One state, two states

Matthew Teller came to Stroud and spoke at a packed meeting at St Lawrence’s church, with the Bishop of Gloucester also on the platform. The meeting, entitled “Paths of Hope: seeking justice and compassion for Palestinians and Israelis” was chaired by CSSD member Judith Large.

Matthew spoke movingly about his own background and how he’d come to move away from support for Israel and Zionism. He spoke a bit about the origins of Zionism, particularly the strand that had its beginnings in Protestant Christianity and the hope that the re-establishment of a Jewish state in “the Holy Land”, and the “ingathering of the exiles”, will be a fulfillment of prophecy and lead to the Second Coming of Jesus. He had less to say about the origins of Jewish Zionism, and in particular how Zionism went from being a weird minority political current at the beginning of the twentieth century to being, by the middle of the twentieth century, the unquestioned and unquestionable dominant ideology of most mainstream Jewish communities.

Mostly he spoke about two-state vs one-state solutions in Israel-Palestine. He pointed out all the things that were weak and bad about the two-state solution - the unfairness of the proposed boundaries, the way in which the proposed Palestinian state is already slashed to pieces by Israeli settlement blocks, the real possibility that the Israeli right would use the establishment of a small, powerless, Palestinian state to expel some or all of Israel’s Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. 

Nothing he said here was wrong, though he didn’t dwell on the fact that lots of progressives in both Israel and Palestine do support this approach, at least as an interim. And since one of the demands of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign is for governments to recognise Palestine as a state, then it too implicitly supports this approach.

And then he outlined his preferred option, the one-state solution. It’s probably worth pointing out that his version of this is - to say the least - a bit unusual. He’s actually proposing a binational state, with two national entities co-existing in and jointly ruling over the same territory, each with some degree of state authority and sovereignty. The proposed state would have two names - it would be Israel for the Israeli-Jewish component of the population and Palestine (or Falastin) for the Palestinian-Arab component. 

This is not the same as the “decolonial” one-state solution, in which Palestine has an Arab identity with some tolerated minorities, and (in some versions) Israelis “return to their countries of origin”. Teller didn’t explicitly say that he rejected this, which meant that people who did believe in exactly this could pretend that they liked what he was saying.

The other thing he didn’t say was that his ideas have a history, and it’s mainly an unhappy one. There was a current in the Second International that favoured non-territorial national self-determination. It was particularly pronounced in the Austro-Hungarian empire before WW1, partly as an idea as to how to reconcile conflicting national claims where nationalities didn’t occupy contiguous blocks of territory. The people who proposed it were called Austro-Marxists, and other people in the Socialist movement despised them on the grounds that they appeared to want to preserve the empire as well as its multinational character.

It was also an important part of the political ideology of non-Zionist Jewish organisations in Eastern Europe. The Bund, the General Union of Jewish Workers, advocated what it called National Personal Autonomy.  So did the Fareynikte, the United Jewish Socialist Workers Party.

It was briefly implemented in some Eastern European countries - especially the briefly-independent Ukraine, and the slightly less briefly-independent Lithuania and Esthonia. I’ve not heard anyone ever mention this, let alone point to it as a roaring success. 

And it was proposed, though never implemented, in Palestine during the British Mandate, as an alternative to partition. It has been supported, at times, by various currents among Zionist Jews, from the “socialist-Zionist” Hashomer Hatzair and some of the “Labour Zionist” Ahdut HaAvoda, and the liberal Zionist Brit Shalom and Ihud parties. There are even elements among right-wing Israelis that are prepared to countenance political rights for Palestinians in an expanded Israel that includes the Occupied Territories.

So…it’s not as if the idea of a one-state or a bi-national solution is self-evidently wrong. Personally I think it would be great if Palestinians and Israelis were ready and willing to share the same state structure, and could find a way to get there that didn’t involve either people oppressing the other. Because I’m not a Zionist, it wouldn’t matter to me that the resulting political entity was not “the” Jewish state, or a “a” Jewish state, especially not in the sense of being the state for all the Jews in the world. I’d be just fine with it being a state for all its citizens. 

But it seems disingenuous to pretend that the “two-state solution” is impossibly problematic and that any route to this one-state solution doesn’t have at least as many problems. Right now there’s a lot of hate between Palestinians and Israelis. So while I’d be happy with a future that ultimately included a single unitary or bi-national state, I think that the route to getting there might include two states. It might not, I’m open to suggestions.

And since no solution at all is actually on the table with Netanyahu’s government still in place, it’s important that people who want to stand against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians - the brutality of the occupation, the land confiscations and the ethnic cleansing, the apartheid rules and practices - don’t fight among themselves about what the ultimate resolution of the conflict needs to be.

Review of I Swear

Nice feelgood biopic of Tourette's sufferer John Davidson, who turned into a kind of advocate and explainer of the condition, helping promote public understanding. We watched it at the Odeon at Port Solent, just before getting on the boat to Bilbao, and it was just right.

