The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (2025)

For maybe the first half hour I was constantly thinking 'why am I even watching this?´for it seemed to be little more than a Gen Z update, often quite crude, of an original film with a plot that is almost so simple and familiar that those of my own generation would struggle to forget it even after thirty years.

But then it turns a bit of a corner, throwing in a few surprises, as it oscillates around a range of novel nuances and possibilities, flirting even with what seemed to me to be a mood borrowed from recent bestseller The Housemaid — which is a bit naughty because Freida McFadden's psychological thriller is about to get its own cinematic adaptation starring her of the 'good jeans' and Amanda Seyfried. (They'll have to do something about that ending.)

Here too the final act feels a bit rushed and under-constructed, and throughout the narrative a STOP sign had been portended in a manner that can only be described as Chekhovian, but which turns out to lack the necessary prop pay-off we associate with said Russian author.

 

Ballad of a Small Player (2025)

'Reinvention' is perhaps the key word on the poster below.

As we were watching it the word 're-jigging' popped into my head — a re-jigging of one of my favourite contemporary novels, a result of which a lot of what I took to be the meaning of the story has somehow fallen away.

Lawrence Osborne's literary 'meat' was wrapped up in a complex exploration of how the gambling addict's compulsions might intersect with specifically Chinese notions of chance and the superstitions surrounding greed. In that context the 'ghost story' element makes a lot of sense, which it kind of doesn't here in the adaptation.

'Lord Doyle' tells us that as an outsider in Macau he is a gweilo, a Cantonese slang term for ghost man or foreign devil. Yet ironically in this Edward Berger (Conclave, All Quiet On the Western Front...) film, not only are all the interesting underlying ideas displaced by visual and performance pizzazz (an odd combo of Wong Kar-wai and Wes Anderson-lite), the native inhabitants of this city have become distinctly ghostlike.

Are extras so expensive over there?

Berger seems to be going out of his way to not duplicate the novelist's fascinating insights into the Macau gambling culture and its clans and outside the casinos he appears to want to limit the number of Chinese people he might show as inhabiting this environment.

This is especially true of the sequence on the island of Samma, here just a home floating in isolation on the sea, but in the book a community (and a cuisine) with which the protagonists are seen to interact.

Screenwriter Joffe has also significantly boosted another non-local character, that given to Tilda Swinton as cartoonish PI Blithe. I can see how this helps avoid the mechanism of flashbacks, but this role seems whimsical and feeds into a finale where Reilly is offered a measure of redemption within a sequence where the film appears to struggle to find a tonally worthwhile conclusion.

So whatever the merits of this movie, and it does have a handful, they aren't the merits of the novel*, and I think this is a good enough novel to deserve more than 'reinvention' by Netflix.

* When first published it was described as one of the best ever English language works of fiction about contemporary China. Berger's film is only very incidentally about China.

All the things that don't belong here...

When I first came to Central America there were many more ways for an outsider to suddenly find themselves completely out of their depth, particularly outside the major towns. These days the whole environment has become markedly shallower.

If there is an age-old tendency to predate on outsider, it has adjusted to this new environment, yet the works of Paul Bowles are (unjustly one feels) now often disparaged by contemporary American liberals who pride themselves on their seemingly all-encompassing comfort zones and perhaps don't appreciate their good fortune to be gracing this new era.

Bowles was a highly talented writer and composer, a gay man who found an extended temporo-spatial slither of liberation (along with undoubtedly enviable comfort) in the developing world, which confounds many in the mainstream today.

Pastor Dowe at Tacaté, peak Bowles one might say, is set amongst the Lacandon Maya and features some of his very best evocations of potentially mean landscapes. As with Lowry's Under the Volcano, the period is the back end of the Spanish Civil War, though the narrative itself was also written just over a decade later.

Its protagonist is a widowed protestant preacher who has come to this made-up settlement in the backwoods of Chiapas from his base in Ocosingo, having brushed up a bit on the local lingo and cosmology and, as is often the case with Bowles protagonists, his comfort zone soon segues into the tract of smothering discomfit.

