Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory.

 

- Anything Antony Loewenstein writes on Israel is a must-read in my humble opinion.

- His new book is a detailed, enlightening, and very persuasive critique of Israel and its subjugation of the Palestinian people through its encouragement of the armaments industry in every way. I was stunned by its shocking revelations. 

- Israeli companies are world leaders in CCTV systems, drones, threat detection technologies, and data exploitation and manipulation. All Palestinians are aggressively monitored regardless of age, location, or intent.

- Israel sells to regimes regardless of their intent. In 2021 it sold its surveillance systems to 130 countries, including repressive ethnocentric autocracies. European democracies such as Greece are also eager purchasers, particularly of drones used for locating refugees in the Mediterranean. India under Modi has adopted anti-Muslim, Israeli-developed, strategies in Kashmir, as has China in its treatment of the Uighurs. The border control systems being used along the US-Mexico border are dominated by Israel corporates and their technology. 

- In the 1960s and 1970s South Africa’s apartheid state strongly supported Israel. According to the South African Government Yearbook in 1976 ‘Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples…a surrounding majority…of unwanted populations’. Using South African apartheid-era rhetoric to defend the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories remains alive to this day. 

- Israeli companies ('Private Mossads') create sophisticated, state-sponsored surveillance technology that allows spyware to target its victims. Sophisticated hacking technologies are attractive to authoritarian regimes who also use the tools to target the gay community. 

- In the world of social media Israel is ruthless in cracking down. Palestinian posts suddenly disappear on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp and Twitter. Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze contain a minimal amount of data about Palestinian precincts. 

- The book has received high praise from well respected critics and publications:

A sad and sordid record of how 'the light unto the nations' became the purveyor of the means of violence and brutal repression from Guatemala to Myanmar and wherever else the opportunity arose. (Noam Chomsky)

 

A sharp expose of how Israel's suppression of Palestine has translated into lucrative anti-terrorist systems that the Israeli government exports globally...As the author shows, the Israelis have sent weapons and technology to Pinochet's Chile in the 1970s as well as to disreputable regimes in Burma, Sri Lanka, Rhodesia, and Rwanda, among others....An eye-opening delineation of the alarming ramifications of Israel's status as an 'ethnonationalist state'.  (Kirkus Reviews)

This interview with Antony is well worth watching:

  https://www.democracynow.org/2023/6/23/the_palestine_laboratory_author_antony_loewenstein

Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

 

- I've been a long time fan of American crime writer Dennis Lehane. I wrote this about his Joe Coughlin series of three gangster books in 2015:  The series is well worth your time. All the novels are exquisitely plotted, gripping and absorbing on every level, and with all the tension and atmospherics you hope for in a quality read. 

- In his latest novel we're taken back to Boston and its lower class Irish and Black communities in the mid-seventies. The focus this time is on racial tensions, but gangsters still prevail. In 1974 a US district court Judge ruled that busing white and black school students was needed to desegregate Boston’s public schools. The Irish-American community in particular was outraged and protested loudly and violently. They hated 'niggers'. 

- Mary Pat Fennessy is our main character and she's feisty and angry as hell, and everybody knows not to mess with her. Her teenage son died from a drug overdose, and her teenage daughter has gone missing. She lives in the project, part of Southie (South Boston), and works as a hospital aide in a Catholic old folks home. 

- She’s imprisoned in the ugly racism of the time, and she's from an ugly, dumb, always-fighting large family. ‘She can’t blame the coloreds for wanting to escape their shithole, but trading it for her shithole makes no sense’. 

- A young black man is found dead on the subway tracks, and four young whites are suspected, including Mary Pat's daughter. The police get involved, but it's almost impossible for them to get to the truth of what happened. No-one talks. Mary Pat, however, is determined to find out what happened and why her daughter has disappeared. 

- Lehane takes time to build a deeper narrative framework and it pays off in spades, adding richness to a very gritty story. We're immersed in the lives of unlikeable and ugly characters and their vigorous, boisterous conversations. But unfortunately a distinctive tone dominates and to me it becomes a real negative. American goodies and baddies who talk like comic stereotypes. And it’s preachy, as if Lehane can't help himself. 

Max Porter, Shy

 

- Max Porter's previous novel Lanny was brilliant. (See my review here).

- Shy, his new one, is equally as good. Like Lanny, it's short (122 pages), and shimmers with dazzling prose. Over the course of a few hours during the night a young teen walks to a pond and reflects on all his memories, nightmares and fantasies that have characterised his broken life. He wants to end it. His voice is sparkling, jazzy, punchy and crude, and often whacky and confusing. I had to read this short book twice to clarify where it was going and what it was doing. But it well and truly paid off. ‘The night is a shattered flicker-drag of these sense-jumbled memories, like he’s dropped, but he’s stone-cold not, he’s just traipsing along..’ The typefaces change for the different times and voices he recalls.

