heresthepencil's reviews
975 reviews

not to use buzzwords, but this essay is a must-read for anyone who wants to clearly see why the zionist settler colonial state of israel is the way it is. and how palestinians have been resisting it since its conception.

 

 it's stated at the beginning that any revolutionary party's aims & politics should be clear enough to be understood by the masses (since it is all for them), and this document does exactly that. palestine will be free! 

it’s a very angry book, but also a somewhat hopeful one.

angry in the sense that finkelstein is very obviously furious with israel, like any sane person with a working conscience should be. he’s rude and sarcastic, yes, but that doesn’t stop him from being fair and meticulously pointing out every lie & crime of “israel”. there’s a lot of statistics and direct quotes from idf soldiers taking part in the massacre.

the book focuses on the operation cast lead of december 2008-january 2009, and the goldstone’s UN report stating that “israel” committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. (it was written before goldstone changed his mind about idf intentionally targeting palestinian civilians.) the title itself is a quote from a column by an israeli journalist gideon levy, regarding the report.

and the book is (cautiously) hopeful in its overall conclusion: that things are changing. that the general public’s support of “israel” is lowering, becoming less natural. that the propaganda machine is beginning to break. granted, finkelstein wrote it in 2010, and here we are in 2024, exactly three months after the start of the most recent aggression and barely a few years after the aggression of may 2021. but boycotts are losing giants billions of dollars, celebrities’ kids are wearing sweatshirts with palestine motifs, the protests around the whole world haven’t really stopped for a second since october. maybe he is right, however excruciatingly slow this change is. 

rep: Japanese cast, autistic-coded mc

the excruciating exploitation of both capitalism & patriarchy told through the lens of a "perfect" convenience store worker. depressing and terrifying, and the way keiko's brain works absolutely stops you in your tracks. it's very telling that it's the skeleton-like, unwashed, despised leach of a misogynistic man who's the only anti-capitalist character here. 

rep: Peruvian queer mc in a polyam relationship, Peruvian characters, Spanish sapphic character, sapphic characers of color
tw: racism, mentions of suicide

this sure was an unexpected last book of the year. it's tiny, but packs a lot. it's about literally learning about your very roots (in this case, white colonialist-discoverer), and learning and caring for your heritage. about discovering those whom history forgotten. about listening to those who are still around you. about not assuming anything, but also maybe trusting yourself more than strangers. about desire; oh it is so deeply about desire, and how it complicates your life, how it makes it rich. 

zionism, with its goal of creating a settler colonial state in palestine, is in fact a form of antisemitism. zionists have never cared abt the safety of all jews, only abt creating this sick joke of a country (and making money).

reading this book (available here) is an absolutely insane experience. learning that zionists collaborated with nazis, only to later covered it up with convoluted trials & assassinations, is not exactly surprising, given everything we see "israel" doing nowadays, but it is stomach-turning. 

like the characters themselves, you will move through this novel not being able to distinguish dream from reality. it's about the pain & struggle of loosing connections, both in the literal sense, be it by death, by fighting, by moving away, and in the more abstract sense of not being able to connect. it's visible in the plot lines, in the characters loosing their senses, and finally in the writing itself - it's often disjointed, hazy like the man's eyesight, quiet & unnerving like the woman's voicelessness. and still, the book manages to be beautiful and lyrical, and to underline how there's always some way to connect.

rep: Korean mcs, Indian side character
tw: hospitals, death, mentions of abortion 

love that this collection exists. refaat, you did create a tale.

rep: Palestinian characters
tw: violence, murder death, guns, bombs 

haunting and unbearable. and to think, i'm only experiencing those barbarisms as images on my computer screen