This is in part because he has possibly failed to appreciate that his own modernity is compromised by his adherence to ancient credulities and when he tweaks the 'good news' to accommodate Mayan beliefs and divine personages, he permits his flock to turn the tables on him.

Intriguingly, we learn that these Maya possess a duo of creator gods, Hachakyum and Metzabok, venerated here in a pair of adjacent, hidden caves. 'Metzabok makes all the things that do not belong here,' the pastor is informed, and it is to this deity that he soon finds himself praying.

Task (HBO)

What bugs me a bit about the kind of biker gangs featured in Task, is that they are dealing in millions, but where exactly does all the money go, other than in corrupting the cops?  

Social mobility certainly doesn't seem to be their thing.

I almost passed on this show, partly because it was being led by Mark Ruffalo, currently a leading light of Hollywood's faux-righteous mob, but wisdom, he himself states during the finale's epilogue, is knowing what to overlook, so I am glad I overcame this qualm.

While there is some pent up passive aggressive sanctimoniousness in the character of Tom Brandis, he ends up being a likeable, if unlikely, Task-master, perhaps an American liberal fantasy of an FBI agent: a lapsed man of God, always steadfastly determined to do the right thing, even if it this occasionally blows up in his face. (In Tom's case, maybe a bit more than occasionally.)

This story seems to be an extended lecture about the dangers of testosterone-fuelled strategising, but it is undoubtedly the female characters who really stand out here, driving my own engagement with the narrative through the episodes, especially Maeve, Lizzie and Aleah. (Looking forward now to seeing Emilia Jones in Cat Person.)

None of these roles went to American actresses, so as with Mare of Easttown, the question of accents hangs in the air again. I can't really tell, at least not like a Pennsylvania native could, but I suspect that all the non-Yanks in the principal cast are generally coping better than American thesps would in an equivalent drama set somewhere in Britain with a marked regional accent even amongst the middle classes, like Liverpool, say.

The Perfect Neighbor (2025)

 

If you have Netflix, watch this extraordinary documentary, largely put together with bodycam clips and other 'official' footage. 

The villain of this piece is a textbook example of a stone cold soul, lacking any kind empathy...precisely the kind of uber-creepy presence you would never want to turn up in your own neighbourhood. 

There are obvious lessons for Florida police here, for their 'I have to believe both of you' / 'kids will be kids' approach undoubtedly fed into the final escalation.

(If you watch attentively, of all the cops who came to deal with her complaints, there was ONE who applied the correct approach.)

The Long Walk (2025)

Based on Stephen King's very first novel, which he began at college in the sixties and eventually published in 1979 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

I read it 45 years ago, having already been partially fed it via intense, non-sequential gobbets by a Latin teacher who was clearly obsessed with it. An extreme authoritarian, I am certain he closely identified with 'The Major' and possibly anticipated this grim scenario more as utopia than dystopia.

I somehow doubt that he knew that Bachman was a cover for a very liberally-minded upcoming horror writer and, were he still with us, he'd no doubt be horrified by the politics of the actor chosen to portray his hero in this movie.

In Prep school we'd long had a Latin teacher who could easily be persuaded to drop all the 'Sextus est in horto' bunk and just spend the lesson recounting the myths of the ancients in his engagingly camp manner.

But this one was driven by an inner mythology of a much darker variety and the only diversion we ever got were readings from this uplifting text where you 'got your ticket' if you proved inadequate to the task in hand. Every lesson came with its very own 'terrifying tomorrow'.

I'd been learning Latin fairly steadily since the age of five and I now associate this story fairly strongly with my decision to give it up prior to O level.

The source novel had a somewhat rumpled ending, perhaps a rather lame attempt to thwart the narrative's own predictability and the alternative fashioned for this adaptation is one of those you can see coming for roughly 350 miles.

