Rambling

Book Thoughts: Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine by Nada Elia

I've been trying to take notes on nonfiction books I've read. However, I've noticed that I don't actually have all the time in the world to create the notes as detailed as I want. So in the spirit of, "If I really feel like something is missing, I'll just reread the book and finish this post in the future," here is an incomplete post, started in April and left languishing until now. At the end, I note where I left off taking notes. Personal commentary marked in darker blue.

This book was hard to read since it was written in 2022, before the genocide ramped up again after the 2023 attacks. It's very hopeful, but I had to take moments to just put it down and feel anger and sadness over the current state of Palestine.

Taking notes on this book was also pretty hard because it's already pretty well organized, at least for its narrative flow. There was so much that I could pull out as quotes but then I would probably just be copying and pasting the entire book.

So I've tried to make things as short as possible just for fast reference and reorganized things to file under general topic. But the actual thing should be read as well. I would include page numbers, but digital versions really depend on how big your screen is so I don't have any.

...

Nearly 9 months later, I've realized that book summaries of this detail are not actually feasible for me, so here lies an abandoned project. I should at least put down my general thoughts, though:

It's hard to recall everything I was thinking back in April as I hadn't started my practice of taking bullet notes while reading to distill what I want to most actively find again in the future, but the main thing I remember taking from this book was that the struggles of gender and sexual minorities are not an afterthought. They are part and parcel of the struggle and are deeply intertwined with things like food sovereignty.

In my personal life, my mom often framed things like women's rights and the like as secondary goals to be achieved after more "pressing" matters were solved first. For my mom, famously a single-issue voter, that was always Taiwan's independence. Certainly, the problems in American life didn't count either; it was only the problem of whether or not the administration supported Taiwan enough (or hated China enough). My dad, on the other hand, is so painfully cishet dude that stuff like this just doesn't really even register to him as a serious thing to be considering. He's just like, "I agree," and then goes back to thinking about male authors, male scientists, male politicians, etc. in a way that indicates that he's not actually seriously thinking about what it would mean for society to be built around caring for the most vulnerable.

This book has great sections (not covered below) about how Palestine is a feminist issue (Zionist colonialism results in more femicide and gendered sexual violence is a weapon of war); the issues of pink-washing; how Zionists are actively destroying the ecosystem of Palestine and hoarding water; and how this struggle isn't just about the land but specifically food sovereignty that is required for true-self determination. And more!

The book club discussion similarly reflected these themes (when we even talked about Palestine; I feel like I remember that book club getting pretty off topic). People were really appreciative of how this book made them think about how the issues of women and queer people are an integral part of all of this and how important food sovereignty is. And of course, some sheer disbelief and disgust at how the Israeli army will claim to be more humane by eating vegan while killing a bunch of human beings.

Below is my aborted attempt at notes. Honestly, if anyone is even bothering to read this (doubt.png), you might as well just go read the book. I've really dropped the ball on this one, el oh el. Honestly, this book would probably be worth a reread for me in the future because I can feel that my own explanations for the ideas it contained are not so good 9 months later.


Symbols & Definitions

Notable Palestinian symbols:


Palestine is an Indigenous struggle against Settler Colonialism

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said argues that imperialism is the ideology, colonialism its on-the-ground manifestation.


Colonialism can be divided into two broad types:

Reference:


Israel has always been a Settler Colonial project. Zionists are not Indigenous

The original conceptions of Israel framed it in terms of a settler colonial project expanding into a frontier, modeled after the United States.

From "The Iron Wall"

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.

The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage. (...)

It does not matter at all which phraseology we employ in explaining our colonising aims, Herzl’s or Sir Herbert Samuel’s.

Colonisation carries its own explanation, the only possible explanation, unalterable and as clear as daylight to every ordinary Jew and every ordinary Arab.

Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim. It lies in the very nature of things, and in this particular regard nature cannot be changed. (...)

We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say “non” and withdraw from Zionism. (...)

Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach. (...)

Zionist colonisation, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.

Emphasis from the official Jabotinsky Institute website. Omitted parts marked by (...)