Review of Latin Blood: The Ballad of Ney Matogrosso

Musical biopic of Brazilian gay singer, a bit long and plodding, but with some nice music and some striking images. Two months after I watched it, I don't remember much else - the reconciliation with his father, who's in the military but doesn't approve of the dictatorship maybe. Not much else.

Review of "Quicksilver" by Neal Stephenson

I re-read this after a twenty year interval, and it's just as wonderful as I remembered it. I loved every page, the insightful proper history, the anachronistic cod-history jokes (the Barbary Corsair galley where the rowers are singing Hava Nagila, for example), the characters, the sweep. Just wonderful. I was on holiday, and couldn't wait for evening to come so that I could read more of it. I started re-reading the second book in the series as soon as I got home.

Review of "The Testaments" by Margaret Attwood

A sequel to The Handmaids Tale, which I read a long time ago, before I started writing book reviews so consistently. That was a great, terrifying dystopian novel. This is slightly less so. It starts our really well, and is so chilling that I could only read it in the daytime, not last thing at night. Reading in the Trump era, with the religious, fascist and misogynist far right to strong, is very painful - at the time of the first book that was much less so, so that it almost felt like an allegory for fundamentalist regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Not now.

But as it progresses plot takes over from atmosphere, so that by the end it's something of an adventure yarn. Still good, but not the same experience.

Review of "Wild" by Cheryl Strayed

Another walk book. Coming so soon after High Caucasus, it really is enough to put you off the idea of hiking holidays for life - the fear, the wild animals, the risk of death...

I'd already watched the film and mainly liked it. The book is less elegiac, more about the mechanics of the trip and the pain of actually walking that much. Cheryl doesn't hide the multiple bad decisions she makes, and even though I knew she survived to write the book parts of it were really scary. Some of it was not good to be reading last thing at night, even though it was gripping. Lots about her addiction, bad relationships, and troubled upbringing. 

Review of "Flags in Berlin: An account of life in Berlin 1928-1945" by Biddy Youngday

A self-published book written by the grandmother of my friend Charles (Bill) Brimacombe, with support from his aunt (I think), this is a very matter-of-fact account of life in Germany during the rise of the Nazis and then their rule. Biddy was an upper-middle class woman who had led a sheltered life, but was "spirited" and ran away from her family to Germany, where she married a working-class German man. They both became Communists, and she writes about their activities - in the tail end of Weimar and then under Nazi rule - in a somewhat dispassionate way, though the book is all the more revealing for that.

Biddy's British passport was cancelled so that she could stay in Germany, but she held on to the document, which enabled her and daughters to leave the Soviet occupation zone and return to Britain at the end of the war. Her account of her mental breakdown, and time inside various psychiatric facilities, when she's back in Britain is the hardest part of the book to read.

Review of Mango

Fairly lame and predictable Danish romcom about a hard professional woman in the hotel business who is sent to the south of Spain to buy up a mango farm and turn it into a luxury hotel, but ends up implausibly falling in love with the (Danish) owner and repairing her relationship with her teenage daughter into the bargain.

Watched on Netflix, and not good enough to justify the subscription.

Review of "High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland" by Tom Parfitt

I was expecting a sort of "Between the Wood and The Water" set in the Caucasus, but it turned out to be not so much of a posh-boy jaunt with heartwarming characters, and much more gruelling. Lots more fear (bears and wild boar, and the constant scanning for Islamist fighters), lots more unpleasantness - the food is shit much of the time, the accommodation terrible, the police and bureaucrats corrupt and menacing. From time to time he appreciates the beauty of his surroundings, but he also details the physical discomfort of lots of walking - feet, legs, hips...

And in the background there's his PTSD from his experiences in actual terrorist episodes in Beslan and elsewhere. 

So not an easy read, or a good one for night-time, but worth the time.

Review of American Fiction

Surprisingly thoughtful and interesting film, about the world of books and authors, but also about race and class in contemporary America. The central character is a Black professor who writes high-culture novels that don't sell very well, overshadowed by other writers who do "ghetto" novels even though they are no more out of the ghetto than he is. As a prank he writes a ghetto novel, and then...well, I don't have to spell it all out.

Definitely worth watching. We watched it on BBC iPlayer via our smart TV's native capabilities - i.e. not via casting from the smartphone app.

Review of "The Rose of Sebastopol" by Katherine McMahon

Not completely sure about this one. I didn't enjoy it all that much. It was a bit dull some of the time, and I found myself grinding through it very slowly, which is never a good sign. Some of the writing felt very clunky, like it could have done with a further edit.

And yet I kept going, partly because I wanted to find out what happened to the characters, and along the way I found a lot that I hadn't known about Victorian medicine, and battlefield medicine (apparently the Russians invented triage), and about the Crimean War - I hadn't appreciated quite how bloody that was, almost like a trial run for WW1.

