Thwap's Reading Achievements for 2026

 Here's links to 2025 Books I & II.  2024's readings.  2023.  September 2021 to December 2022.

Anyway, a few days ago I finished Fresh Green Life by Sebastian Castillo.  

I knew that it was about a guy in his thirties who has been living in self-imposed isolation for a year who goes to a News Year's Eve party with friends and colleagues from his university days.  You can read the linked review if you want.  But I will just say that I enjoyed the book.  If held a few surprises for me as it went along.  I found the language of the narrator a little pompous at first.  I wasn't sure if that was intentional on the part of the writer to mock the narrator, or whether it was the writer's own voice.  Whatever it was, it faded and the rest of the time was smooth sailing.  In the end it was (for me) a hilarious send-up of the lives of academics.  [Here's a link to the narrator's favourite film.]

2026-01-18

Today I finished Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine:

Pappe argues that Israel's creation involved deliberate ethnic-cleansing:

In his latest work, renowned Israeli author and academic Pappe (A History of Modern Palestine ) does not mince words, doing Jimmy Carter one better (or worse, depending on one's point of view) by accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, beginning in the 1948 war for independence and continuing through the present. Focusing primarily on Plan D (Dalet , in Hebrew), conceived on March 10, 1948, Pappe demonstrates how ethnic cleansing was not a circumstance of war, but rather a deliberate goal of combat for early Israeli military units organized by David Ben-Gurion, whom Pappe labels the “architect of ethnic cleansing. The forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians between 1948 and 1949, Pappe argues, was part of a long-standing Zionist plan to manufacture an ethnically pure Jewish state. 

It's depressing reading Pappe's conclusion, written in 2006, about the slim possibilities for peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, knowing how far from that outcome the reality in 2026 is.  

I didn't know much about the "war" between Israel and the Palestinians and other Arab states.  I had been raised to believe that the Arab states told the Palestinians to temporarily leave so as to be out of the way while they crushed the Israeli state as it was being born.  I never thought that their leaving justified not letting them return, but I learned a long time ago from Christopher Hitchens that there had never been such an order.

The reality is that the Palestinians were hardly armed.  They weren't happy with the UN partition plan but those within the borders of what was to be Israel had resigned themselves to living in "Israel" when the time came.  They weren't prepared for what the Israelis had planned for them.

Iraq, Syria and Jordan sent troops that never left the lands that had been allotted to Palestine by the UN.

Egypt sent a mostly untrained militia into Gaza with little preparation and bombed Tel Aviv and some other towns for a few days.

Jordan's King planned to take the West Bank for himself in return for allowing Israel to take the rest of all that it wanted.

And all of this ethnic cleansing had been planned long before WWII and The Holocaust.