Elia's comments about this passage:

Jabotinsky, who had served in Palestine as a member of the British Army in 1918, knew there were Palestinians for whom the “colonisation of their country” was inadmissible. But that did not trouble him much, as his vision was in keeping with the imperialism of his day, which openly dismissed the will of the native population. After all, in 1923, as he was writing his essay on Jewish European colonialism of an Arab country, most of the world was colonized by European powers: over 90 percent of Africa, all of Australia, almost all of Polynesia, over 60 percent of Asia, and all of the Americas. Official figures put the percentage of the Americas “under European colonialism” in 1900 at under 30 percent, rather than close to 100 percent. This low figure reflects the fact that countries that had declared their independence from Spain, Portugal, and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and the USA, were no longer considered “under European colonialism,” even though it was the colonizers, not the countries’ Indigenous peoples, who were now “independent.” It is a similar linguistic slippage that describes the founding of Israel in 1948 as “independence,” when that was achieved at the expense of the native population. Jabotinsky’s “The Iron Wall” deserves a full, close reading, as it is replete with sober assessments of the Palestinian people’s love of their land, and the complete indifference of the European settlers for this love. For example, he writes that the Palestinians “feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and their [sic] Sioux for their rolling Prairies.”

Zionism, thus, clearly originated as a European colonial project, albeit by individuals who identified primarily in terms of their religion, rather than their nationality. This is not a unique development: religious identification has long been a defining factor in European nationalism, from the many “wars of religion” that characterized the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century, to the more recent division around support for, or opposition to, the European Union (EU), with Catholics overwhelmingly in support, and Protestants primarily opposed to the EU. Jabotinsky, born in Ukraine, fought with the British Army, where he founded the Jewish Battalion.

From Jabotinsky's followup essay "The Ethics of the Iron Wall", published one week after:

Consequently, colonisation in Uganda is also immoral, and colonisation in any other place in the world, whatever it may be called, is immoral. There are no more uninhabited islands in the world. In every oasis there is a native population settled from times immemorial, who will not tolerate an immigrant majority or an invasion of outsiders.

This passage recognizes Palestinians as Indigenous, “from times immemorial,” while openly describing the Zionist settlers as “an invasion of outsiders.”

**

The new country was expansionist, as it continued to dispossess and disenfranchise the Indigenous people, in the European settlers’ aggressive quest for more territory. Yet, it claimed to be itself coming under attack by the Indigenous nations defending their ancestral lands. This reversal of reality is inscribed in the US Declaration of Independence, which states that the King of England “has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” And, of course, the newly born nation claimed to be a democracy, asserting its belief that “all men are created equal,” while deeming the Indigenous peoples “savages,” enslaving Africans and their children, and depriving all women of the most basic human rights.

Israel would follow the American model. Its proponents had always envisioned it as a new nation, replacing the pre-existing one: settler colonialism, which necessitates the elimination of the native. Zionism was not “franchise colonialism,” no Zionist ideologue articulated a vision of Jews extracting resources from Palestine to enrich Germany, Austria, Poland, or Russia. The Jewish colonizers, wherever they lived in Europe (Arab Jews were rarely considered in the early discussions and, in those instances, typically were regarded in racist colonial terms) would emigrate to Palestine, and make it Israel, a Jewish nation. A selective “land of refuge,” which destroyed to replace. The Palestinians, like the various Indigenous peoples of the Americas, were to disappear. Their resistance, in defense of their own ancestral lands, would render them “terrorists,” as it had rendered Turtle Island’s Indigenous nations into “savages” attacking settlers on the settlers’ self-claimed frontiers. And just as the European settlers in Turtle Island did not spare the Indigenous based on age or sex, yet claimed it was those “merciless savages” whose practice “is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions,” so Israel spared no Palestinian on the basis of age or sex.


Zionists only started to call themselves Indigenous in order to distance themselves from white supremacists.