Similar scenarios have been suggested to us periodically since this one popped into student Stephen's head. In a way, The Squid Game is the most recent. The trouble with the film is that it falls just short of sufficiency on many different levels, starting perhaps with budget, but also the dialogue, the back story and so on are not quite all there.

Possibly worth noting that this is one of those kinds of movies which may not get made once America is finally great again, because it was shot north of the border in Canada. (Spoiler: as were all but one of the participants in this event!)

Pas de Rois?

Further to all that No Kings exuberance in the former colonies yesterday, a tiny slice of history from Merry Old England...

It's approaching the end of 1386.

The King is an effete 19-year-old, an extreme narcissist obsessed with hygiene and social distancing. Without knowing it he has invented the linen hankerchief as a way of blowing or wiping his nose or indeed covering his mouth when interacting with his subjects.

He has a near absolute belief in his own authority and a form of personal rule which is disconcerting to say the least for the Lords and the Commons, who collectively maintain a rather different notion about the way that the interests of the realm ought to be managed.

The French are about to invade.

Not one of those putative invasions as with Napoleon (and later Adolf), for the troops and their horses and supplies were already on board hundreds of ships at Bruges that November awaiting a change in the weather. Bonne chance avec ça, but London's mayor has ordered citizens to stockpile food and in Kent evacuations are underway.

Addressing this very imminent danger on any level will require the raising of significant revenue and a level of governance approaching basic competence.

But the Royal administration is a complete mess: corrupt, inefficient, leaky and the monarch himself surrounded by a coterie of acquisitive and extravagant favourites, also rumoured to be hanky waving types.

This situation might be said to have had its roots in the end of the previous reign, generally considered by historians to have been highly successful, but which ended with the old guy in a semi-senile state being preyed upon by a notably materialist young lady and her family.

His successor and grandson has lately been refusing to attend Parliament, the agreed forum for handling disputes at the elite end of society "behind closed doors".

Faced with a sovereign who will not engage with any of the established channels of communication, who appears more interested in adventures in the opposite direction, over the Irish Sea, and who has even suggested that he might submit to his French 'cousin', rather be cornered by his own magnates, the Lords and Commons elect to stage a bit of a coup.

Out go the loathed Chancellor and Treasurer and, via appropriate statute, in comes a 14-man council which would reform the administration and effectively run an emergency government for a year in the sovereign's name.

The King stomps off on an extended peripatetic sulk with his hangers on, wandering from place to place across the North and the Midlands, plotting his royal revenge.

After six months he comes up with a cunning plan. He summons the country's most senior judges to a meeting place of his choosing and cajoles them into producing a written judgement stating that everything that has been done to limit his authority is thoroughly illegal and akin to the most heinous treason.

He then turns south and heads towards London...

Mental Maps

Perhaps the craziest journey I have ever undertaken was this one, in the late summer of '89 along the Rio San Pedro from El Naranjo towards Tenosique in Mexico.

I'm not going to recount it again in any detail, but tracking it today on Google Maps led to some novel reflections.

Back then, we had no map, no fully-formed big picture mental image as we moved along. Or maybe it was the medium-sized image that was missing.

So, arriving in El Naranjo we had no real concept of where it was in relation to where we were going. There was a border post with a Customs office in a shack, so we must basically be on the frontier, I then assumed.

Prior to each trip to Belize I had visited Stanford's Maps in Covent Garden where, stashed away in a big drawer at the rear, one could find massive folding aviation maps of that nation, marking the key townships and some of the features of the terrain, and these proved useful...but in Guatemala we were basically operating blind.

There was nothing in the guidebooks, because there weren't really any. Guatemala was best covered, via a page or two, oddly enough, in the South American handbook, and none of its maps were of any use here.

This attempt to reach the ruins of Palenque by exiting 'the top' of Guatemala began as a dare.

Someone, the sort of someone who regarded themselves as a living gatekeeper of local knowledge, had coldly informed us that it wouldn't be possible, that we should in fact believe the imaginary guidebook when it said one needed to commence this trek from the southern highlands, NW along the Panamerican Highway and up into southern Chiapas. Attempting the Petén route was soon going to make us feel like Lope de Aguirre etc etc.