Review of The Ballad of Wallis Island

Beautiful slow poignant movie, which nevertheless manages to be quite funny. It's about a folk duo who were lovers but broke up and stopped playing together, and a lottery-winner superfan who wants to get them together for a private concert, just for him, on a lonely island off the Welsh coast.

Watched via informal distribution and USB stick.

Review of O Brother Where Art Thou

Watched again in the Middle Floor at Springhill, from a DVD, and realised that though I had warm and fuzzy feelings about this film, I'd forgotten almost all of it.

Anyway, it was great, even after 25 years - fabulous music, sharp dialogue, a good and funny plot, and good politics. The set-piece with the KKK rally, the discovery that the "reform" anti-corruption candidate for governor is the Grand Wizard, all feels very topical.

Feeding the hand that bites us

Last weekend I attended some of the Festival of Commoning, held in Stroud. There were lots of interesting talks and discussions, but there was one particularly significant moment for me. Jem Bendell, famous as a guru of XR and Deep Adaption, was down to speak on “Great Reclamation”. In retrospect the title of his talk ought perhaps to have rung a few alarm bells, but it didn’t - one assumes that an event like this ought to be a relatively safe place. 

He didn’t talk about climate or deep adaptation at all - the focus of his talk was a call for restrictions on foreigners buying or owning land in Britain. I don’t have a very strong view on this. I’m aware that lots of other countries have such restrictions, and there’s room for a balanced, evidence-based discussion on what the impact might be on the affordability of homes in Britain.

The trouble was that the language that he used was very strongly reminiscent of that used by the far right. He talked about “globalists” and “international bankers”. He spoke about how these people were “sucking the life blood out of our country”, and he said that this was directly linked to “our” children deciding not to have babies. It was all rather “Great Replacement”, and the title may have been a deliberate referece - if it wasn’t, then it’s shocking that no-one noticed. (You can see a version of what he said on his blog here, and judge for yourself whether my reaction was justified).

So when it was time for questions and contributions, I stuck my hand up and pointed this out, saying that on a day when Tommy Robinson had brought 100.000 foot soldiers on to the streets of London, it was a bad day to be fooling around with economic nationalism. I said that “globalists” was often a dogwhistle for Jews, and that focusing on “foreign” ownership of property made it seem as if it was OK for the Duke of Westminster to own huge amounts of property in Britain because he was “one of us” - in Bendell’s word, a citizen.

It would have been easy for him to have agreed that the language was - on reflection - a bit unfortunate, and that it wasn’t his intention to align himself with the far right, but he didn’t. He doubled down, said that “globalists” were the source of the problem, and that the suggestion that he might be unconsciously echoing racist and antisemitic rhetoric was just the sort of thing he’d be expecting from “guilt-ridden Guardianistas”. 

Somebody else from the floor joined in, saying that his language was wrong and bad, and that it was of a piece with the sort of thing one heard from the US far right; rather wonderfully, that person turned out to be Carne Ross, the “accidental anarchist” and former diplomat who was one of the later celebrity speakers at the event. Someone else called out that next he would start talking about the Rothschilds. Still Bendell was having none of it; he was in sympathy with Black and Brown people who couldn’t afford housing, and that was down to the globalists.

The final contribution came from a local activist with whom I’ve had my disagreements who made a generous and kind closing remark about me personally, and about the importance of being careful about language.

Afterwards a few people spoke to me - some of the organisers of the festival, who said that I’d been right to bring it up, and that Jem Bendell didn’t really mean it, and we probably agreed. A couple of others said that they’d never heard that “globalist” and “cosmopolitan” were used code-words for Jew, and I perhaps unkindly replied that they ought to get out more.

I was pretty shaken by the experience, though the solidarity I received helped make it better. Reflecting later, I thought it would of course be easy for Jem Bendell to show that he wasn’t a racist. There’s no sign that he’s an antisemite either, in the sense of someone who hates Jews. Apart from a recent engagement with the cause of Palestine and Gaza, he’s not said or written anything touching on the subject.

I think that’s the point. Antisemitism isn’t a feeling (hate), it’s an ideology - one which puts Jews at the centre of explaining how the world works and what’s wrong with it. It’s possible, and even common, to spread this ideology without personally hating Jews, and even to do it in places where there aren’t many Jews. 

And what’s wrong with it isn’t only that it’s hurtful to actual Jewish people, but that it makes everyone else stupider, and less able to understand the world as it really is. That’s the point about the expression “the socialism of fools”. Antisemitism isn’t just something that is promoted by stupid people, but something that helps to make people stupider.

AFTERWORD: Jem Bendell wrote a response to this post, which is published here. Once again, I wish to make it clear that I am not accusing Jem Bendell of being an antisemite. You can judge for yourself whether the language he uses is helpful to other people who are.

