READING THE WAY TO THE SPRING

Ben Ehrenreich's account of his time spent in the West Bank, mainly in the village of Nabi Saleh, is a forceful journalistic record of the experience of Palestinians, supported by Israeli and foreign activists, who oppose the Occupation, run by the state of Israel and delivered by various arms of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and other state agencies.

As well as descriptions of protests and violent put-downs, the book includes historical and political background to provide information and context. It is useful for readers new to the contemporary story of Palestine.

As is often the case with Western activists and journalists in colonialist settings, Ehrenreich's best relationships locally are with the children. He has full and frank engagements with many adults, notably Bassem and Nariman Tamimi, with whom he lodges for part of the time. They are active and experienced in the resistance to the Occupation which, in Nabi Saleh, focusses on a spring well and the land around it. A weekly march to the well, now occupied by the IDF and an Israeli settler community, to protest at the usurpation of the land and the water, is the primary act of resistance. These Friday actions - various combinations of march, protest, violence by the IDF, with tear gas, stun grenades, 'stink water' cannon, rioting and stone throwing by young villagers - provide a metronomic beat throughout the book.

The term 'embedded', when applied to journalists in war zones, first received general currency when applied to individuals and their relationships with Western Allied Militaries in Iraq in 2003. Ehrenreich is embedded with an extended Palestinian family, their neighbours and associated Israeli activist-supporters, who are, by dint of the occupation, engaged in acts of resistance each and everyday, many of which acts take them into direct conflict with the Israeli state and its forces.

Ehrenreich writes 'on the nose' most of the time, in a contemporary, Westernised journo-voice you would read in feature articles in, say, The New York Times or Harpers. He gamely admits to authorial defensiveness in that he wishes to offer the redress of story to the world he asserts is currently off balance. He aspires to

something more modest than objectivity, which is truth.

He affirms, with pride, the truth that even in despair and hopelessness, people continue to resist.

Ehrenreich is a novelist as well as a journalist and he has a genuine capacity for story. He brings the reader into the incidents he witnessed and wrote about, in as far as any outsider can so do. There is a sense of immersion and insight. There is also a sense of being at a remove, hovering as a drone camera hovers above affairs, getting images and taking views.

Short 'interludes', scattered though the main text, offer wide and sometimes pinpoint views of the situation. They read like diary pieces from the London Review of Books. They work, in their own way, to offer commentary, often sub-textually illustrating just how difficult it is to overturn colonial occupation.

One such 'interlude' is entitled stagecraft, where Ehrenreich comments bitterly on the impotence of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and on the manner in which it acts as an enabling buffer between the population and the occupation. He views the rubble, jerry re-built PA headquarters, the Muqata'a, as the setting for the demise of possibilities for change.

As a contemporary primer on the character and experience of Palestinian resistance to the occupation, Ben Ehrenreich's The Way to the Spring is an informative and affecting account by an ecrivain engagé, an outsider and a sympathiser, opening a window for readers into the turmoil at the navel of the world's search for justice and peace.

The book ends with comprehensive notes and a useful index, which take it beyond the bounds of magazine reportage and into the fields of social research and historical accounting, where it makes valuable contributions.

The chapter on the city of Hebron, entitled A Matter of Hope, is a chilling digest of the militarised experience of people in that city and all of Palestine. The perverse normality that citizens endure takes Ehrenreich into considerations of science fiction and dystopian futures. The ancient city of Hebron is all too thoroughly dystopian in the present. The chapter ends with a killing and a funeral, leaving the reader to wonder at the chapter title and how small a matter hope is.

The Way to the Spring – life and death in Palestine; Ben Ehrenreich, Granta Books, London, 2016

See also a review by Nathan Thrall in London Review of Books, Volume 38, Number 23, 1.12.2016

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LET'S SWOT TRUMP

The votes are in. The decision is made. It's time to dust off the old flip chart, find four clean sheets of A3 flip-chart paper and a marker or two that haven't dried out since the last time you used them and left the caps off, before you became enthralled by laptops, projectors and power points. It's time to turn on the lights and get everyone thinking. It's time to SWOT Trump.