What amazes me now is how willing I was back then to undertake such an expedition through what was essentially an active war zone with the absolute bare minimum of information, either prior-acquired or real time. I didn't yet speak Spanish either. Nowadays I have become completely Google Maps dependent, even inside rather straightforwardly laid out small towns.

V asked me once 'how did you even know where to start?' and I honestly couldn't answer that one. There has to have been some word of mouth, but whose mouth? My travelling companion was just as much in the dark as I was. I think perhaps a Texan archaeologist in Belize had mentioned El Naranjo to us and so we'd jumped on a Bluebird bus at Santa Elena that was displaying that name above the windscreen. Simples.

I have fond memories of the ride along the San Pedro, in a kind of motorised, long wooden canoe. We'd equipped ourselves with a bag of Gallos. (The road route and the new border post actually on the border at El Ceibo would appear later on, just after the Millennium.)

Less fond are the memories of Tenosique, the nearest substantial Mexican town, beside the Río Usumascinta. Maybe one day I will return to see if it is still as weird, but probably not via the same eastern approach!

The Tourism Whirlpool

“Vandals in sandals” was how the Consul memorably referred to tourists in Under the Volcano.

Perhaps the definitive text on how this Vandal invasion tends to pan out each time, is R. W. Butler’s The Concept of a Tourist Area Cycle Evolution: Implications for Management of Resources (1980). One wonders whether Wetback at INGUAT has read it.

Butler identified a set of stages, each one leading inexorably to the next...

1) The Exploration Phase > a small group of visitors show up. There are almost no facilities specifically catering for their needs. Transportation, and much else, is rudimentary. They depart or assimilate.

2) The Involvement Phase > word of mouth has increased the numbers and locals have spotted an opportunity to provide a range of new services.

3) The Development Phase > well-funded and well-organised groups, sometimes from outside the country, but almost always from outside the specific location, start to muscle in on the market, displacing the pioneers.

4) The Consolidation Phase > tourism becomes the dominant part of the local economy and people involved in the sector now outnumber everybody else. (A subset of locals and longer-term assimilated outlanders enters the increasingly ‘Pissed Off’ phase.)

5) The Stagnation Phase > a peak has been attained and there are all kinds of associated environmental and social issues emerging, along with unsettling economic distortions across the community.

Of this particular phase Butler noted, “The area will have a well-established image but it will no longer be in fashion.” Nostalgia has become chronic, seemingly endemic even amongst comparative newcomers.

Tulum might spring to mind here, but has lately hastened toiwards...

6) The Decline Phase > the writing is on the wall and some of the existing facilities attempt to swerve back to catering for locals or the more permanent kind of outsiders with apartment blocks, gated communities and retiree ghettos.

This is God’s Waiting Room on almost every level; terminal. Yet for a select few there is an available epilogue, a Rejuvination, more like the undead state than a whole new phase of life. (Some of Britain’s old seaside resorts achieved this transition by pitching to niches: Tech in Bournemouth, Gay in Brighton.)

I think most of us can quickly spot which phase any given destination in Central America is currently experiencing.

Though the world has changed a bit overall in other ways since 1980, and I might add some additional (or perhaps just intermediate) phases to the cycle.

Such as ‘Influencer Phase’.

Influencers are tourists who want to be taken for travellers, and they are unquestionably the very worst kind of vandals in sandals.

Their role is to arrive at a place that has already hit one of the later phases and act like the Explorer Phase is still chugging along nicely and to use their social media platforms to propagate this illusion.

I think I first became properly aware of this subculture back at the end of the last decade when I was on a minivan in Oaxaca state.

Many of my fellow 'travellers' were dressed like the pioneering explorers of old, but you could immediately tell that neither physically nor intellectually were they in any manner equipped for the journey.

With a grimace they were enduring its arduousness solely because of the selfie op they anticipated at its conclusion.

The shuttle had to stop several times so that they could be sick.