Review of Martha

A sympathetic biopic of Martha Stewart, that makes her seem almost nice. The bad parts aren't ignored, but they are spun and glossed. So we sort of know that she's horrible to minions, but it's OK because she's just a perfectionist, and everyone who was getting at her (like the SEC and the FBI and the DA) did it because she was a successful woman, not because she'd done anything really wrong.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of The Heartbreak Agency

Not-very-good German romcom - a woman starts an agency to help people suffering from heartbreak after break-ups, a journalist writes a mean article about it. He gets sacked by his new young boss because he won't retract, and finds himself grovelling for his job back which means he has to write another, nicer article, which includes receiving the heartbreak therapy...and he and the agency woman end up falling for each other, obvs...

The best bit is the location, which includes some stunning Baltic coastline, and now I want to go there. Someone seems to have described this as the "worst film ever", and it's not quite that bad.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Dreamland" by Kevin Baker

Wow, what a book. 

I bought this for my mum, in hardback, as a birthday present years ago - I looked at the subject matter, Jewish immigrants in New York City in the early C20th and thought she'd like it. I don't know if she ever read it, which is sad.

At some point I borrowed it from her, and put it in my bookshelf, and I didn't read it either, until now. And it's pretty amazing. A multi-threaded narrative with many characters, usually told in close third person but occasionally in first person. Many but not all of the characters are indeed Jewish immigrants, though not the pious, Americanising upwardly mobile ones that we are usually presented with in this sort of narrative. They're gangsters, prostitutes, union organisers, circus freaks...

It's very vivid in its descriptions of the city and its environs, especially Coney Island, the site of the eponymous theme park "Dreamland". 

I want to read the rest of the trilogy now, even though I had previously never heard of Kevin Baker. Disappointingly he's the same age as me, but he's written so much!

Review of "Silverview" by John le Carre

Not one of his best...perhaps because it's not entirely his. He died before he finished it, and his son completed it from extensive notes. It was a bit boring, with a not entirely believable ageing Polish  antifascist disappointed by Communism as the central character - the sort of ambivalent, ambiguous disappointed old guy that Le Carre usually does well, but not so interesting here.

Review of We Live in Time

A poignant romantic drama, made much more interesting by the unusual narrative structure - non-linear, so events are jumbled up in an out-of-sequence timeline. This allows for multiple dramatic crises, whereas if it had been linear we'd have expected it to build towards one. It's got a lot of domestic drama, hard to discuss without spoiling. But it's well acted and beautifully put together, well worth watching.

Unusual good film on Netflix.

Review of Kensuke's Kingdom

Nice, mainly gentle animated film, in which a young boy is storm-washed from the deck of his parents' sailing boat and (somewhat implausibly) finds himself on a tropical island paradise presided over by the eponymous Kensuke, a former Japanese sailor whose family were all killed in the Nagasaki nuclear bombing. 

Perhaps I missed it, but I had thought that when the storm hits the family sailing boat is still in the Atlantic Ocean, heading for South Africa, which makes the presence of a Japanese sailor hard to explain. The Wikipedia article about the book makes it clear that they are in the Pacific, which makes much more sense.

Despite the subject matter I didn't get too emotionally involved - not as much as I did in the The Wild Robot, another animated film which strangely I don't seem to have reviewed. 

Review of "Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History" by C.L.R. James Illustrated by Sakina Karimjee and Nic Watts

As I write here quite often, I'm not a big fan of graphic novels. I find them hard to read, distracting and non-linear- maybe I have an old-fashioned attention span. This one felt different, perhaps because it's adapted from a play, and it reads like the script of a good play. I am a big fan of CLR James, and his intelligence and his willingness to deal with difficult and contradictory elements (like the slave-owning planters' enthusiasm for the French Revolution) shines through.

It's still bloody confusing though, and hard to keep track of all the currents - the revolting slaves loyal to the kings of France and Spain, the interventions of the British and the Americans, the shifting loyalties of the mulattoes and the free blacks. I'm glad there was a list of dramatis personae at the beginning, and I referred back to it more than once.

Still hard to read of Toussaint's betrayal and death without a lump in the throat, and the graphic novel removes many of the details that are in James's book The Black Jacobins.

A great introduction to the Haitian revolution though, with a good bibliography. 

Review of "Spies" by Michael Frayn

A beautiful, clever book, mostly told through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy in wartime England, though with a frame first person narrative told by the same person in his old age. It touches on everything about England - class, race, town and country (and new suburb), manners, sexuality.  Two boys who are uncertain friends play lots of fantasy-based games around their newly built suburb, which still shades into rough rural at its edges, and they create a scenario around the idea that one of their mothers is a German spy. It's hard to say more without spoiling. 

Review of The Blue Caftan

Sad, slow but engrossing Moroccan film about a man who works as a maker of embroidered kaftans, and his wife who is dying of cancer. Their business is struggling, the wife suspects their new apprentice of stealing from them, and the husband is secretly gay and goes to the hamam for casual sex with men.

