An eye-opening, intriguing study.
A sharp exposé of how Israel’s suppression of Palestine has translated into lucrative anti-terrorist systems that the Israeli government exports globally.
In the introduction, Australian journalist Loewenstein, an “atheist Jew” and author of Disaster Capitalism and Pills, Powder, and Smoke, writes about growing up “in a liberal Zionist home in Melbourne…where support for Israel wasn’t a required religion but certainly expected.” However, as the Israeli domination of the Palestinian narrative became increasingly apparent, the author grew disillusioned, not unlike many young people in the West. In this meticulous study, he asserts that “Israel’s claim to be a thriving democracy in the heart of the Middle East is challenged by the facts”—namely, that the nation has been exporting sophisticated, state-of-the-art weaponry and surveillance technology around the world, largely to unsavory dictators who are trying to crush rebellious minorities, much like the Israelis with the Palestinians. Loewenstein lays out the methods the Israelis have used to control the Palestinians, including high-tech defense equipment, checkpoint security, and cybersurveillance, all of which have been tested and modified for effectiveness in order to export globally. As the author shows, the Israelis have sent weapons and technology to Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s as well as to disreputable regimes in Burma, Sri Lanka, Rhodesia, and Rwanda, among others. Israel’s vaunted Uzi gun, designed in the late 1940s, has been sold to more than 90 countries since then. “Militarism [eventually] became the country’s guiding principle,” writes the author, especially since 9/11, when the rest of the world got a taste of the terrorism Israel has battled for decades. In his diligent narrative, Loewenstein devotes chapters to the now-ubiquitous Pegasus system, a phone-hacking tool sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, and the recent activities of social media companies that have “routinely blocked content that was critical of Israel or showed the Palestinian point of view.”
An eye-opening, intriguing study.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781839762086
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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