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heresthepencil's review
informative
reflective
4.0
it’s a very angry book, but also a somewhat hopeful one.
angry in the sense that finkelstein is very obviously furious with israel, like any sane person with a working conscience should be. he’s rude and sarcastic, yes, but that doesn’t stop him from being fair and meticulously pointing out every lie & crime of “israel”. there’s a lot of statistics and direct quotes from idf soldiers taking part in the massacre.
the book focuses on the operation cast lead of december 2008-january 2009, and the goldstone’s UN report stating that “israel” committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. (it was written before goldstone changed his mind about idf intentionally targeting palestinian civilians.) the title itself is a quote from a column by an israeli journalist gideon levy, regarding the report.
and the book is (cautiously) hopeful in its overall conclusion: that things are changing. that the general public’s support of “israel” is lowering, becoming less natural. that the propaganda machine is beginning to break. granted, finkelstein wrote it in 2010, and here we are in 2024, exactly three months after the start of the most recent aggression and barely a few years after the aggression of may 2021. but boycotts are losing giants billions of dollars, celebrities’ kids are wearing sweatshirts with palestine motifs, the protests around the whole world haven’t really stopped for a second since october. maybe he is right, however excruciatingly slow this change is.
angry in the sense that finkelstein is very obviously furious with israel, like any sane person with a working conscience should be. he’s rude and sarcastic, yes, but that doesn’t stop him from being fair and meticulously pointing out every lie & crime of “israel”. there’s a lot of statistics and direct quotes from idf soldiers taking part in the massacre.
the book focuses on the operation cast lead of december 2008-january 2009, and the goldstone’s UN report stating that “israel” committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. (it was written before goldstone changed his mind about idf intentionally targeting palestinian civilians.) the title itself is a quote from a column by an israeli journalist gideon levy, regarding the report.
and the book is (cautiously) hopeful in its overall conclusion: that things are changing. that the general public’s support of “israel” is lowering, becoming less natural. that the propaganda machine is beginning to break. granted, finkelstein wrote it in 2010, and here we are in 2024, exactly three months after the start of the most recent aggression and barely a few years after the aggression of may 2021. but boycotts are losing giants billions of dollars, celebrities’ kids are wearing sweatshirts with palestine motifs, the protests around the whole world haven’t really stopped for a second since october. maybe he is right, however excruciatingly slow this change is.
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