Why this is described as a comedy completely escapes me. There are no laughs, though the couple laugh at something once in the film. It's about death, grief, deception, love and sex, and also about craft skill. Along the way I learned something about Moroccan society and customs, especially death and funeral customs.

This was on Channel 4, but we watched it on an old fashioned hard disc recorder at Minnie's rather than on catch-up.

Review of Deep Cover

A fun comedy-thriller that actually has some laughs. Three improv comedians (well, one is a class tutor and one has just walked in off the street by mistake) get suckered by a rogue policeman into going undercover to investigate a cigarette smuggling racket, but stumble into a much bigger and scarier drug smuggling gang war. 

It's genuinely suspenseful and funny, though don't watch it if you can't take violence.

Watched via informal distribution and a USB drive.

Review of "Veteranhood" by Joe Glenton

Interesting and thoughtful book about the politics of veterans - both the politics of the veterans themselves and the way they are used by politicians, including mainstream and far right politicians. Glenton is a good writer and he says a lot that has wider relevance, especially in terms of how the cultural left relates to actual working class people.

Review of "The Western Wind" by Samantha Harvey

Remarkable book by the author of "Orbital", and almost nothing like that. It's a first-person narrative set in the late C15th, in which the narrator is the parish priest in a not-very-prosperous west country village. It's of course embedded in the world of medieval Christianity, a mixture of theology and folk-superstitions and lots in between (how would you characterise the belief that someone who dies "un-shriven" cannot enter heaven?). There's a suspicious death that's being investigated by an outsider, a rural dean who is in effect the narrator's boss. 

What makes it quite so special is the narrative structure. It takes place over four days, but as readers we experience them in reverse order, so that the narrative really unfolds, but in an unexpected way - we learn gradually that what we think we have "seen" is actually something very different. 

Definitely worth a read. We listened to it as an audio book first, and I didn't get the structure properly until I actually read a paper copy.

Review of The End of The Tour

A very unusual film - about how David Lipsky (a journalist for Rolling Stone) goes to interview the writer David Foster Wallace by joining his writer's book tour, and the relationship that develops between them. In between it's about what goes on between writers and their subjects, and the business of book tours, and what integrity demands of reporters, and so on.

It's slow, and not so beautiful to look at, but really interesting. And now I want to read more of David Lipsky.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" by Marina Lewycka

Everyone loved this book when it came out, didn't they? I didn't like it so much. First there's the picaresque humour - the old man acting stupidly and irrationally over the obvious exploitative and semi-crooked "tart-ish" woman, who is also what would be called by many an illegal immigrant. The first-person narrator is politically wise to the nastiness of the stereotype, but she's really having her cake and eating it - managing to have a narrative that's a bit racist and sexist while also maintaining a distance from it. And picaresque - laughing at the stupidity of an old man - doesn't sit well with me. I never understood how anyone could find Don Quixote funny.

And the Ukrainian nationalism too. The book was written before the "Orange Revolution" and all of the stuff that followed, though after the break-up of the USSR. In the post-invasion period many progressives have become a lot less critical about the darker side of Ukrainian nationalism, and the people who bang on about it tend to be "Red-Brown" stooges for Putin. But it's there, and the book mentions in passing Stephan Bandera, and Symon Petliura, as Ukrainian nationalists without even alluding to their Nazi and pogromist histories. I can't believe that most readers of the book will know who they were, and won't learn that about them.

Review of "Lessons in Chemistry" by Bonnie Garmus

Another really enjoyable novel. I watched the TV series first, which was also great, and then when it finished I was missing the characters so I read the novel. Which turned out to be a little different from the series - the Afro-American characters and the anti-racist theme of the series isn't really a thing in the book, though the main character Elizabeth Zott is a supporter of civil rights and racial equality, just as she's a feminist - probably a premature feminist, because she's between the two waves of feminism.

The TV series seems to have put some more complexity in, but also left out some of the scratchiness that's in the book - hard to write about without spoilers, but in some ways it's more critical of conservative and conventional America.

Review of "North Woods" by Daniel Mason

 Really enjoyable novel made up of different stories set in the same place through history.  I feel there ought to be a name for that but I can't think of it. In this case it's a rural local in Western Massachusetts, on the boundaries of forested wilderness. It gradually becomes more tame over the various stories, but not evenly - it goes from wilderness, to orchards, to farmland and then back to holiday-home wilderness. 

It works as a prism for American history - racism, colonial expropriation, slavery - the lot. There's a bit of a supernatural theme running through it too, with ghosts and fake mediums who turn out to have real experiences with ghosts. As with Cloud Atlas, the different episodes are told in different styles, and there are fragments of songs and poems and some pictures scattered through.

A joy - I was sorry when it finished.

Review of "Popular Resistance in Palestine A History of Hope and Empowerment" by Mazin B. Qumsiyeh

I was disappointed and upset by this book. It's not specially well written, and it feels poorly edited too - sometimes the same episode is described twice, or the same point made, within a few pages. 

