israel. It did not proceed at the time because it challenged the exclusive Jewish right to the entirety of Israel, and was further hampered by the tepid response of the PLO leadership at the time. Who knows- perhaps its time will come yet, and Khalidi would be a good midwife. He sees shortcomings on both sides: he is critical of Hamas’ actions against citizens, and even more critical of the PLO’s internal politicking and compromised position after the Oslo Accords.

Moreover, he is conscious of Jewish sensibilities- though he does not share them- as well. He argues that any future resolution of the conflict will necessarily and inevitably fail unless it is based on the principle of equality. However, he recognizes that the Israeli attachment to inequality as far as Palestinians are concerned is rooted in a real history of insecurity and persecution, and that Palestinians too need to be weaned from the delusion that Jewish Israelis are not a “real” people with national rights.

While it is true that Zionism has transmuted the Jewish religion and the historic peoplehood of the Jews into something quite different- a modern nationalism- this does not erase the fact that Israeli Jews today consider themselves a people with a sense of national belonging in Palestine, which they think of as the Land of Israel, no matter how this transmutation came about. Palestinians, too, today consider themselves a people with national links to what is indeed their ancestral homeland, for reasons that are as arbitrary and as conjunctural as those that led to Zionism, as arbitrary as any of the reasons that led to the emergence of scores of modern national movements. … While the fundamentally colonial nature of the Palestinian-Israel encounter must be acknowledged, there are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other. Their mutual acceptance can only be based on complete equality of rights, including national rights, notwithstanding the crucial historical differences between the two. (p.247)

This is a dense, but well-written book. It moves chronologically, but its six-part structure gives shape to what could otherwise be a long list of battles and political moves. For me, it highlights the century-long process of larger powers dictating the Palestinian destiny – as indeed, the recent ceasefire negotiations illustrate yet again with the prominence of outside powers- but also the absolute necessity for an equitable solution if this conflict is ever to come to an end.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: own copy, now very much annotated.

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