The arrival of the 'new' with the elevation of Donald Trump as Emperor of the Free World (Western Section) is a reversion to past glories, as if, along with the UK Brexit vote, the former empires of Reagan and Thatcher have been resurrected, this time not with the ruse of a cowboy film-star, but in the shell-persona of a celebrity tv game show presenter.

Thus, tools from that era need to be called upon. Let's SWOT Trump. Let's write up the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats for Trumpland, as the new Emperor flexes his shoulders in readiness for the Cloak of Power.

Strengths:

Well, Trump is based in that part of the Empire with the most nuclear weapons and the greatest military might generally. Plus the biggest arms' manufacturing sector. That's strength, though ironically of an increasingly enfeebled kind, in the face of suicide attacks and small operations not amenable to being blown up. Even 'mass punishments' have lost some of their appeal, though, tragically, not in Gaza. Competitors (Russia, China) lag behind, but have the capacity to be threatening. Allies (Israel) are essential for research and development as well as sales and as an out-post in a recalcitrant region. Trump may struggle with the fact that Israel is a religious state and not the religion he and many of his supporters, including the Klansmen, support. Associates (NATO, including France, Germany, UK) are unsettled. They are busy trying to sell armaments themselves, so they're also competitors, which is not a strength then, but a form of threat. Economically. Of course, Trump is at the head of the very biggest economy, which is a strength, though his own election illustrates the threats micro-economics can be to the big macro-globalisers of Wall Street and Washington. Ironically, rust-belt unemployed people want to buy the products made by global corporations in the cheap-labour countries in Asia. Could they be made, down the road, in green-shoot USA and still be afforded by workers there? How much for an iPod built in Omaha? Is that a strength?

Weaknesses:

Trump has to deliver. That's a weakness. You make promises, you must deliver. That's a form of threat. If the wall doesn't go up around Tijuana soon, Trump'll be chased out of Washington. Sure, he can send a few bulldozers up and down the banks of the Rio Grande and do a bit of ground work – loads of Irish lads could be brought in for that, though their illegal status maybe a problem. Is that a threat? A short run along the Google Map image of the US-Mexico border soon illustrates how weak the notion of a wall is. Another weakness is Trump's reliance on bullying, which is going out of style, generally. That is not to say that violence is not widespread and still the main driver for 'getting things done', but a noticeable chill factor surrounds it and is getting stronger. Sure, rancour and aggression have been on the rise across the world, notably in Europe in relation to international politics but Trump's imperium is weak in that populations may not have much stomach for belligerence overseas in the aftermath of confused debacles in Iraq, North Africa, Afghanistan and Syria. Of course, the practice of profiting from proxy wars has reached new heights, which may present Trumpland with opportunities.

Opportunities:

Every bombed out city needs to be rebuilt. Ask the shareholders of Haliburton, still basking in the glory of the money made from the re-building of post-Saddam Iraq. There will be opportunities for money-making in Syria, once an arrangement is arrived at with Putin and his oligarch friends. The carve-up of post-apocalypse Syria is Trump's biggest and most immediate opportunity. He, along with Putin’s oligarchs, will grab it.

Threats:
Disgruntled voters will feel let-down when the wall is not built, when the Muslims keep coming in, when the factories don't immediately re-open, when America isn't suddenly great … again. Expect fairly early assertions that a second term may be required, with the next Imperial election campaign getting underway promptly. And while Hilary Clinton is a spent force, don't be surprised if a younger Clinton, the bould Chelsea, doesn't make a burst in the outside lane in readiness for a future joust.

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WATCHING I, DANIEL BLAKE

I, DANIEL BLAKE is an acclaimed film by directing and writing team Ken Loach and Paul Laverty. It tells the tortured odyssey of Daniel and Katie through the benefit system in Newcastle, in the north-east of England, where he is a local, while she and her two children are incomers from London, castaways on the desert island of Poverty.

It's a hard watch, no doubt intentionally so. The scenes in the food bank are visceral and telling. The best achieved in the film. The scene in the CV workshop is chilling; the statistics and the put-down; the many workers, in the Job Centre Plus and associated settings, prepared to operate the monstrous system, often besuited or be-uniformed, using a discourse of 'work, assistance and sanction' in one and the same breath. It is Kafkaesque, yes; chilling, confusing and all too real in its detachment.

