Month: Aug 2025

Summer reading

Are the better angels of our nature winning out? Are we, as we achieve higher levels of civilisation, becoming any less violent? I hadn’t intended it this way but violence has been an undercurrent throughout almost all my summer reading. My blog’s name may be Zenpolitics but there are no easy rides.

I’ve been back, with the wonderful John Stoner and his novel ‘Augustus’, to the life and times of Caesar Augustus and his immediate precursors. (Books by Mary Beard and Tom Holland, serious non-fiction, underline just how bloody life could be in ancient Rome). Moving on 1400 years, to the decades either side of 1400 (a neat symmetry!), Helen Castor’s ‘The Eagle and the Hart’ (not a novel but narrative non-fiction) focuses on Richard II, a lover of peace assailed by violence on his home soil and over the Channel. His successor, Henry IV, copes better. A little more than a century later we’ve Luther nailing his theses on a Wittenberg door and precipitating the Reformation, and its appalling immediate aftermath, the German Peasants’ War, as wonderfully described (in ‘Summer of Fire and Blood’) by Lyndal Roper.

We’re visiting France next month so I read Emile Zola’s novel ‘Debacle’, about the Franco-Prussian War by way (a curious way, I admit – the book happened to be on my shelves) of preparation: the victors of the battle of Sedan in 1870 would return to France less than fifty years later.

I stayed with roughly the same period, moving on to 1874, when I picked up another John Stoner novel, ‘Butcher’s Crossing’. (Now a film.) If I was hoping for respite the title should have warned me. It’s about a journey from Kansas to the Rockies where they hunt buffalo (for their hides) in a high mountain valley, shooting thousands, with a view to leaving none behind. A direct route to extinction.

I found respite in a wonderful book, ‘Left Bank’, by Agnes Poirier about Paris in the 1940s and how its intellectual and cultural and café life survived the Nazi occupation. It’s the world of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, and fighting is in-fighting, literary and artistic. But there is a looming threat. Their opponents once the Germans are driven out are the hard-core Soviet-aligned, toe-the-socialist-realist-line Communists.

The dangers, as they might have been, to Paris and to France of hardline Soviet Communism are spelt out in a graphic way in Anne Applebaum’s remarkable book, ‘Red Terror’. Its subject is Ukraine in the inter-war years. By 1921 the various attempts to establish independence in the aftermath of World War One had all failed. Soviet power was firmly established. (It’s curious to read how in the years 1921-22 American aid had been enlisted to combat famine.)

Ukrainian language and culture were for a while encouraged as a way the Soviets saw of binding Ukrainians to a new Marxist dispensation. But by 1929 Stalin was in charge and the mood was changing. A trial of that year referred to ‘Ukrainian nationalism, nationalistic parties, their treacherous policies, their unworthy ideas of bourgeois independence, of Ukraine’s independence’. The brutal introduction of land reform, the obliteration of the kulaks as a class, and at the same time the requisitioning of the grain, on which the peasants survived, for the cities and for export, led to the Holodomor, the famine of 1932-33, during which up to five million people died. Stalin’s paranoia was by this time deep-rooted. His purges of the late 1930s all but wiped out Ukraine’s intellectual and cultural life.

There’s so much more I could say. Read the book. For my next book, something that’s maybe an easier read? Maybe, maybe not. Take each book as it comes.

Israel and Gaza – keeping the faith

So much is written about Gaza. I feel outrage, and disbelief. About Hamas and the brutality, and the futility, of its actions. And about Israel’s response, which has directed our focus back in Israel itself. What does it stand for?

Zionist ideas going back to Theodor Herzl are interwoven with a sense not just of a physical return to the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel) but of a spiritual and territorial revival of the old biblical, pre-diaspora Israel. This isn’t the modern Israel we in Europe supported. But it is the Israel of Netanyahu, Ben-Givr and Smotrich. It is also it seems the Israel of Trump’s born-again-Christian ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. He recently visited a Christian church in the West Bank which had been attacked by Jewish settlers. He protested. But attacks on Palestinian Arabs are condoned. It is as if it’s they who are the occupiers of Jewish land, of the territories Huckabee and the Israeli government describe as, using their biblical names, Judea and Samaria.

I have always been pro-Jewish. I cannot emphasise that more strongly. My academic heroes and indeed teachers were Jewish. I never made distinctions between Jew and Gentile. The Old Testament, ‘Old’ as Christians see it, has been and is a primer for life, with God and without, as well being both magical story and superlative historical document. For my father freemasonry brought Christian and Jew together in Manchester in the 1930s and later decades. I remember reading, as maybe a ten-year-old child, a story about 1948 and Israel’s fight for and achievement of independence. Only later did I learn about the nakba (the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948) and take on board the other side of the story. Later, in my twenties, Martin Buber became one of my heroes, for his books ‘I and Thou’, life lessons that have stayed with me, and the wonderful ‘Tales of the Hasidism’, and for his advocacy back in the 1930s of a bi-national, Israel and Palestine, solution.

Yesterday I watched footage, on Channel Four, from the West Bank, of settlers fencing off land owned by a Palestinian Arab farmer and, when he tried to stop them, a settler shooting him in the leg. The farmer’s son recorded the incident on his mobile phone.  Settlers are allowed to carry guns. The farmer had a leg amputated. He’s now back defending his land.

Two days ago I learnt of the death of an Al Jazeera journalist and his team in Gaza. The Israelis did not mind taking out five others if they got their man, Anas Al-Sharif. They claim to have documents linking him to Hamas and missile campaigns against Israel. But they won’t answers questions. They can’t produce the documents. Journalists are excluded from Gaza. We are left to conclude that Israel’s claims are specious. And they don’t care. They are, it seems, past caring, locked in their own doom-loop. Al-Sharif reported from  his tent, his home having been bombed, on the day-to-day reality of Israel’s bombardment. We need to hear what he had to say.

In this week of anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we’re reminded of the terrible realities of destruction from the air. Israel’s destruction of Gaza has been measured, deliberate, and slow, and no less terrible for that. And yet we feel some residual moral obligation to support Israel. And that compromises our position when we oppose the brutalities of Vladimir Putin, also the SAF (government) and RSF (rebel) forces in Sudan, and the army junta in Myanmar. There is a deep cynicism in the way Netanyahu’s government turns that obligation to their advantage.

Israel in the years up to the Likud victory 1977 still had its pioneering spirit. That I could connect to. In the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars it was fighting for its survival. That was enough to overcome any ambivalence I felt. This was what I’d characterise as the old Israel. I could connect to its passion, and to its genius. Friends who worked on kibbutzim came back with good stories.

Yes, we could be accused of romanticising Israel. We weren’t to know how terrible the consequences of the continued occupation of Jordanian and Egyptian lands after 1967 might be. That opened floodgates for which there is no sign of any closure. But the old Israel I know is still there, it was in its own way an inspiration to us back then, and we lose too much if we lose it, vexed and violent though its origins were.

As for the ‘new Israel’ of Netanyahu, Ben Givr and Smotrich, of Judea and Samaria as they would rename Palestinian territory, they have nothing to offer the world. Only their hatreds.  And they have turned the current conflict into, as now it seems a majority of Israelis see it, a battle for their nation’s very survival.

The forces of hatred are not yet spent. We as outsiders might long for a pragmatic solution but by its nature pragmatism cannot be imposed. Like Keir Starmer I want to see Palestine independence recognised but wonder also what good it might do and how might Hamas be excluded. Would it be no more than a token gesture? With Trump dictating our response we are little more than straws waving in the wind.  

But we must keep the faith. In a very literal sense – Christian and Jewish. We need both.