- For a year or so he's been a resident at a reform school called the Last Chance, along with ‘…some of the most disturbed and violent young offenders in the country…he’s living in this shite old mansion converted into a school for badly behaved boys in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere.’ 

 - He stormed out of regular school after throwing a violent fit. He lived with his perplexed mother (her ‘snotty repetitive questions’) and his stepdad (‘fucking self-important twat’). He always felt isolated, alone and angry, and was rather obsessed with loud drum and bass music, metal and rap. ‘It promises and delivers’. That comforts him. One drunken night he smashed the furniture, glassware and windows of his godmother’s house. 

- The teachers and counselors at Last Chance are sympathetic and caring, and Shy, despite his often robust conversations with them, knows that. Now, as he's trudging through the night he reflects on his bad behaviour, and it pains him.

- At the end he wades into the muddy pond he was headed for, weighed down by a heavy backpack full of flintstones. But he re-thinks. 

- The novel's ending is emotional and hopeful and very satisfying.  

Serhii Plokhy, The Russo-Ukrainian War.

                                               

- If you want to dig deep into the Ukraine-Russia war then this just published book is a must read. It is exceptionally good. The author is a Ukrainian-American professor of history at Harvard University and widely regarded as the world's foremost historian of Ukraine. 

- Written between March 2022 and February 2023, it is comprehensive and full of detail, and delves into the centuries-long history of the often turbulent, often peaceful, relationship between the two countries. 

- Generally speaking it is pro-Ukraine, pro-Zelensky, and pro-West, but it is also sympathetic to Russia's grievances when justified. It places the current confrontation in a deep historical context, making Zelensky's and Putin's positions clear and rational. 

- During the long cold war period of the USSR the relationship between the two largest and most important republics, Russia and Ukraine, were critical to the economies and social cohesion of both. But when the USSR and the Communist Party collapsed under Gorbachev, and Russia's brief experiment with democracy ended under Yeltsin, the tensions with Ukraine were inflamed. It was clear that the Ukrainian people were passionate about preserving their independent democratic state. It began pushing for NATO membership from the early 2000’s on, and Putin continually expressed concern. 'Moscow considered Ukrainian membership in NATO a breach of good relations with Russia...while it would not dare attack NATO, it could easily attack its aspirants (like Georgia and Ukraine) and it did so’. 

- The book delves deep into the Minsk Agreements. Zelensky and Putin remained fundamentally at odds. Zelensky ‘vacillated on the issue of the implementation of the constitutional reforms envisioned by Putin. The reforms would have given the Donbas special status and turned it into a Russian enclave if the Russians had been allowed to take charge of the elections. Zelensky faced…difficulties when in October he agreed to the formula endorsed by Russia, Germany and France for the reintegration of Donbas. Almost immediately, mass protests erupted all over Ukraine under the slogan ‘No to the capitulation’. Looking for a way out of a difficult situation Zelensky said ‘no’ to Putin in Paris. Now he had nowhere to go but west and no door to knock on but that of NATO’. 

- There was huge support (93%) by the people of Ukraine for Zelensky’s resistance.

- Putin, on the other hand, 'was the victim of his own delusions, historical and otherwise, and his troops became victims of his propaganda efforts’. 

- The massive sanctions enacted by the US, the EU, and many Asian states, particularly against its substantial gas exports, began to bring serious economic destruction to the Russian economy. Merkel’s contrasting view - encouraging economic cooperation with Russia - was seen as appeasement of an aggressor, and the new Chancellor Scholz reversed it. 

- France's Macron and Italy's Mario Draghi, favouring diplomacy, tried to broker a deal between Moscow and Kiev in February 2022, but Zelensky, expressing the mindset and committment of the Ukrainian people, rejected that notion as favouring Russia. Washington welcomed the plan but Russia mocked it. It wasn't long before the European leaders backtracked. 

- The Afterword at the end of the book is a superb reflection of how this war will end:

The Russo-Ukrainian War has become the latest military conflict in the long history of wars of national liberation, which can be traced back to the American Revolution. It also belongs in the long list of wars that accompanied the decline and disintegration of world empires from the Spanish to the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian, and then from the British and French to the Dutch, Belgian, and Portuguese. We know how those wars ended - with the sovereignty of former colonies and dependencies and the concomitant devolution of former empires into post-imperial nation-states.