Martin's Booklog

The Iron Wall – Avi Shlaim

Published on April 13, 2009

Cover of The Iron Wall

The Iron Wall
Avi Shlaim
670 pages including index
published in 2000

Avi Shlaim is an Israeli/British historian, one of a generation of revisionist historians who from the 1980s started tearing down the foundation myths of the state of Israel. History always has political undertones and perhaps nowhere more so than in Israel, which after all justifies its existence with the historical claim of the Jewish people on the lands of Palestine, as developed through zionist ideology. With the succesful establishment of Israel as a Jewish state came a set of founding myths and in the first decades after independence Israeli historians by and large confirmed rather than challenged those myths. In the eighties this changed, as new historians started re-examining those core assumptions. Unlike the earlier generation, people like Avi Shlaim had not had the same personal experience and direct involvement in the foundation of Israel and its wars and could look more objectively on the facts rather than let ideology steer their interpretations.

In The Iron Wall – Israel and the Arab World Avi Shlaim takes aim at Israel’s foreign policy concerning its immediate neighbours. It’s a big book, tracing the evolution of Israel’s approach to the Arab countries from its struggle for independence up to 1998 and the failure of the Oslo peace process. The title of the book comes from two 1923 essays by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Zionist leader and according to Shlaim, “spiritual father of the Israeli right”. In these essays Jabotinsky set out the possibilities for dealing with the socalled “Arab problem” and coming to the conclusion that the only way to deal with it is to continue the settlement efforts “under protection of a force that is not dependent on the local population, behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down”.

A Writer’s Diary – Virginia Woolf

Published on April 12, 2009

Cover of A Writer's Diary

A Writer’s Diary
Virginia Woolf
350 pages including index
published in 1953

A Writer’s Diary is an extract of her personal diaries put together by her husband and widower Leonard Woolf a decade or so after her death. It’s been edited to keep out the more personal entries as well as to slim down the original twentysix handwritten volumes to a more managable size. What remains is a volume of entries detailing Virginia Woolf’s writing process, enlivened by sprinklings of literary gossip and the occasional entry talking about the general state of the world. The diary starts in 1918 and ends in march of 1941, not long before her death. Although the only other Virginia Woolf book I’ve read was A Room of One’s Own some four years ago, this didn’t really matter; you don’t need to know her other work to find meaning in this, nor is it spoiled by reading about the process by which it was created first.

Virginia Woolf was not the happiest of writers. Throughout her life she suffered from nervous breakdowns, as also seen in her diary, and she ultimately ended her life by drowning herself after she felt “the madness” returning. She also suffered from extreme mood swings, which is clearly visible reading through A Writer’s Diary, where one day she would write with pleasure how well the writing on a given book went, the next day despairing about the critical reception she expected for the same book. In some of the entries talking about social events you can also see that while she enjoy being social, these sort of things took a lot of energy out of her. As somebody relatively introvert myself, I can sympathise.

Inventing Ruritania – Vesna Goldsworthy

Published on April 6, 2009

Cover of Inventing Ruritania

Inventing Ruritania
Vesna Goldsworthy
254 pages including index
published in 1998

What immediately came to mind when I picked up this book from the library was Edward Said’s Orientalism. Where that book looked at how Europe created its image of the Middle East, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination looks at how the western idea of the Balkans has been shaped or even created by writers of popular fiction and travel literature. Goldsworthy focuses mainly on British literature, as for British writers “the Balkans are sufficiently close to remain in the field of vision, yet remote enough to be relatively free of the ‘traditional friendships’ and ‘historical alliances’ which frequently inspire the specific interests in the area of other European powers” while they are “too far away to be of consistent interest to American writers”. Historically, she limits her inquiries to relatively modern times, from the early nineteenth century up to now, as she argues that the Balkans as an area of interest only emerged as Ottoman supremacy in the area was broken. Before there can be stereotypical images of the Balkans, there first has to be a Balkans, obviously and until the Ottoman empire started to disintegrate there wasn’t.

A book like Inventing Ruritania, which wants to expose the cliches with which western thought has been riddled about the Balkans, can’t help but be political. This is more so when you consider when it was published, in 1998, barely a year before NATO would wage its first humanitarian war against Serbia, just after the wars in Bosnia and Croatia had ended. You could see Inventing Ruritania as a sort of metacritique of the sloppy thinking in Britain and elsewhere with which these events were explained and written about. One of Goldsworthy’s points in this book is indeed to lay bare the sort of racist stereotyping language about the Balkans that is still used thoughtlessly, often by people who would never dream about deescribing areas like Africa or India in similar terms… Yet Inventing Ruritania isn’t a polemic, not even to the extent Orientalism was.

Intifada – Zachary Lockman & Joel Benin

Published on April 5, 2009

Cover of Intifada

Intifada
Zachary Lockman & Joel Benin
423 pages including index
published in 1989

During Israel’s invasion of Gaza this January there was one of those stupid drummed up controversies that always happen whenever Israel’s engaging in warcrimes again and hence coming under foreign pressure. In this case it was Dutch Socialist Party member of parliament Harry van Bommel who got into trouble after his call for Intifada was twisted from being a call to resistance into not just a call for armed resistance but fullblown terrorism. Various zionist pressure groups were keen to pretend that intifada invariably meant terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings while ignoring that the first Intifada had been characterised by non-violent protests and most socalled Palestinian violence only happened in self defence against IDF aggression. Nobody honest can call boys throwing stones at tanks terrorists, but that didn’t stop our local zionists from pretending it was, helped by conflating the much more violent Second Intifada with the first.

Now I grew up in the eighties and I remember the first Intifada. I was barely in highschool when it started in 1987 and not very politically aware, but I did notice that by late 1988, early 1989 there were quite a lot older students wearing keffiyehs, usually as shawls, as a symbol of their support for the Palestinians; this at a not too leftwing Christian school. The Intifada had the same sort of stature as the ANC’s struggle to end Apartheid had because everybody could see how the Palestinians were being oppressed and how justified they were in their (largely non-violent) resistance despite IDF agression. It was therefore a blatant rewriting of history to equate Intifada with terrorism and to confirm this, I read this collection of essays on the Intifada.

My Loot, let me show you it (again)

Published on April 1, 2009

I spent a little bit too much money getting more classic science fiction, but there was so much good stuff and honestly I could’ve walked out with twice the number of books I did:

The Halfling and Other Stories – Leigh Brackett
Odd John Olaf Stapledon
The Island Under the Earth Avram Davidson
Mutiny in Space Avram Davidson
The Phoenix and the Mirror Avram Davidson
The Falling Torch Algis Budrys
The Texas-Israeli War: 1999Howard Waldrop & Jake Saunders
Time for the Stars Robert A. Heinlein
The Universe Against Her James H. Schmitz
Virconium Nights M. John Harrison
The Floating Gods M. John Harrison
A Storm of Wings M. John Harrison
Quark 4 Samuel Delany & Marylin Hacker (editors)
The Chronicles of Corum Michael Moorcock
The Inner Wheel Keith Roberts
Eyes of Amber Joan D. Vinge