Saint Johnny Foreigner?

 

Well, for a start...yes, I can believe the Guardian published this. 

But the issue here for me is that I cannot quite work out whether the historical illiteracy is genuine or somehow put on.

And it's not just the name checks here for Turkey and Palestine. It's the failure to address why George was chosen as the patron saint of England c1350, effectively usurping card-carrying 'native' martyr and hero St Edmund (an East Anglian murdered by Danes, who probably had no real concept of England anyway.)

George was not picked because of any physical connection to the British Isles, but because he was then supposed to best represent a set of trans-civilisational values which on the domestic front went under the banner of 'Chivalric' and on the foreign policy plane as 'Crusading'.

He is thus the totem of an enduring us and them divide, Good vs Evil, but perhaps specifically Christian virtues perceived as the metric of good versus pagan and heathen ways perceived as the essence of all that is bad. (There was of course no GB News to get this message across back then.)

Mocking St George's modern adherents this way today, the Guardian either doesn't know this, or does not want to know it. They appear to be blocking their minds to the symbolism, as if that alone will be enough to make them appear more rational than the flag wavers.

Yet I suspect that the people who now march behind George's banner are, on some levels at least, aware of this ancient payload, and therefore the newspaper's attempt to paint them as ignorant and silly (which they may otherwise be, of course) is in this instance, some way off the mark and not really a winning gesture in the debate. It's all bit 'you hate foreigners, but your saint was himself a foreigner, haha'.

There's one more intriguing little component to the relationship of this outsider with his adopted nation, with perhaps a dollop or two of lasting relevance.

By 1350 the English had become used to having far flung foreign superheroes imposed upon them by the dominant culture across the channel, starting, one might say, with Jesus Himself.

After conquest and colonisation by a French-speaking version of continental civilisation in 1066, this process was amplified, as the local language and identity were actively suppressed, and alternative, more Anglo-Saxon legends, like that of Alfred, seriously underplayed.

King Arthur attained the status he did in the early Middle Ages precisely because he was NOT English.

So St George fit the pattern, but the pattern was in transition.

The Hundred Years War was in progress and for the first time many of the knights lining up against their French counterparts could speak English...and reportedly enjoyed doing so, especially when any Frenchies were nearby.

So as well as representing a set of Christian, chivalric ideals, St George also came to oversee a kind of cultural reunification of the ruling elites with the masses of England, in clear opposition to the other lot on the other side of the channel e.g. proper nationhood, with its own set of us and them narratives: "Cry God for Harry, England and St George!"

Invaders be invaders...

History works on the basis of chosen identity not DNA, inevitably, because for most of history nobody knew about DNA. 

It’s why the Battle of Hastings in 1066 was between Anglo-Saxons and an invading army of Frenchmen, even if it wasn’t, not really. 

It’s why Obama is an African American and not any other variety of American. 

It’s why so called Palestinians are Arabs, because they tell us they are. (And, if they then also claim to be indigenous to their current location, we need to call them out for trying to have their cake and eat it.)

And thus, even if the fanciful notion that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were Palestinians appeals to you, in spite of the fact that the timelines make it impossible that they might have self-identified as such, the one thing they absolutely could not have been was Arabs. 

Indeed, if you are the sort of person inclined to regard people of European descent in places like the Americas and Australasia as inhabitants of stolen land, then so too are the Palestinian Arabs in the so called West Bank. This is not something you should be permitted to play both ways for reasons of political convenience. 

Invaders be invaders. And we are all of us invaders, one way or another. You possibly need to drop your sanctimonious and frankly moronic historical polarities and start trying to think about how people in general could be convinced to live harmoniously without them.

Nothing good or bad that happened in the past becomes less good or bad over time. There is no virtue (or indeed vice) in temporal proximity. Every one of our deceased historical ancestors is equally dead. It's a level playing field.

An idea containing unthinkables...