But that's not the main thing that's wrong with it. Its politics and its account of history are often really bad. The first four or so chapters are a "discussion" of the role of violence in struggles of resistance, but there's nothing remotely analytical about it. Sometimes the resistance (wherever) uses violence, and sometimes it doesn't. He's obviously keen not to be seen as criticising armed struggle, whether or not it's appropriate or effective. 

Worse, there's really no distinction between different kinds of armed-struggle tactics or strategies. Sure, the South African regime and its supporters called the ANC "terrorists", but for the most part its armed wing stayed away from indiscriminate attacks on civilians, focusing instead on infrastructure. Whereas the Palestinian armed struggle focused on soft Israeli targets, with lots of attacks on civilians - kidnappings, hostage taking, and exactly the kind of bombings and shootings that had earlier been deployed by the Irgun against Palestinians in Mandate Palestine. The question here is not the abstract "do Palestinians have the right to use violence" but what kind of violence should they use. For both Fatah and later Hamas, the rhetoric was revolutionary but the tactics were those of fascism.

After this there's a long chronological account of Palestinian resistance, beginning with the Ottoman period.  The Zionists start to arrive, but there's absolutely nothing about where they are coming from or why.  As with other Palestinian and Arab Nationalist accounts of "the Zionists" they are presented as pith-helmeted colonialists. There's no indication or reflection at all as to why Jews were leaving the Russian empire. Of course the Palestinians of the time can be forgiven for not thinking about that so much - something bad was beginning to happen to them, and they correctly understood that it was going to get worse. But someone now writing a history owes their readers something better.

This tendency is exacerbated in the history of the Mandate. By the time the book reaches the 1930s it acknowledges that the flow of Zionist immigrants is increasing, but there's absolutely no account as to why. The author manages to talk about the history of this period without mentioning antisemitism or the Nazis. The only mention of the Holocaust in the book is to illustrate a point about the bad education that Jewish children in Israel receive. There's nothing at all about who made up the wave of Jewish immigrants in the immediate post-WW2 period, or about the mass emigration of Jews from Arab countries that came after that. Again, it would contradict the view that "the Zionists" were all European and American colons.

When it gets to 1967 there's a brief mention of Ahmed Shukeiri, the Egyptian-backed first head of the PLO, though no mention of his call to throw the Jews into the sea or his promise that no Jews would survive the coming war.

Overall the history in the book is like a mirror image of the bad history that I received from my Zionist education. There's lots about the pro-Zionist sympathies of the British (we were only told about the bad period in which the British tried to restrict Zionist immigration, not the preceding 16 years in which they had enabled it), and then the Americans. There is of course nothing about the way in which the USSR and the international Communist movement acted as midwives for the birth of Israel, because that would contradict the narrative that Israel was a creation of imperialism. 

It's a shame, because somewhere in there there's a better book struggling and failing to get out.  There's a lot of good documentation about the popular non-violent struggle. The account of the post-1948 and then post-1967 resistance is informative and told me lots I didn't know. Somewhere in this period some good Israelis begin to appear, though without any discussion or reflection as to what that might mean. There's a little bit of an account of Palestinians who are prepared to accept a permanent presence for Israelis, though usually in terms of them being sell-outs. At one point he does actually quote with approval that "there's no place for a second nation in Palestine", though he is far from consistent about this.

I read this on a Kindle, so it's harder to illustrate this with quotes and excerpts. In a way I'd like to write more, because this is an important juncture in the evolution of my perspective on Israel-Palestine...listening to Palestinian voices, but then not finding them easy to listen to.

Review of "The Jazz Scene" by Francis Newton

This has sat on my shelf for more than a year. Someone was clearing out his Jazz books collection, and I took this one, mainly because I remember that "Francis Newton" was a pseudonym for the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who wrote Jazz reviews for various left wing publications.

Anyway, it turns out that it is a very good book, intelligent, informed and very sensible about Jazz, its audience, its players, and its history. The author (whatever we want to call him) situates Jazz in its historical and social context, without resorting to vulgar Marxism or daft economic determinism. Really great, well worth reading. 

Review of Benedetta

A Paul Verhoeven historical drama with heresy, blasphemy, lurid visions and lesbian nuns. Not ridiculously over the top like Ken Russel's "The Devils", this nevertheless managed to be quite salacious, but also anticlerical and anti-religious in a good way.

Benedetta is given to a convent as a quite young child, but almost immediately begins to have visions. These become progressively more lurid, but she's also doing miracles - bleeding wounds of Christ, that sort of thing. The local clerics decide to believe her (good for the pilgrimage trade), others are not so sure but she sees them off. Then the Papal Nuncio gets involved, and it's torture and burning at the stake...

Watched on Channel 4's app via Chromecast.

