en-US Tue, 22 Apr 2025 15:59:35 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg ReadStatus9340578916 Tue, 22 Apr 2025 15:59:35 -0700 /review/show/7510587661 Claire wants to read The Eights by Joanna Miller
]]> ReadStatus9337256140 Mon, 21 Apr 2025 19:44:16 -0700 /review/show/7508230391 Claire wants to read Music Camp by Penny Tangey
]]> ReadStatus9332666186 Sun, 20 Apr 2025 18:53:40 -0700 /review/show/7505026492 Claire wants to read Dateline Jerusalem: Journalism's Toughest Assignment by John Lyons
]]> ReadStatus9324675033 Fri, 18 Apr 2025 15:43:20 -0700 /review/show/7499527913 Claire wants to read The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience by Plestia Alaqad
]]> ReadStatus9324674012 Fri, 18 Apr 2025 15:42:58 -0700 /review/show/7499527212 Claire wants to read We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth by Ahmed Alnaouq
]]> Review5916500900 Tue, 15 Apr 2025 21:54:36 -0700 /review/show/5916500900 Claire gave 5 stars to Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (Kindle Edition) by Noam Chomsky
bookshelves: history
This is essential reading if you want to understand the Palestine/Israel conflict. I wouldn’t recommend it as an introductory text, because it’s extremely long and dense (it took me a year to get through it). But if you’ve read some more general history books on the topic (eg The One Hundred Year War on Palestine), this is the next step to gaining a more detailed understanding. Chomsky lived in Israel for a while and speaks Hebrew so this books provides an insider view of Israeli society through sources that are otherwise unknown in the west.

The subject of this book is the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories from 1967 to 1999 and Israel’s role in the Lebanese civil war. In meticulous and horrific detail, Chomsky lays out decades of war crimes and human rights abuses committed by Israel against the Palestinian and Lebanese people. These crimes have largely been ignored by the west, or grossly misrepresented in order to convince the western public that Arabs deserve to be stripped of their dignity and basic human rights.

Reading this book in 2025 is surreal, because there are many pages where it sounds like Chomsky is talking about the present war in Gaza, but in fact he’s talking about the war in Lebanon in the 1980s. All the crimes we’re witnessing now have already been committed by Israel on a smaller scale. For example, Israel shelled every hospital in Beirut that treated Palestinian patients. They also trapped Palestinians in west Beirut, carpet bombed them, and then claimed the PLO was holding them hostage and was thus responsible for their deaths. They’ve been using the same playbook for decades and they will keep using it as long as no one does anything to stop them or hold them accountable for their crimes.

It would take too long to summarise this book, so here are some of the main takeaways I can remember:

- The international community and Palestinian political groups all support the two state solution, while Israel and the US reject it. No government of Israel has ever supported the creation of a Palestinian state.

- Israel is more afraid of a peaceful settlement than of war. They prefer Palestinians to be terrorists, because then they can claim that they have no partner for peace. Whenever Palestinian resistance groups get too close to a political settlement, Israel starts a war to prevent it.

- Both sides of Israeli politics support the eventual annexation of the West Bank and differ only in their strategies for how to achieve it. Likud is more open about it while Labor favours doing it quietly so nobody notices.

- Any peace process Israel has been involved in has been a smokescreen to distract from the fact that the occupation is intended to be permanent.

- Any “state� Israel has offered the Palestinians has consisted of a collection of disconnected semi-autonomous cantons or bantustans that exist under Israeli rule. This is not a “state� by anyone’s definition and should not be taken seriously. The Oslo accords effectively achieved this scenario in the West Bank and that’s what they were intended to do.

- Israel has perfected the art of the “preemptive strike�. This occurs when Israel claims a neighbour is planning to attack them so they attack first. However, these strikes are typically justified using false flag operations (Israel makes it appear as though they have been attacked), deliberate provocations of their neighbours (such as driving tanks towards their territory), or completely made up intel (the other country was never planning to attack them in the first place). These attacks conveniently lead to Israel claiming more territory for itself (a recent example is the Israeli invasion of Syria in late 2024).

- Israel committed serious war crimes in Lebanon in the 1980s, including carpet bombing Beirut, targeting civilian infrastructure (schools, mosques, hospitals), detaining and torturing civilian men in concentration camps, and facilitating the massacre of 3000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. This massacre occurred after Israel made a deal with the PLO that guaranteed protection of Palestinian civilians in Beirut. Obviously they broke this deal. There were no consequences for Israel, and they are now committing all the same war crimes in Gaza on a much greater scale.

- The US has been actively supporting, enabling and helping to cover up Israel’s crimes for decades, to the point where even some Israelis have criticised the US for encouraging the most extreme elements of their society. Both democrats and republicans are equally guilty of this. The US has no interest in true peace or a just resolution of the conflict. They are only interested in maintaining Israeli hegemony in the region. ]]> Review7492464906 Tue, 15 Apr 2025 21:09:17 -0700 /review/show/7492464906 Claire gave 3 stars to Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of it (Hardcover) by Janina Ramírez
bookshelves: history
]]> ReadStatus9314393985 Tue, 15 Apr 2025 20:49:59 -0700 /review/show/7492429824 Claire wants to read Medieval Women: A Social History of Women in England 450-1500 by Henrietta Leyser
]]> ReadStatus9306843703 Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:20:02 -0700 /review/show/7487140106 Claire wants to read The Magician’s Daughter by H.G. Parry
]]> ReadStatus9306842430 Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:19:11 -0700 /review/show/7487139172 Claire wants to read The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H.G. Parry
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