Earlier this week BBC Mundo published an article about the brave resistance of the people of Gaza in the face of invasion by an army led by Alexander the Great. Fascinating as it was, rather like the recent Metro piece on the 'cultural appropriation' of Hummus, one could sense the underlying determination to distract us from the one historical narrative that the hyper-liberals seem hyper-determined to suppress at all costs, that of Arab theocratic colonialism. 

For those of us who long for peace in the Near East (not least for the peace and quiet that this might engender) it seems evident that the realisation of Palestinian Arab national aspirations will be a prerequisite for longer-term concord. 

Yet these national aspirations, such as they are, have become bound up with the idea of Palestine, itself a composite of the aforementioned unmentionable historical narrative, indeed a version of it in modern, radicalised format, and thus so infused with both Jihadist extremism, anti-westernism and antisemitism, it is truly hard to see right now how they might be realised any time soon without feeding the fascist beast, so to speak. 

And the worst part is of course that this rather toxic supremacist idea has fostered a mirror image of itself within Israel, such that a nation which was essentially tolerant and socialist for much of its early history has adopted a virulently defensive posture comprising its own undeniably supremacist gestures. 

This has of course only enhanced the fundamental incompatibility at the heart of the conflict, and even if some territorial solution could be found along the lines that the majority of European bien pensants have long hoped for, there is an unwillingness on their part to acknowledge that the idea of Palestine contains additional incompatibilities with the formalised collective fictions which currently prevail in the Arab and wider Islamic world, and that the Jews and their doggedly-defended civic rights are really not the sole problem here. 

Many of those who currently self-bamboozle with the idea of Palestine are out there calling out the worst effects of Israel's 'self-defence', often mis-appropriating historically-specific and highly-loaded terms like Apartheid and Holocaust, and one is inclined to surmise that they do so to a large extent in order not to have to pause to consider that their own central idea promises all these supremacist side-effects in a radically purer form: genocide, ethnic cleansing, discrimination, gangsterism and state-sponsored evils of the more obvious varieties.

To appreciate what a sovereign Palestinian state might portend, one only has to consider the already marginalised and oppressed state of several highly vulnerable minority communities in Gaza: LGBTQ+, facing intimidation and worse, Christians, facing forced conversion and a pressure to leave, and black Palestinians, descendants of the African slaves that the Ottomans kept in to the 20th century (another stream of history that the mists have enveloped) who face all kinds of systemic racism and exclusion and are predominantly concentrated in a Gaza City neighbourhood sometimes referred to as al-Abeed, “the slaves.” 

Indeed anyone who rushes to denigrate Israel as an 'Apartheid state' should pause to ponder the fuller implications of From the river to the sea, Palestine will be 'FREE'. 

Today the 'Nakba' is primarily used to refer to the displacement and ethnic cleansing of Arabs by Israel after the 1948 war, or so says Wikipedia, at best an over-simplification of what actually happened, but at the time the tragedy referred to was not the loss of land, but the cosmic shame of failing to wipe out the 'zionist entity'. 

And the fact that a greater number of Jews were simultaneously ethnically-cleansed from locations around the nearby Islamic world is yet another unmentionable in progressive circles today. 

The displaced Palestinians, most of whom were complicit in a failed attempt at radical ethnic cleansing in 1948, were 'rewarded' with permanent, heritable refugee status. The displaced Jews' equivalent reward was, in effect, Israel. Neither have had anywhere else to go since the Arabs' ill-advised attempt to bypass the UN compromise. 

Even if the competing supremacisms are now somehow suppressed and the Palestinians accept a territorial compromise, simultaneously surrendering that seriously problematic 'right of return' (as once did those many millions of Germans shunted lastingly westwards at the end of WWII), there would remain the matter of how they would treat the Jews of Judea, a continual presence in that particular geographic space since both it and they acquired the name. 

One is inclined to think that this population would end up being lumped in legally with the so-called settlers, and their eventual fate marked by the merest of shrugs by the 'international community'. Though the zombie-progressives would surely cheer on a successful 'de-colonisation' event with guttural enthusiasm. 