Thus, they would claim that all Jews globally are descended from historic Palestine, hence making “aliyah” (the Zionist term for Jewish immigration to Israel) always a “return” to their ancestral land. Many are offended at the suggestion that people not of Eastern Mediterranean stock could at any point have converted to Judaism, even when there is a historical record of such group conversions, from San Nicandro, Italy, to the Khazars of central Asia, as well as individual conversions, generally women marrying a Jewish spouse.8 Additionally, these sophisticated Zionists insist that they alone are the Indigenous peoples of that land, with the Palestinians being the interlopers. More recently, Afrikaners have been converting to Judaism so as to become settlers in Palestine, where their new religious identification offers them the privileges they previously had as whites in apartheid South Africa. It would be interesting to hear the sophisticated Zionists’ explanation of this phenomenon—their mental gymnastics are often fascinating. I once debated with a “New Age Zionist” who told me there is a lot of science we still can’t understand, and that deeply held religious beliefs change a person’s DNA, hence, they concluded that converting to Judaism makes you Semitic. I had to point out that “semitism” is not a genetic trait; it is a linguistic group.


Other settler colonial nations recognize Israel as a nation because it mirrors their own:

In the liberal Western mindset, the occupation of lands seized in 1967 is illegal, but Israel within the UN-determined 1947 borders is legitimate, because imperial powers deemed it so.

Seventy percent of the Palestinian people lost their homes and became refugees in 1948, not 1967. The ethnic cleansing we are witnessing today is merely a continuation of what began under the British Mandate, and culminated in the large-scale displacement of Palestinians in 1947–1948. The Zionist “system” is not broken, it was always a racist, supremacist, settler colonial project.

The Indigenous, the colonized, the disenfranchised and criminalized, side with the Palestinians; the white supremacist colonizers side with Israel, as they are attracted to the exclusive ethnic character and violent practices of the state. Indeed, according to his social media profile, Fauci, the settler who was squatting in the el-Kurd family home, is a fan of former President Donald Trump. In 2017, white supremacist Richard Spencer, the de facto leader of the alt-right in the USA, had explained to an Israeli news anchor that:
an Israeli citizen, someone who understands your identity, who has a sense of nationhood and peoplehood, and the history and experience of the Jewish people, you should respect someone like me, who has analogous feelings about whites. You could say that I am a white Zionist—in the sense that I care about my people, I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves. Just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.7

Reference:

Today, we see this reversal of accountability in mainstream Western media reports that mention Israel “responding to Palestinian attacks,” with no mention of the fact that Israel has been violating Palestinian human rights, and occupying Palestinian land, for decades, not the other way around.

Meanwhile, Ari Ben Canaan represents the ideal of “the New Jew.” The newly founded Israel was turning the long-standing European stereotype of the “diminutive,” “effeminate,” “shady” Jew into a strong, muscular, masculine man. Oz Almog’s book, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew is revealing of the misogyny pervasive in Zionist ideology, as it looks exclusively at traditionally masculine figures such as the Palmach commander, the marine commando, the pilot—all male roles at the time—in its discussion of “the first Israelis.”21 Women, apparently, did not qualify. Indeed, Almog’s entire book on “the New Jew” does not have any discussion of early Israeli women’s contributions, with chapters titled “The Elect Son [but not daughter] of the Chosen People,” “The Stamp of His [not hers] Country’s Landscape,” “Uri [not Ruth] of Arabia,” and “Monks [but not nuns] in Khaki.” Today, the settlers taking over Palestinian homes are also generally young men, members of any of several settler organizations, who occupy a Palestinian home until the neighborhood is deemed ready to be occupied by Israeli families. They are the “pioneers” of the twenty-first century, single men, or married with a wife and children awaiting word that they can now move into the house a Palestinian family was evicted from.

