sweet & sour notes

This might be too little, too late, but I want to share links to some of the materials I've used to learn the context of current events since Hamas massacres in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, and throughout the Israeli Defence Forces' bloody siege and bombardment of Gaza that has followed. These sources are mainly podcasts, this is because the way I usually consume news and analysis these days is to listen to podcasts while I do other things. There's no real photojournalism on this list, because I have chosen not to look for photographs to confirm the horrific reporting I already understand and believe.

• On 9 October, Rami Younis of +972 Magazine wrote “We're facing unprecedented horror. Why is Biden adding fuel to the fire?”
• Arts & culture YouTuber Big Joel asked “How can we grieve the death of thirteen hundred Jews when they are used as a justification to destroy a people?”
• Political/historical writer John Ganz wrote a very raw essay on nationalist violence in the first days of the siege, “The Trap: I Refuse to Be Recruited” on his Substack blog Unpopular Front.
• Former Jewish Currents editor David Klion talked to On the Media's Brooke Gladstone about how comparisons between the 7 October massacres and 9/11 ominously portended IDF war crimes to follow in “On the Media: What Comparisons to 9/11 Tell Us about the Israel-Hamas Conflict”.
• Klion also talked to the hosts of Left Anchor, covering generational differences in how U.S. Jews understand modern Israeli history, how ethnic cleansing shaped Israel and Gaza as they exist today, how the extreme rightward drift of the Israeli government led to this moment, and why international actors' positions on the siege do not map neatly onto their positions on the ongoing Russian occupation of Ukraine in “The War on Gaza”.
• Left Anchor subsequently interviewed DSA organizer Layla Al-Sheikh about the U.S. government's influence on the siege for “The War on Gaza II”.
• Tareq Baconi wrote Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, which seems to be regarded as the definitive English-language book on Hamas. Daniel Denvir of The Dig interviewed Baconi about it for two hours.
• Baconi also answered questions from New York Times writer Ezra Klein and laid out where diplomacy might go after the utter devastation of this moment in The Ezra Klein Show episode ”'This is How Hamas Is Seeing this'”.
• Ezra Klein also interviewed Rabbi Sharon Brous about how her Torah study and deep affinity for Israeli society have led her to condem the government's disregard for Palestinian life in “The Sermons I Needed to Hear Right Now”
• Jewish Currents editor Arielle Angel interviews political theorist Naomi Klein on how the politics of memory and trauma in Israel are appropriated in service of ethnic cleansing, and how they can be recaptured in service of human rights in the On the Nose podcast episode “Naomi Klein on Israel's 'Doppelganger Politics'”
• The New Yorker editor David Remnick talked to Brooke Gladstone for a 3 November On the Media segment about the challenge of providing fair and honest journalism about mass death and suffering when objectivity is impossible
• The single text most recommended by the above sources is The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi. Big Joel began summarizing the book for his YouTube audience and has tackled Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.

---

Where not otherwise noted, the content of this blog is written by Dominique Cyprès and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.