A review by malcolmmurrellbyrd
Blindness: October 7 and the Left: Jewish Quarterly 256 by Hadley Freeman

1.0

This text is weak and easily deconstructed to an echo of state media propaganda. Grammar and punctuation is often incorrect and arguments are half-baked thoughts with no reliable evidence. Where are the footnotes or endnotes for the quotations and supposed statistics that are given? At least have a further reading section or bibliography at the end of the book. I haven read thousands of pages, numerous books, academic articles, and newspaper articles that this book is as shallow and "blind" as it can get. Anti-semitism has increased and is a problem as I have discussed with my groups in Friends of Jewish Voice for Peace, but that is about where this books argument(s) ends in providing any such insights. If someone is interested in writing a paper on Israel/Palestine, resistance, Zionism, militarism, religious fundamentalism, human rights, pariah states, and propaganda this book is useful to cite and argue against. I will never forget what happened on October 7th, but I will not forget how people in my family, Israelis and Americans in power, have strongly suggested the nuking of Gaza. Absurd. I can't forget the social media posts by IDF soldiers of raiding and looting Palestinian homes. IDF soldiers dancing and playing music on Gaza's rubble. IDF soldiers proposing to each other on rubble in Gaza saying "we'll make a new home here." IDF soldiers stealing Palestinian women's undergarments to pin on walls for dating app pictures. The blood that flows in Gaza, the forced starvation, the daily bombardment that includes schools, hospitals, and refugee camps, and not to mention the targeted killing of hundreds of journalisms and humanitarian aid workers. And this is just Israel's recent treatment of Gaza, aka "mowing the grass," how about Israel's and settler actions in the West Bank? Thousands of Palestinians have been illegally detained by Israel, many of which are children, for months without arrest. Collective punishment is handed out to the Palestinians in the West Bank constantly. Read history, understand others and your own bias, consider the context and the times experienced, consider what evidence is used and is ignored, what are the arguments and how to they argue against and criticize others, and finally make your own analysis. How we counter anti-semitism, islamophobia, propaganda, injustice, ect. is by thinking rather than blindly believing and letting emotions take over rational thought.