A hard-eyed look at the role of Israel’s army in the creation of the Jewish state.
A history of Israel focused on the role of the army in becoming “an apartheid state.”
Bresheeth-Zabner, who teaches at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, begins his account with the 19th-century Zionist program to relocate European Jews to Palestine to escape pervasive anti-Semitism. The stated goal of the movement was to reclaim the biblical homeland as a new Jewish state. With the drive for independence after World War II, a genuine Israeli military came into being. Despite its name, the Israel Defense Forces, established in 1948, served as a vehicle to gain control of territory, usually by expelling the Indigenous occupants. As a result, Israel has been in an almost constant state of war—not because of external threats but as a way to justify repression of the Palestinians. The author argues that the IDF routinely commits atrocities against Palestinians and other Arab populations within and beyond Israel’s borders. He thoroughly documents the growth of a military-industrial complex as a major driver of Israel’s economy, with customers all over the world and major support by the U.S.—again, to the benefit of the IDF. Furthermore, the central role of the IDF means that Israeli politics is determined by military considerations, with every political party recruiting ex-generals as candidates. Bresheeth-Zabner drives home his points relentlessly, with chapter after chapter portraying an Israel in which non-Jews are second-class citizens, at best, and politicians pay only lip service to democratic principles. For general readers, the narrative is a difficult slog, with numerous references to names and events that will be unfamiliar to many nonscholars. Nor is it smoothly written, with the author relying more heavily on the blunt force of his arguments. However, readers with a strong interest in this ongoing quandary may find some value.
A hard-eyed look at the role of Israel’s army in the creation of the Jewish state.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78873-784-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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