Images of Daniel Blake, played brilliantly by Dave Johns, trudging about the city centre, around building sites and small industrial units are a far cry from the world of work glamourised for the digital denizens of multi-coloured offices, filled with latte-swigging workers, lounging on jelly-bean filled bags.

The film is a forensic detailing of the experience of one man grieving for his late wife, coping with illness and loss of work and income, who makes time to respond to the needs of a young woman and her two children. It is a frightening account of ageing, desperation, illness and isolation, underlining the truth of the old Simon Community tv ad of how close individuals are to destitution. Two wage packets, was it?

As in many of the duo's films, gestures to art and imagination are important. In this case, there is the wonderful graffito on the wall of the Job Centre Plus, which leads again to sanction (a brush with the law and a police caution) rather than concrete assistance. There are also Daniel's crafting efforts with waste wood. And a great performance gesture in scenes with a chorus of hen-party revellers and dole claimants, who cheer the soliloquy by the man, who offers Daniel his jacket and castigates the arresting police officers, saying that they too will face job losses due to rampant privatisation.

All the principals are accomplished and the supporting cast, though not detailed in any great depth, are credible, in particular Sharon Percy as Shirley in the Job Centre Plus.

The film-makers are parsimonious with hope. The workers in the employ of the state and their outsourced agencies are brutalised and brutish, indoctrinated rather than educated. Is there hope for the children? Not obviously. There are the sterling efforts by the food-bank workers to be humane; the attempts by some Job Centre Plus staff to assist.

The dominant discourse is offered by the market. This is tragic, given that the market has proven itself inept and dangerous, unable to meaningfully deliver decent lives for citizens. The mantra 'let the market decide' delivers what it does; saleable goods for short-term profits. Daniel Blake can't sell his labour, his skills, experience and utility, due to illness. He sells his last assets, a few sticks of furniture. Katie has none and resorts to using the only asset she has: her self. She makes her choice, with pain and then endures, with pain. There is humiliation, yes. It is a commonplace.

The speech by Katie at the end, delivered with power and eloquence, is telling. Does it offer hope? Or confirm the desperation? It bookends the theatricality of the opening, where voices only are used. At the end, a soliloquy given in 'direct address' to the camera and the audience, asserting the rights of citizens is the best the film-makers can offer. When the story is so desperate, when hope is absent, does film-making break down? Do the film-makers lose heart and resort to the great gestures of theatre? Tragedy. Speech. Words. The face, in close-up, as film's grand gesture. Defiance and dissent. Alone.

I, Daniel Blake is another wonder from Ken Loach and Paul Laverty. It is a story of today, a universal story rooted in the north-east of England and reaching internationally. Hence, the awards. It tells the story using the forms of realism, forms well used by the film-makers in the past, worrying to the cinema-goer that we merely watch and consume vicariously, as we would any of today's omni-screen offerings. Two early-teen girls left the screening after an hour. The cinema-goer was not surprised. The first hour is formidably left-wing and educational and, arguably, it needs to be, in the face of the dominant neo-liberal discourse.  It gets going when the conflict between the two characters gingers up on an economic decision the young woman makes. 

In interviews around the time of the making of the film, people involved took hope from the arrival of Jeremy Corbyn as head of The British Labour Party. So did the cinema-goer. Polling figures for The British Labour Party are not good, even among older people, Ken Loach's peers and the people most likely to vote.

The day following the viewing the cinema-goer had a conversation with a middle-aged woman who works in a café. She is caught in the JSA/ESA trap as her casual contract will not be of any use as she faces surgery on her feet, worn out by years of work.

Enduring seems to be the only option now, for Daniel, Katie, her children and their fellows in the country. The tragedy of living on JSA/ESA is well told and the desperation is not shirked. That a wealthy society should get to be like this is obscene. Any wonder Gary Lineker, ace-footballer, patriot and tv presenter could tweet, in a related context about 'utterly heartless treatment' to young refugees and that the cinema-goer can wonder with the footballer

'What is happening to our country?'

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5168192/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ql_1

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/i_daniel_blake

https://mobile.twitter.com/GaryLineker/status/788407048031600640

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