Review of Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle

A disappointing, ramshackle, often boring film, with occasional glints of interest. It's a fly-on-the-wall documentary - no narrative or narrator - made by a son about his eighty-year-old mother.  She's not an obvious choice for a film. She's overweight, unattractive, and she doesn't stop talking. She has not much interest in other people, and little insight into her own life.

The title comes from her own declaration of what she wanted from life. The film rather glosses over how it came about that her and her husband were wealthy enough to buy the castle. It seems that money was inherited, but it's not entirely clear from who. The family were Falangists, and some members were executed "by the Reds" during the Civil War. The woman (Julita) talks about her own membership of the Falangist youth, the uniform she wore and so on; but later on she criticises Franco for abolishing the Republic, because her present-day political views extend to disapproval of the Spanish monarchy and monarchies in general.

Much of the film centres on the amount of crap that she has accumulated and preserved. The castle, and the now abandoned engineering factory that her husband once operated, are absolutely rammed full of junk - broken objects, tattered remnants of clothes that might one day be mended, and many small and labelled boxes with dolls house furniture, pins, stationary, and so on. 

That's sort of poignant, because I can't help feeling that my own life is full of crap that I am holding on to and shouldn't. The film is inter-cut with footage from home movies of the family when the children were younger, and they look to have had a fun, happy childhood - beach holidays and so on. Again, I look at that and wonder what the arc of my own life would like if it were made into a film like this.

But most of the time it's boring and depressing, and I missed some of it when I fell asleep. Ruth missed almost all of it, but still saw enough to remember how much she didn't like it.

Watched at Jane Opher's house - the old Co-op on Horns Road - as part of an ongoing series of Spanish films. The occasion was enjoyable even if the film wasn't.

Review of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

I watched this as part of my birthday celebrations. A few months ago I found myself - unusually - listening to Radio 4, and there was a program about musicals where they raved about this as one of the best musicals ever. And then it was scheduled to be on the Stroud Film Festival, but I missed it.

So I obtained it and put it on in the Middle Floor at Springhill Cohousing - a bit of a challenge because the file was too big to copy on to a USB, and my mini PC sometimes forgets how to produce sound output from its earphone jack. But all sorted, and the showing was a success; quite a few people came, and they - like me - enjoyed it.

But it's a weird musical. Apart from the fact that there's no spoken dialogue at all, everything is sung - it's an anti-romantic romance. Sorry for the spoiler, but the main story line is that the young woman does not wait for her lover to return from the Algerian War, but marries someone else instead, because she is forgetting her absent lover even though she is carrying his child.

He comes back, marries someone else (the woman who had cared unceasingly for the dying aunt who raised him), and when the original pair meet again the moment of love has passed. There is no sense that they might yet get back together, just a feeling of a future that didn't happen.

The beautiful theme song for the film, performed by many artists, is "I Will Wait For You", but she doesn't.

Review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

I've belated become a John Le Carre fan. I think this film captures the atmosphere of the books, especially the shabby interiors of the intelligence agency premises and safe houses. I liked the acting, but somehow I literally lost the plot - I couldn't figure out what was happening. I read the Wikipedia article about it, and realised that I'd fallen asleep and missed a major section, which might have made it easier to follow.

Watched on BBC iPlayer

Review of "L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City" by John Buntin

The ratings and reviews of this book seem to be overwhelmingly positive, and I see it's been turned into a TV series. Still, I wasn't all that impressed, though it was something to read in the small hours to help me go back to sleep. 

The central conceit is that it's a dual biography of mobster Mickey Cohen and LA Police Chief William H Parker. But Cohen is a lesser figure, and his biography and career are not all that interesting. Parker bestrode the city as it grew, and dominated its politics and its policing, and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Buntin really wanted to write a biography of him, or should have anyway. 

The author has had a lot of help from the LAPD and various Parker-related foundations and organisations, so though it's pretty obvious from reading the book that the man was a megalomaniac and a racist, and a right-wing operator who couldn't get on with other right-wing operators (especially J Edgar Hoover), the author doesn't want to say so. The book almost ends with Parker's death, though there's a longish epilogue that covers the 1991 riots. It's not clear whether it wants to say that the riots were Parker's legacy, or that if he'd been in charge they would have been crushed more effectively - I think it wanted to have it both ways, which makes it confusing and unsatisfactory.

I read this on kindle, so I'm not putting up a cover picture. 

Review of Shoshana

 

This is a film about Shoshana Borochov, a real person who was the daughter of Dov Ber Borochov, a "Marxist Zionist". There's lots to say about his ideas and his politics, which were in my lifetime influential in a retro sort of way about young Jews with contradictory ideas about Zionism and revolutionary socialism - but the film doesn't say much about his, though it alludes to the way he would have liked Zionism to have turned out nice. 

The film is about Shoshana's relationship with a British policeman, who is part of the Mandate authority trying to fight against the Irgun and its breakaway faction Lehi. This troubled love story is the centre of the film

The Irgun suspended hostilities against the British for the duration of WW2, Lehi didn't, and famously tried to develop a relationship with the Nazis on the basis of common hostility to the British Empire.