Colonialism is always gendered, and always sexually violent. The very language used by colonizers reflects the sexualization of conquest. Throughout Africa, they described their forays as “penetration” into “virgin” land—“virgin” because new to Europeans. But the violence was not a metaphor. The colonizers’ attacks were invariably accompanied by “rape, loot, and pillage.” Women who survived the rapes were frequently taken hostage, as sex slaves. From Okinawa to Korea to the Philippines, Iraq, and Afghanistan, entire micro economies of human trafficking and sex work are set up around military bases, to “serve” the troops. “Man camps,” the temporary housing for men working in oil, mining, forestry, and other extractive industries primarily around Indigenous reservations today, are hot beds of rape, with nearby Indigenous women frequently targeted because of the rapists’ sadly valid assumption that they will not be arrested and persecuted. In Palestine, women were not spared the masculinist violence of Zionism. Today, there is ample documentation that, from the onset of al-Nakba to the present day, their experiences reveal the multiple jeopardy of being colonized, and being women. From the rapes that accompanied the attacks on towns and villages from 1947 to 1949, to the sexual torture of political prisoners in Israeli jails, to the rape, mutilation, and evisceration of refugee women in Sabra and Shatila, and the denial of reproductive justice throughout the West Bank, Palestinian women have borne the brunt of Israel’s sexual violence. And queer Palestinians have not been spared in the supposedly “gay friendly” Jewish state, where homonationalism means openly gay Israelis can serve in the occupation army, but where, as Palestinian queers have repeatedly noted, there is “no pink door in the apartheid wall.”22


Imperialism, Colonialism, and the limitations of the Apartheid Framework

Israel's control of all of historic Palestine (14 million people) as an apartheid regime is recognized by:

These reports fail to mention:

Apartheid, a system of legalized racism, is a logical progeny of imperialist ideology, and of that ideology’s on-the-ground manifestation, colonialism. It is one of the many weapons of imperialism. Simply put, there would be no apartheid in Palestine if it were not for settler colonialism. It is therefore time to reaffirm and emphasize Palestine’s reality as a colonized country, whose Indigenous people have been dispossessed and disenfranchised, while settlers, protected by the army, police forces, and legal system of a colonial state, took over, and continue to steal Palestinian lands, homes, villages, and natural resources. Al-Nakba, Arabic for “the catastrophe,” is not a historical moment that happened and concluded in May 1948—it is ongoing.


Getting rid of Apartheid is not enough:

The present plight of formerly colonized countries around the globe, after they gained their independence, as well as the ongoing circumstances of the Black and Indigenous people of North America, who theoretically have equal rights but who have remained criminalized, hunted, caged, and murdered, is proof that eliminating legal barriers without addressing the practical consequences of injustice does not redress historic inequities. Therefore, even as we are organizing to overthrow Israel’s state-sanctioned violence, we must look beyond apartheid as the primary means of oppression of the Palestinian people. Beyond apartheid, Zionism itself must be abolished. It is an essentially racist, supremacist ideology, and the oppressive system it has produced cannot be reformed.

Seeking to reform the Zionist state assumes that Zionism’s initial impulse—which is premised on settler colonialism and necessitates land theft, dispossession, displacement, human and cultural genocide—is acceptable, but that something went wrong, somewhere down the line. For instance, a reform limited to the West Bank and Gaza implies that al-Nakba— Palestine’s catastrophe—did not start around 1948, but in 1967. Ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would not dismantle Jewish supremacy in those parts of the Palestinian homeland first occupied in 1948; nor would it address the Right of Return of Palestinians displaced from those cities and villages occupied in 1948, without which the Zionist dream would not have materialized. Indeed, the “peace process,” with its endless round of futile talks, is an illustration of the attempt at “reform,” rather than abolition. What that process has led to is an entrenchment of dispossession, now subcontracted to the Palestinian Authority. Instead, one must ask: “When was Zionism not a supremacist ideology privileging some people over others, based on perceived ethnicity? When did Zionism not necessitate the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people? Was there ever one brief moment, from its inception to the present day, when Zionism was not violent?” Zionism cannot be reformed; it must be abolished.

And abolition in the context of Palestine, as in all contexts, also presumes that one is working to set up the alternative at the very same time one is dismantling the oppressive system. The many initiatives developed by Palestinians today are radically different from what governments have been proposing and supporting since before 1948. Farmers are already establishing sustainable, community supported agriculture. Educators are crafting liberatory and inclusive curricula. Feminists are setting up the infrastructure for a post-Zionist society that is also post-patriarchal. Public intellectuals are crafting detailed proposals that rise above partitions and borders. And Palestinians, both in the diaspora and the homeland, are forming global alliances around causes that bring us together, rather than set us apart. This book discusses some of these while exposing the irreconcilability of Zionism with justice, sustainability, feminism, liberation.

