My first action on waking is to look at my phone. Press the green WhatsApp icon and hope for two blue ticks. One grey tick is a precursor of death. Two grey ticks are arguably worse. They mean that communications have been live, but your friend may not be.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict (for lack of a better term) did not start on 7 October 2023, and the willingness of Palestinian armed groups to use violence is not the only obstacle to peace. At the heart of this intractable tragedy is the inability of a colonial and occupying power (and its enablers) to accept a people’s rejection of their subjugation and their determination to fight against it. Whatever form this resistance has taken – and it includes a long history of non-violence and civil disobedience as well as armed struggle – Israel has responded with a disproportionate use of force and disregard for the human toll.
Suella Braverman finally goaded Rishi Sunak into sacking her as home secretary yesterday morning. The nominal cause was the editorial Braverman wrote for the Times last Thursday, which libelled pro-Palestinian demonstrators as ‘hate marchers’ and criticised the police for ‘playing favourites’. Number Ten has since briefed that its suggested edits for the piece were ignored. Braverman’s baseless claim of threats to remembrance services at the Cenotaph helped mobilise hundreds of far-right counter-protesters; responsibility for the drunken violence and sporadic racist attacks against demonstrators returning home lies with her.
In the last week of October the digital dimension of the entire British Library vanished. Just like that. No catalogue, no internet, no way to buy a pencil at the gift shop by card. An early tweet reported ‘technical issues’; a few days later the library said it had been subject to a cyber attack.
Israeli airstrikes have reduced entire neighbourhoods in Gaza to rubble while a near total siege has deprived the population of vital supplies: food, water, medicine and fuel. Yet missile defence systems and millions in US military aid allow Tel Avivians to pantomime normality. Some bars are open late and children are back at school. Old routines chafe against the collective trauma of the attack on 7 October.
I was shelving some books when the American journalist walked in. Many international reporters have come to Jerusalem since 7 October, staying in the hotels near our Educational Bookshop on Salahadin Street in East Jerusalem. The book in my hand was Avi Shlaim’s autobiography, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew. It has been doing well for us; it traces the historian’s life from his childhood in Iraq, through his immigration to the newly founded state of Israel in the early 1950s, to his work as an academic in the UK, where he still lives. The journalist asked me for the best book I had on the Middle East. I generally try not to judge people who ask such questions: it often comes from a tourist, on a one-off, long-planned trip or pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But coming from a journalist, it was unsettling.
The LRB’s limited edition print and a copy of the British Library’s new facsimile edition of the First Folio
The chance meetings, narrow escapes and spooky coincidences that fill Shakespeare’s romances are also a feature of the histories and provenances of the 235 surviving copies of the First Folio.