Anti-zionism reading group Week 4!

I hereby promise to get better at posting the future threads on time every week.

All right I bought the epub on haymarket so will mix it in with the other book I've been reading (The Scar by China Mieville)

The question of human, who gets the label, and why is foundational to global Zionism. If you start from the perspective that exclusively humanizes settlers (not just Zionists) and dehumanizes the indigenous, then all is permissible. The narratives of the oppressed are irrelevant, superseded by blood libel horror stories about savage massremoved and suicide bombings, eagerly devoured by the western public. I can’t wait for chapters four and five, where we’ll get more in depth

He writes so well. These chapters fly by for me, even if the subject matter is traumatic and disgusting

The direct comparison of Western media treatment for Palestinians and for Ukrainians was sickening. How ever much you hate the imperial stenographers, it isn’t enough. The psychologist quoted by the New York Times in particular made me have to step away from the book. It’s so bewildering that there are philology and race science books from two hundred years ago that have more impact on what can be said about current events than any history or economics. i guess that’s orientalism at work. The median liberal idealist is so wrapped up in stories that they think Eastern Europe and the Levant are mythical, far off locations, and the happenings there have to be relayed by specialized, expert translators. It’s such a suffocating épistémè that even the author and other writers who rejected American-washing Shireen Abu Akleh still felt the need “to exculpate her from the crime of being Palestinian” with her press equipment. i think it’s very telling that the approved, Zionist experts referred to her as “armed with [her] camera”. The master translators that work at Western news outlets and universities can take any victim and make them a perpetrator, or vice versa. And every single thing that happens east and south of the Imperial Core is incomprehensibly foreign to the Anglophone and Francophone common sense, so you have to listen to the ‘experts’. It’s almost sublime, in the sense of a small figure staring at a tidal wave of lies encompassing the horizon.

I really struggled to read the ebook (stalled arouncd Ch1). I got through it but failed had nothing to say on it. So I ordered a physical book. Which will hopefully arrive eventually. Then learned I could access it via audiobook. So today I put it on while I was fixing some lamps. A quiet activity requiring a minimum of brainpower, so can give enough focus to a book requiring it. I got through to Chapter 8, almost done.

I'm not waiting til Chapter 8 to post, sorry. I will forget. Instead, posting it now, in a 2 week old post.

Basically this book is making a point I already agree with. I do not feel my mind has been changed about anything. Perhaps reaffirmed.

So I can't tell if I am

• too stupid to understand the book
• not noticing when I am learning
• not the target audience

Sorry I know it sounds arrogant. But I am not accustomed to reading at all these days, and I don't know what I'm supposed to get from this. When the book gets here I can try again in a format amenable to note taking, in case it's just going write over my head.