By looking beyond apartheid, and beyond Zionism, we can start envisioning the future of Palestine, one that is beyond various binaries, whether these be the obsolete “two states” delusion, or the “homeland” and the “diaspora” division, or even “Jews” and “Arabs,” as if these were mutually exclusive, rather than a colonial invention. Historically, these binaries have been used to divide, yet they have also always had inherently blurred boundaries and criteria. This is evident in the fact that even fourth-generation Palestinian refugees, whether in the Gaza Strip, or in Seattle, Washington, always recall the city or village their families were displaced from. Moreover, a refugee from Yaffa, in present-day Israel, would not be “returning” to their hometown if they were to move to the West Bank, where the new state of Palestine is to be located, according to the ever elusive “two-state solution.” Nor would someone from Haifa be “returning” to Khan Younis, in the Gaza Strip, also envisioned as part of that new, amputated Palestine. They would still be displaced, denied the right to return to their homes. Palestine has historically existed as the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and partial liberation is not justice denied, it is, quite simply, impossible. This is why, following decades of governments and politicians attempting to establish an independent Palestinian “state,” Palestine’s public intellectuals and activists are looking outside the framework of a two-state solution, to explore nationhood in the context of decolonization, instead of state building.

Additionally, the recent widespread currency of the term Gazans, as if they were not first and foremost Palestinians, is a double-edged development. It brings attention to their unique circumstances even as it discursively separates them from the rest of their country—thus further contributing to the fragmentation of the Palestinian people. Since the withdrawal of Israeli settlers in 2005, Gaza, as Palestinian geographer Nour Joudah writes, has been “a settler-colonial city without the settlers,” and she urges us to look at the Gaza Strip as a model of Indigenous survival, rather than disappearance. Indeed, the innovations coming out of the Gaza Strip, from setting up parkour courses in the apocalyptic landscape of a shell-shocked city, to creating building bricks out of the ash and rubble of bombed out houses, are exemplary of the determination and hopeful ingenuity needed everywhere today. That survival is in large part the result of women’s creativeness, organizing, activism, and overall life-affirming practices.


Common Zionist Arguments:

  1. Palestine “never existed” because it was never a nation state modeled upon the nineteenth-century European concept of countries.
    • Same as the Eurocentric colonial mindset that viewed Turtle Island as vacant land because they didn't have the same "national" political structure as Europe
    • While Palestine had been part of the Ottoman Empire, that empire granted subject communities significant autonomy. This changed drastically under the British Mandate.
    • The “Arab” Revolt of 1936–1939 was in every way a nationalist, Palestinian revolt against Britain’s imperial claims to determine the fate of Palestine, and to the Balfour Declaration.


Women's Struggles

Such analysis is central to the discussion of Indigenous issues on Turtle Island, for example, where it is understood that Native women bear the brunt of white supremacist violence. It is also understood when one looks at the Black community, where women and gender non-conforming individuals fall at the intersection of multiple oppressive systems, leading to the observation that “If black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”

Palestinian women’s resistance to foreign imposition is not a new phenomenon. They have participated in anticolonial protests since the early 1920s, when it became clear the British Mandate would facilitate their dispossession. In the late 1930s, when British troops stormed the militant village of Baqa al-Gharbiyya, and rounded up and took away the men, unarmed Palestinian women descended upon the barracks where these men had been detained, securing their release.20 Decades later, under Israeli occupation, women were instrumental in organizing the grassroots clandestine network and popular committees that sustained the First Intifada, a mass mobilization which forced the world to recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination. Women formed and staffed mobile health clinics, they taught underground classes when Israel shut down schools in collective punishment of the revolting Palestinians, they prepared and delivered food to the youth on the frontlines.21 Sadly, their forward-looking grassroots leadership was marginalized following the 1993 Oslo Accords, which facilitated the return of the leadership of Palestinian male politicians who clearly lacked the transformative imagination necessary to get us out of the morass of the “peace process.” It is impossible not to notice the difference between the first and second intifadas, especially along gender lines, a difference due in no small part to the creation of the repressive Palestinian Authority in 1994. Yet, women are still at the forefront of organizing today, challenging the gendered violence of settler colonialism, as well as restrictive Palestinian cultural norms. No analysis of Palestinian resistance is complete without focused attention on their interventions.

