PALESTINE IN A WORLD ON FIRE, aptly titled interviews with eminent thinkers

PALESTINE IN A WORLD ON FIRE
KATHERINE NATANEL & ILAN PAPPÉ
Haymarket Books
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A collection of interviews with some of the world’s leading progressive thinkers on the movement for Palestinian liberation and its connections to struggles for justice across the globe.

As more and more people align themselves with the Palestinian people, Palestine in a World on Fire provides the global perspective and analysis needed to inform how we forge ahead on this path of newfound solidarity. Editors Ilan Pappé and Katherine Natanel have gathered a collection of interviews that are intimate, challenging, and rigorous—many of them conducted before October 7th but still startlingly prescient. The interviewees connect the struggle for Palestinian liberation to various liberatory movements around the world, simultaneously interrogating and recontextualizing their own positions given the ongoing aggression in Palestine. This incredible group includes Angela Y. Davis, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Nadine El-Enany, Gabor Mate, Mustafa Barghouti, Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Gilroy, Elias Khoury, Gayatri Spivak, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian.

Palestine in a World on Fire highlights the centrality of Palestine in struggles shared across the capitalism, imperialism, misogyny, neo-colonialism, racism, and more. Each conversation tackles urgent events and unfolding dynamics, and the scholar-activists interviewed here provide invaluable perspectives and insights, illuminating the richness and relevance of recent scholarship on Palestine.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Ask yourself why the US media does't have any, or not many, pro-Palestinian voices featured as speakers about the ongoing genocide Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinians. An answer comes when you're ready to look at the roots of bias in a hypercapitalist world undergoing a multi-front fascist takeover across multiple countries. Populist values, such as they are, burn brightly when people are afraid and abused. Tech scum are in charge of huge pots of wealth and using it to forward the abusive, hypercapitalist agenda...the luckiest thing that has happened yet is the dopes from DOGE coming after the data and the money of the jerkoffs who voted the scumbags who can't even run a group chat properly.

Waking up to the threat to yourselves, at last, means we all have a small chance of making some of them see the pattern of abuse being used. It certainly also includes the murder and the eradication of people and cultures "They" do not like.

Palestinians are on the sharp edge of the sword. "They" do not plan to stop swinging it. If you and yours are not in its path, you will be.

Essentially this collection of softball interviews of Progressive figures across multiple scholarly disciplines is evidence that the reason libraries, universities, and "lower" schools are all under attack. The way to stop an idea is not to ban it, but to render it incomprehensible and unrelatable. Physics is doing that very handily and entirely to itself by getting really, really deeply up its own ass. Economics and social sciences are having it done to them by "Them" demanding their supply of new thinkers and believers be cut off from resources to learn about the disciplines. Stupid people are easier to lie to than educated ones.

It is a book that's been overtaken by events in some ways. It's a shame that many who could best benefit from its focus are likely not to read it as "the news" is hard enough to contend with, still less launch on a deep dive into how the Palestinian genocide is part of a larger playbook.

The terrible truth is it is working as it always has. Critics of the machinery of totalitarianism, like Alexei Navalny and Primo Levi, suffer awful fates if they're high enough profile to be threatening. The rest if us, the insignificant ones, are left alone to chatter amongst ourselves, as we can't do "Them" much inconvenience still less harm.

So take this as my considered advice: Learn more about what atrocities are going on right now; think about what will keep happening; get angry and resist. However small it is, act against "Them."