The film does make some efforts to show the different currents within the Palestinian-Jewish community in Palestine, but it's pretty cartoon-ish. We see that the mainstream Zionists (Labour Zionists, though it doesn't really say so) don't like the Revisionist Zionists (Irgun, and then Lehi) much, but there's not all that much substance to the disagreement - though the mainstream Zionists do call the Irgun fascists, which is justified. There are occasional Palestinian-Arab victims depicted (an Irgun attack on a bus, and then bombs in marketplaces) but there are no voices from the Arab community, no Arab characters...apart from one scene where the Mandatory Police carry out frightening round-ups in a village.

The Revisionist Zionists want to proclaim a Jewish (or rather a Hebrew) state right now, even though there's nothing like a Jewish majority. The mainstream Zionists are gradualists, and believe that continued Jewish immigration will eventually produce a Jewish majority, at which point the locals will accept a Jewish state. I can't help wondering when they thought this was going to be - the 1950s? The 1960s? With the British providing the umbrella under which this demographic and political shift would take place?

The film ends with the very beginning of what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinian Arabs the Nakhba...but all that's shown is a group of disorganised Arab fighters running to attack a group of Haganah fighters, lying in wait with machine guns. There's no refugees, no displacement...nothing of the civil war between the Haganah and the Irgun either. 

A few details are worth noting. We see the Irgunists flyposting their posters, with the emblem of a fist holding a rifle over a map including both Palestine and Transjordan, and the slogan (in Ivrit) "Rak Kach" - that is, "Only Thus". Until this point I hadn't really appreciated the continuity between the Irgun and the Kahanist party, which was of course called "Kach".

Also, Shoshana and her mother seem to be speaking to each other in Russian - presumably this was much more common in the Yishuv than we are given to understand, though Dov Ber Borochov was a Yiddishist as well as a Zionist, and the party he founded (Left Poalei Zion) was also pro-Yiddish. 

At one point in the film some bright-eyed young Zionists say that they have recently arrived from Kiev - was this ever possible in the 1930s?

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "Altered Carbon" by Richard Morgan

The hardest science fiction I've read for a long time, and a mashup of cyberpunk and hard boiled detective noir. I really loved it. It's been on my Kindle for years, but somehow I never got round to reading it. I must say that I couldn't follow every twist and turn of the plot - the fact that characters can die and be restored most of the time, and that they slip in and out of each other's bodies - sorry, "sleeves" - makes this harder. I couldn't explain who turned out to have done it if any of my lives depended on it. Still, it was good if not great, and I will be back for more. I have a feeling that I started to watch the TV series once, and I might even have another look at that.

Review of Radical Love: The Life and Legacy of Satish Kumar

I watched this in the company of about a hundred people who were devotees of Kumar and thought he was perhaps literally God's gift to humanity. Some of these people were friends whom I admire, and others were fascist-adjacent woo lovers, so perhaps he is some sort of Rorschach inkblot on to who you can project whatever you want. 

I was depressed and bored by the film, which at just over an hour felt way too long. Lots of spiritual practices and pilgrimages, described as if they were effective political actions. A long section with Vananda Shiva, which brought to mind the film about her watched in the same place, and which left me with the same uncomfortable feeling. 

So yeah, watched at Hawkwood as part of Stroud Film Festival. Based on the venue I had an expectation about what the film would be like, which was not disappointed. However, Ruth and I walked there across the fields and through the woods by moonlight, and that was wonderful.

Review of Conclave

A papal election thriller, with lots of twists as the various candidates are revealed to have things in their past, or even in their presents, that don't look good in a putative Pope.

Very lush to look at, but not that much actually happens - unsurprisingly, because the cardinals doing the voting are locked in to the Vatican, so all that we can really see are side conversations and voting procedures.

Sort of tense without being actually interesting, though it held our attention.

Watched via USB and informal distribution.

Review of No Other Land

Absolutely relentless documentation of the way that first the Israeli army, and then settlers, try to evict a group of Palestinian villagers from their land in the West Hebron hills. It's crushing to watch, and there's no Hollywood-style redemption. One of the film makers is a Jewish Israeli, and the villagers are suspicious of him - not unreasonably, as we see him leaving the West Bank via the Israelis-only road back into Israel. 

There's been a lot of controversy over the film, which won an Oscar for best foreign film. Unsurprisingly many Israelis think it's propaganda, but some Palestinians also condemned it because the Israeli-Palestinian team that made it didn't use the right words to denounce Israel's occupation and genocide, and were therefore guilty of "normalisation". Fortunately other Palestinians, including the villagers most directly affected, were wiser.

Watched via informal distribution, even though it was available for free on Channel 4...mainly because I wanted to show it from a USB stick on the DVD player in the Springhill Common House. Only it wouldn't play there, even though it worked fine at home.