RobertoArchimboldi

RobertoArchimboldi , 5 days ago to bookstodon group

Just finished reading #IlanPappé's 'the ethnic cleansing of Palestine'. It is a sickening read. It has two great merits and a couple of minor faults. The faults: the book is not written for professional historians, but it sometimes slips into that mode; it has a bit of a tendency to romanticise the Palestinians and Palestinian life. They are all brave and live in picturesque villages. The later is a very understandable response to the dehumanisation and erasure that Zionist historiography indulged in.

Much more importantly it forces the reader to confront what those maps showing the dispossession of the Palestinians mean: a planned, systematic, brutally violent programme of destruction and expulsion with a fair number of massacres. It gives the lie to the idea that the conflict is complicated. It isn't. One group of people violently destroyed and then erased another to create their new state.

It also is optimistic in a way. It beliefs that sharing that space has always been possible, but it requires the Israelis to give up their dreams of a Jewish state built over the ruins of Palestinian life. That doesn't seem impossible.

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RobertoArchimboldi , 20 days ago to bookstodon group

Just finished reading #HananAlShaych's 'Women of Sand and Myrrh'. It is brilliant and a tough read. This is largely because it captures something of the way that women, but actually any human, are trapped in a kind of limbo, unable to be themselves. There is no way out in a world where everything is false. It is able to explore these metaphysical themes by starting from the very particular: exile from Lebanon to a nameless gulf state emerging into an unreal capitalist modernity from an unreal nomadic past.

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RobertoArchimboldi , 1 month ago to bookstodon group

Finished reading #AlexanderBaron's memoir, 'A chapter of accidents'. I wouldn't particularly recommend. There are flashes of his great abilities, but is mostly a list of communists that he met in the 30s interpreted with splenetic attacks on the CPGB. The part describing life in the army is moving and worth reading.

It is a shame because some deeper reflection on life in Britain as a Jew in that period and why Stalinism seemed so attractive would have been very interesting.

His novels are brilliant and worth reading.

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