Painting Fakes

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 core objectives.  Howeve

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 often disproportionate Israeli

I've been slow to write about the war in Palestine this time around, mainly because I don't have that much time to blog here these days.  I've written to and tweeted at our Foreign Affairs Minister and our Prime Minister to say it's not good enough to bleat about 'Israel's right to self-defence' and then call feebly for a 'humanitarian pause' when 30,000 people have been killed, most of them women and children, two million have been displaced, most of Gaza's infrastructure has been destroyed, its population faces famine and we continue to sell weapons to the perpetrators of these war crimes.  No matter what Hamas operatives did on October 7 last year, none of this is OK. I've also taken the time, after years of superficial knowledge of the history of this war, to read The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance by Palestinian historian and advocate Rashid Khalidi.  This has inspired me to pre

There have been, and will be, plenty of post-mortems on the recent referendum, from people on all sides of the political fence, black and white.  A lot of those people will be more qualified than me to comment.  This statement from the First Nations leaders behind the 'yes' campaign is a 'must read'.  By comparison my thoughts carry little weight, but here goes anyway.... I come at this as a partisan.  I was active in the 'yes' campaign although far from central to it.  I went in the big march, joined with others to make a human 'yes' on a local football field, put up a 'yes' sign on the tree in front of my house, handed out flyers at the local train station, shared stuff on social media.  Most of this was done despite knowing it looked like a losing cause.  I didn't want to contribute to that loss with my own defeatist apathy.   There are lots of nuances to the explanation for the 'no' vote, and I think they all have some truth to t

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the dirty little secret of the Stolen Generation and the valiant efforts of the late Archie Roach to bring it to our attention.  Since then I've been reading about the even darker and dirtier secret that came before that - the fact that the British colonisation of Australia, and in particular my home state of Queensland, was accomplished through the use of deadly force against its original custodians.   This is not a pleasant or a pretty tale and there is really no fair way to soften it.  In his book Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland's Frontier Killing Times , published in 2013, historian Timothy Bottoms quotes an estimate that at the time of the first British encroachment into what became Queensland - the establishment of the convict settlement in Brisbane in 1826 - there were somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people living here.  By the end of the century there were only about 20,000 First Nations people left.  He engages in some techn

I've written before about the crazy world of drug policy and the arms race between dealers and police that marks our futile efforts to outlaw various substances.  We are caught in an endless loop of first order change , doing more of the same and hoping for a different result.  The victims, it has always seemed to me, are the poor people at the bottom of the heap - people with addictions, trauma and other issues in their lives who end up jailed or homeless as casualties of a pointless war.  So I was excited to learn about the existence of Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction. A friend told me about Hari's most recent book, Stolen Focus , which looks at the prevalence of digital technologies and the way they are robbing us of our ability to concentrate and be present in the moment.  I really enjoyed it, if that is the right word for a great book about a terrible thing, but it was this earlier book that really made me take notice.  Publi