Painting Fakes

Part 1 of this series outlined the history of the Zionist project from the late 19th century until the creation of Israel in 1948 with its attendant expulsion of Palestinians in the Nakba.  Part 2 discussed the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, its guerilla campaign of cross-border raids from Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon, and the blowback it received both from the Israelis and its Arab hosts.  This phase took a decisive turn in 1982 when Israel invaded southern Lebanon, with massive loss of Lebanese and Palestinian lives, and the PLO was ejected from Lebanon.   The Israelis were highly satisfied with what they had achieved with the Lebanese invasion, thinking they had dealt a decisive blow to Palestinian resistance.  This wasn’t how it worked out, as Rashid Khalidi tells us. A modern David and Goliath With the PLO’s evacuation from Beirut, the Palestinian cause appeared to have been gravely weakened, and Sharon seemed to have achieved all of his core objectives.  Howeve

In Part 1 of this series I provided a quick precis of the emergence of Zionism and its adoption by the British in the administration of Palestine between the two World Wars, concluding with the Nakba – the ‘catastrophe’, in which over 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from Palestine - and the creation of Israel in 1947-48.   The Nakba initiated a period in which the primary locus of Palestinian activism was outside the country.  The largest Palestinian populations were now refugees in the various Arab states – Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt (Gaza was at that point Egyptian territory) and to a lesser extent Libya, Syria and other Arab countries.  They began to organise themselves both politically and militarily in these various nations.  They used their communities in Egyptian-ruled Gaza, Jordanian-ruled West Bank and the south of Lebanon and Syria as staging-posts for cross-border raids, many of which targeted Israeli civilians.  This led to savage and often disproportionate Israeli

I've been slow to write about the war in Palestine this time around, mainly because I don't have that much time to blog here these days.  I've written to and tweeted at our Foreign Affairs Minister and our Prime Minister to say it's not good enough to bleat about 'Israel's right to self-defence' and then call feebly for a 'humanitarian pause' when 30,000 people have been killed, most of them women and children, two million have been displaced, most of Gaza's infrastructure has been destroyed, its population faces famine and we continue to sell weapons to the perpetrators of these war crimes.  No matter what Hamas operatives did on October 7 last year, none of this is OK. I've also taken the time, after years of superficial knowledge of the history of this war, to read The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance by Palestinian historian and advocate Rashid Khalidi.  This has inspired me to pre

Given the likelihood that the 2024 US election will be a repeat of 2020, Joe Biden vs Donald Trump, and Trump has a realistic chance of winning, I've been catching up on Trump 1.0 via the venerable Bob Woodward.  He wrote three Trump books.  Fear  was published in 2017 and dealt with Trump's transition to power and the first nine months of his presidency.  Rage was published in 2020 and dealt with most of the Trump presidency, from its early days to the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests.  The final book, Peril , cowritten with Woodward's younger Washington Post colleague Bob Costa, deals with the 2020 election, its aftermath and the early months of Biden's tenure. Bod Woodward is a strangely appropriate person to be documenting the Trump and Biden years.  He became famous alongside Carl Bernstein in the early 1970s for exposing the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, back in the days when committing a criminal offence was enough to end so

I feel slightly sad at the death of Queen Elizabeth. Not deeply sad. I didn't know her. I never had much time for the monarchy. The signs of her impending death had been there for a couple of years in her increasingly brief appearances at royal events and, in the past year, her frequent absences and cancellations. She was 96, the time had come. The closest encounter I ever had with her was in  1977 when she came to Australia. Among other engagements she opened the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Stadium at Nathan where the 1982 Commonwealth Games were to be held. School students were bused in from all over Brisbane for the occasion.  The ground had been levelled and the athletics track laid but as yet there were no stands. We sat on the grass while she made an extremely boring speech in her strange, plummy voice, then she and Prince Philip paraded around the track in their open-top limo treating us all to the royal wave. I felt a good deal sadder back at the end of July at the death of

I've written before about the crazy world of drug policy and the arms race between dealers and police that marks our futile efforts to outlaw various substances.  We are caught in an endless loop of first order change , doing more of the same and hoping for a different result.  The victims, it has always seemed to me, are the poor people at the bottom of the heap - people with addictions, trauma and other issues in their lives who end up jailed or homeless as casualties of a pointless war.  So I was excited to learn about the existence of Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction. A friend told me about Hari's most recent book, Stolen Focus , which looks at the prevalence of digital technologies and the way they are robbing us of our ability to concentrate and be present in the moment.  I really enjoyed it, if that is the right word for a great book about a terrible thing, but it was this earlier book that really made me take notice.  Publi