And the Gaza Strip, which had been sealed off from the rest of the world for close to fourteen years, came yet again under Israeli military assault, with air strikes and a threatened ground invasion. Palestinians took to the streets in the West Bank, protesting Israel’s actions within the 1948 borders, as well as against the Gaza Strip, in a show of national unity against colonialism not seen since the revolt of 1936–1939. The terror experienced by Palestinians throughout the homeland equaled that of the catastrophic years from 1947–1948. Yet, there was also a new feeling of defiance, of guarded optimism, a nascent belief that liberation was within reach. The hopefulness was due in no small part to the youthful grassroots leadership, acting in defiance of both Israeli police forces and the Palestinian Authority, which was determined to quash the protests.5 And both in the homeland, and in various parts of the global diaspora, the leadership of the “Unity Uprising” was overwhelmingly women, and queers.

Falastiniyyat itself had formed in 2020 in response to toxic masculinity in the local Palestinian organizing scene. Their commitment to the indivisibility of justice, and refusal to co-opt other communities’ struggles, is typical of today’s Palestinian feminist organizing.


Israel settlers continue to take Palestinian homes

Specifically, the el-Kurds are among some of the Palestinian families displaced in 1948 who were given modest homes in Sheikh Jarrah in 1956 per an agreement between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government. As the families grew, some, including the el-Kurds, built extensions to their homes. Numbering eight family members in 1999, the el-Kurds had applied to Israel for a permit to build an extra room, but the Jerusalem municipality would not even consider the request. The el-Kurds went ahead and built the extension anyway. In 2009, Israel ruled against them, fined them close to $100,000, forbade them to use the room, and instead allowed the settlers to move into that extension, separated from the family by a mere drywall. The dispute in 2021 was about the settlers taking over the entire house. Fauci himself had been squatting there for ten years, hence the “first-name basis” conversation between him and Muna el-Kurd. This intimacy, by the way, should put an end to the delusion that the “conflict would be resolved if only Jews and Palestinians got to know each other.” Besides, settler colonialism, land theft, displacement, and occupation of a family’s home should never be referred to as a “conflict.”

But the el-Kurds were determined not to move out, no matter how difficult life with the settlers was. Muna el-Kurd’s grandmother, Rifqa, who died in June 2020 at the ripe age of 103, was representative of Palestinian sumoud and the insistence on the right of return. As Muna el-Kurd’s twin brother Muhammed writes, Rifqa was “older than Israel itself. For this, she was hailed as the ‘icon of Palestinian resistance’ by Jerusalemites. During the 1948 Nakba, she left her home meticulously cleaned, not knowing she would be readying it for its colonizers.”3 El-Kurd, author of a poetry book named after his grandmother, recalls her, at “80-something,” as a “freedom fighter, an ambulance and a half, treating tear-gassed protestors with yogurt and onions.”4 Rifqa el-Kurd had famously said she would only leave her Sheikh Jarrah home to return to the one she had fled in 1948, in Haifa.

But in 2021, in Haifa, Ramle, and Lydd, cities seized by Zionist fighters in 1948, Israelis were once again roaming the streets, looking for homes with Arab names, threatening to attack them at night. Lynch mobs chanting “Death to Arabs” enjoyed the protection of the Israeli gendarmes and “Border Control” officers—an ironic misnomer as Israel does not have recognized borders—who later rounded up the Palestinians protestors, rather than the Jewish mobs.


I think this only covers like 18% of the book. Alas. I've at least learned not to be this ambitious in the future as it evidently won't get done.

#books #nonfiction