The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Companion, Saturday Night, The Tasting, and The Colours Within
Understanding the war in Gaza
TOMASZ PIERSCIONEK welcomes essays by leading Palestinian, Israeli, and international authorities that set the Israeli-Gaza war into context
JOHN GREEN is dissatisfied with a book that fails to address the promotion of ignorance as a ruling-class strategy to maintain control
CHRIS MOSS is gripped by the account of a city that is point of embarkation for conquest and adventure, and arrival stage for dreamers and despots
WILL PODMORE recommends an analysis of the utopian thinking that underlies the rise of bourgeois economics
LEO BOIX reviews Cuban poet Carlos Pintado; Mexican poet Diana Garza Islas; Mexican American writer and critic Rigoberto Gonzalez; and Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos
ANGUS REID deconstructs a popular contemporary novel aimed at a ‘queer’ young adult readership
JOHN GREEN takes issue with a mainstream novel designed to denigrate the GDR
Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm
Edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner
OR books, £17.99
ON 7 October 2023, Hamas launched an extensive surprise attack (which it called al-Aqsa Deluge) against Israeli soldiers and civilians that was unprecedented in its ferocity and reportedly occurred without the knowledge of the group’s regional allies. Around 1,200 Israelis, the majority civilians, were killed while another 250 were taken hostage.
The subsequent weeks and months saw Hamas’s terrorism repaid by Israel’s extreme aggression as the latter launched an extensive bombing campaign and ground invasion, the brutality of which made all previous incursions pale in comparison.
Amid the confusion, anger and sorrow felt by Israelis and Palestinians in the days following October 7, many questions were asked about why Hamas launched the attack and how it managed to catch one of the world’s most sophisticated military forces off guard.
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