Four Books Guaranteed to Expand Your Understanding the World

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe

Jewish historian, Ilan Pappe, lays out historical facts in stark terms, threading the birth of Zionism to the Balfour Declaration that formally sets the foundation for a Jewish nation in historic Palestine to Israel’s birth in 1948, which precipitates the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians in what is known as the Nakba or Catastrophe. Even before the British Mandate ends, Jewish militants are already cleansing Palestinian villages and towns of their inhabitants through various strategies including shooting civilians, poisoning wells, bombing homes and sticking mines in the debris to deter those with dreams of rebuilding, a tragedy that would continue in earnest with the last of the British troops gone.

Adding insult to injury, the United Nation subsequently apportions to the smaller Jewish population a larger piece of the land, land that has since grown in the wake of wars and ever-expanding Jewish settlements. Meanwhile, the Palestinian population has been forced into densely populated enclaves, with refugees scattered across the Middle East and elsewhere denied the right to return.

In one telling section, Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir compares the scene at a Palestinian home to that of European Jews fleeing their houses under threat from Nazi violence, their half-eaten meals abandoned on the dining table. Still, that comparison does little to elicit compassion or any form of soul-searching. Another eerie parallel between Jewish and Palestinian histories presents in Israel’s seizure of Palestinian homes under the pretext that they were readily abandoned, a self-serving justification that mirrors the excuses ethnic Poles deployed to take ownership of Jewish property during and after the Holocaust.   

Over meticulously delineated chapters, Pappe uncovers how Israel’s terrorism, myth-making, and apartheid policies towards Palestinians along with the failures of an ineffective Palestinian leadership have bolstered the Jewish nation-state and fostered feelings of anger, despair and retribution among Palestinians. Essentially, one finds in this book of history many dots connecting Hamas’s gruesome attack on Israelis on October 7, 2023 to Israel’s brutish seven-five year occupation of historic Palestine.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

This tiny novel by Palestinian author Adania Shibli packs a massive punch with its tight, succinct plot and quiet yet potent prose. Split in two parts, the first half centres on an unnamed Israeli commander heading a military unit in the Negev Desert, near the Egyptian border. Days are long, hot and uninteresting until soldiers massacre a group of unarmed Bedouin herders. The sole survivor, a teenage girl, is taken hostage, gang-raped and murdered, a real life event that came to light in 2003. But the heinous deed itself takes on a flat, bloodless and forgettable position in the commander’s mind, registering as another boring event like the troop’s uneventful routine.

The second half begins many decades later, switching from third to first person point of view. A young, unnamed Palestinian woman born 25 years after the Bedouin girl’s murder in 1949 takes a curious interest in the story after stumbling across it in the newspaper. Setting off in her car with an Israeli colleague’s ID to the crime scene, she begins the disorienting journey through zones prohibited to Palestinians, inviting readers to not only witness the dehumanising nature of Israel’s blockade but the results of past military actions at work in the present as old Palestinian towns and villages that would have served as landmarks have either vanished in name or physically, rendering her maps obsolete.   

With just one brief scene, Shibli masterfully demonstrates how residents of occupied Ramallah have become numb to Israeli raids and bombings due to their frequency. In one instance, the Palestinian woman’s colleague opens the office windows, casually explaining that they would otherwise shatter from the blast of a bombing nearby. When the targeted building collapses, the protagonist simply blows the dust from her desk and carries on as though nothing had happened. This blasé feeling meets her at the Israeli military museum she visits for clues on the murdered girl, and on discovering none, realises she may never find any since the teenager, like her, means nothing to Israel, a reality that would characterise her mission’s fatal end.

The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman by Andrzej Szczypiorski

One must forgive the title as it ignores the multiple narratives comprising this exquisite novel set in Nazi-occupied Poland. It’s 1943 and Jews have been banished to the ghetto in Warsaw to await their fate. Others are in hiding, like Henryczek Fichtelbaum, who, tired of his cramped hideout in a sympathetic Pole’s attic, occasionally ventures out to the streets much to his best friend’s chagrin. In one instance, he enters a pastry shop, where a patron recognising him, yells out to fellow customers, “A Jew is eating cake!” as though it’s an aberration. Yet, that darkly comical scene demonstrates the shift in the country’s psyche during the maddening occupation, where conversion of Jews to Catholicism, theft of Jewish property, mass hysteria and fear reign supreme to the point that Jewish informers betray Jews, as in the case of the titular Seidenman who, until her arrest, had escaped detection thanks to her blond hair, blue eyes and fake identity.

The plot is unusual in its melding of the past, present and future, meaning readers know almost immediately which characters who survive the war and those who succumb to its horrors. Case in point, a father trapped in the ghetto due in part to his “disastrous” Jewish appearance silently weeps as the smuggler takes his daughter away, aware it’s the last time he would see her.  

Despite minimal dialogue, Andrzej Szczypiorski superbly captures the conflicting and uncertain realities of ethnic Poles, Jews and Germans trapped in Poland’s socio-political milieu before, during and after the occupation, something rendered in sparkling detail when a disloyal Nazi with deep affinity for Poland confesses to Seidenman his reservations about his adoptive country, which genially hosted him prior to the occupation.

“But after the war, in independent Poland, will other people recognize as self-evident that I belong here? After everything that is now happening between Germans and Poles, will Poles see that?”

Segu by Maryse Conde

In the late 1700s, Christianity, Islam and the transatlantic slave trade converge and descend on an aristocratic family from the West African kingdom of Segu (now part of Mali), which would convulse under the same forces despite its wealth and fearsome warriors. The story unwinds through Dousika Traore’s four sons as each depart the kingdom’s secluded safety for varying reasons. The eldest son, Tiekoro leaves to embraces Islam despite resistance from his family, Malobali ends up in far off Ashanti kingdom as a mercenary and later in Ouida as a nominal Christian, his brother Naba is kidnapped and sold into slavery in Goree Island before following his lover, another slave, to Brazil.  The fourth Traore, Siga, becomes a tanner, a trade he learns during his time in Fez but is frowned upon in Segu. At various points in their life, each man finds his nobility diminished either through their own despicable acts or deeds perpetrated against them.

Weaving an elaborate tale brimming with ideas as much as people who never come off as tropes or one-dimensional villains, Maryse Conde expertly manages to maintain the saga’s sprawling path with clear, simple but never simplistic prose. Together and separately, she uses each brother’s journey to reflect on the upheaval of African spirituality, gruesome rivalry between states, the ugliness of racism and religious zealotry, and the slow disintegration of old traditions under foreign influences.     

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