Painting Fakes

In the home group I'm part of we're currently reading and discussing Palmer J Palmer's Let Your Life Speak, a connected series of essays on the subject of vocation.  Palmer's central idea is that discovering our vocation is not a matter of receiving a message from God, nor about becoming somebody or something, but about recovering our true selves.  He says that we are born as unique, intact selves, but that as we grow the forces of our families, our schools, our churches and our societies lead us to lose sight of our true selves and take on identities which we perceive that others value.  Discovering our true vocation is the process of digging through those adopted selves to rediscover and own the true self we are born to be.   Reading and discussing this book led me back, once again, to my favourite Ursula LeGuin novel, City of Illusions.  This book has featured in this blog before, but like all favourite books it continues to speak, and there is more...

While I was reading Bob Woodward's accounts of the Trump presidency , I came across a reference to Jeff Sharlet's wonderful and terrible book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.   I just had to read it, although it took me a while to get to the top of the holds list at my local library. Published in 2023, The Undertow  is a series of essays which explore the nether regions of the American Right, Trump's base. They were written over a number of years as Sharlet travels around the country talking not to politicians but to ordinary punters who are sold, not just on Trump as a person, but on the whole package - the conspiracies, the misogyny, the guns, the end of abortion, the stolen election, you name it, they believe it. He goes to various events - Trump rallies in which journalists are kept in a cage for Trump to humiliate at the appropriate time; the International Conference on Men's Issues, relocated at short notice from the swanky Detroit Hilton to the decide...

This is the final post (I promise!) in a series about the history of the war on Palestine.  Part 1 told the history of the conflict from the beginnings of Zionism to the Nakba and the creation of Israel.  Part 2 covered the formation of the PLO and its guerilla campaign.  Part 3 covered the First Intifada and the Oslo Accords, and Part 4 discussed the Palestinian Authority and the rise of Hamas.  In this final post I want to look at the wider context of Zionism, and the implications for where we are at right now.   One of the slogans frequently used by Zionists in the 19th  and 20th  centuries was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’.   The phrase was first coined by Christian Restorationists (what we now more commonly call Christian Zionists) in the mid-19th  Century and was later picked up by some of the Zionist leaders, including Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi.   At one level, the firs...

In Part 1 of this series I dealt with the rise of Zionism, the British Mandate in Palestine, the Nakba and the creation of Israel.  Part 2 dealt with the creation of the PLO and its guerilla warfare against Israel, leading to its expulsion from Lebanon in 1982.  Part 3 dealt with the First Intifada and the Oslo Accords.  Here I bring the story up to the present day. With the implementation of the Oslo Accords in 1994, the war shifted decisively into Palestine itself.  The PLO leadership moved into the occupied territories and took up the leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA).  They clearly hoped that this was the first step on the road to nationhood and a lasting settlement, but they were quickly disappointed.   Administrative Zones as per the Oslo Accords - this is a simplified version Rashid Khalidi characterises the PA’s role as primarily related to security – Israel retained effective control of water supply and electricity, border contro...

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 ...

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 o...