The resources required are presumably proportional to activity

it’s probably just a matter of clutter, in the worst possible case

I don’t have answers as I’m still learning the history myself. But I’m currently reading The Hundred Years War on Palestine, which covers 1917-2017, so it gets you a detailed look earlier than 1947.

More crucially for this discussion with your uncle, perhaps, it describes the emergence of Zionism and Israeli identity as a modern phenomenon, as something distinct from just ‘ancient land disputes’.

It’s available as an audiobook if you find that helpful, and you can find the ebook in Library Genesis if you otherwise have trouble getting a copy.

Too many things at once! Right now:

• The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
• Slavery and Social Death by Orlando Patterson
• Valences of the Dialectic by Fredric Jameson
• Settlers by J. Sakai
• The Invention of the White Race by Theodore W. Allen
• Light in Gaza edited by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, and Mike Merryman-Lotze (free at the publisher’s website, linked)

Plus a couple works of fiction, one sort of autobiographical piece, and some computer programming textbooks.

I’m new here and it took me a while at first to figure out why I had a downvote on a post that literally didn’t even express any point of view!

Bizarre

I just finished giving The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine a quick first read via audiobook and it was helpful for me, especially as my first indirect exposure to some of the foundational works of Zionism and framing the emergence of Arab national identities as well as Israeli identity in a coherent modern context.

Last night, I started reading An Army Like No Other, which was so immediately striking that I read some 20 pages aloud to a family member this morning. That book is incredibly direct and insightful about the interrelared roles of ideology and the military-industrial complex in Israeli society. (This one is a Verso book and appears on their reading list.) Of the three books I’ve recently started on related topics, this one has the most polemical style, and its prose is razor sharp.

I’m very curious to hear what others are reading, as well was what you all find has been most vital for you on this topic, either in educating yourself or in explaining the topic to others! If anyone has trouble getting hold of a text (on these reading lists or otherwise) please let me know and I’ll try to help.

Israel is in fact among the most dangerous places, if not the most dangerous place, in the world to be Jewish, precisely because of the violence inherent in settler colonialism.

The idea that Israel serves as a safe haven for Jews has always played a justificatory role in Zionism but it has never been true.

Thanks for letting me know you’ve seen this as well! I guess for now the workaround is to also have a hexbear account, which is easy enough but a bit of a shame since there are so many shared topics and values on the two instances.

Interestingly there are two posts from a couple months ago and nothing else. Stuff from this week is missing.

If and as you come to own capital, whether that is a house, or stocks, or a private pension, it’s going to change the fact of your class position to some extent.

Many people living under capitalism are primarily workers but their class positions are complicated or polluted in that way.

Imo involvement in the stock market is not a super huge deal so much as becoming a landlord or exploiting wage labor or something like that.

Do we know for sure that the emoji spam on Hexbear is due to the downvote policy? It seems to me like it could also just be explained by accidents of history and community focus/culture.