]

(With regard to Elica's last point in the text with the white background, I'll add that the most gobsmackingly racist society I have ever encountered on my travels is socialist Cuba, where people of predominantly African descent have long been formally excluded from certain sections of the economy and where one constantly hears racist tropes being openly shared in 'polite' conversation.)   

Together (2025)

Starring an actual married couple (rather like Eyes Wide Shut) Together is definitely memorable, and 'ooooh' on many levels, but also frustrating, because the ways it might have been improved are obvious.

Some of this might be chalked up to budget constraints, but there are weaknesses in the written treatment of connections between the body horror and the underlying thematic elements: relationships, gender, life goals and so on.

It also needs one or two extra cast members. Never was a movie more in need of one of those talky French dinner party scenes.

A fork in the road...

 

This infographic, currently doing the rounds, is rather succinctly emblematic of the sheer exuberance of the ignorance, bigotry and overall ethical confusion that has taken hold of the 'Free Palestine' cult...to its obvious detriment.

RFK, most documented genocide, I know, I know, but of all ‘the issues which matter’ here, the one that sticks out is smack in the middle: HAS INDIGENOUS CUISINE.

I’m a big fan of Iranian food and it does indeed belong to one of the most distinctive culinary traditions in the region. But Persia, just like the part of the Levant we nowadays refer to as Israel, was conquered and colonised by Arabs, and so the food in modern Iran bears witness to an exchange. Dolma (stuffed veg) for example, originated as the Arabian dish Mahshi yet, on the other hand, the Arabs themselves had not previously been consuming much rice or saffron before they invaded this ancient land.

Over on the western side of this expansion, given the complex history of the peoples and the rise and fall of several imperial systems before the arrival of Islam, eating habits were always a blend of influences.

Today’s Israel is inhabited by a veritable mix of peoples. 25% of citizens are non-Jewish: Palestinian Arabs, Druze, Bedouin and Christians in the main. The majority of the other 75% are non-Azkenazy, in other words they belong to the Middle Eastern or Mediterranean heritage groups. If the food they are eating is not ‘indigenous’, where did it come from? (Are they all just eating pizza like the citizens of Antigua?)

Is a taco ‘indigenous cuisine’?

It is an interesting question because the most famous variant — al pastor — was effectively introduced to Mexico by Levantine Orthodox Christians fleeing Islamic persecution in what we know today as Lebanon.

Across Mesoamerica, as today in Israel and the wider Levant, key ingredients and techniques remain from ancient times, yet Castilian colonisers, themselves carrying a fairly recent history of Islamic subjugation, brought a range of items with them which are absolutely essential to Mexican cuisine today: beef, chicken, cheese, rice, wheat, garlic, onions, plus various fruits like citrus.

30% of Israelis are of Azkenazi heritage, which means they bring some Eastern European delights to the party, like bagels. These are clearly no more ‘indigenous’ to Israel than any kind of wheat-based bread is here in Guatemala, but so what, and how thick do you have to be to make some sort of basically racist political point out of it?

It’s possibly also worth mentioning Beta Israel, the roughly 160,000 Israeli Jews of Ethiopian origin. I’m going to take a punt here and assume that the food they eat at home is in some significant ways different to that of other Israelis, reflecting their distinct geographical history. It’s probably ‘indigenous’ to their unique ethnic sub-culture, if not to Israel itself.

Should the Pro Pals hold this against them I wonder?

(Google to the rescue — Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jewish) cuisine is characterized by its use of spices, stews (wot), and injera, a sourdough flatbread. While sharing many similarities with Ethiopian cuisine overall, certain dishes and practices are distinct. For example, Beta Israel do not eat raw meat dishes like kitfo and gored gored. They also observe kashrut (Jewish dietary laws), which influences their food preparation and consumption.)

Blame Game

The vast majority of positions people are taking regarding the conflict in the Middle East are basically silly and unhelpful.

One way I could illustrate this is to take each of them as they come and rework them into interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror.

So, Bono, for example, would be carefully trying to split blame between the bad boys of the Old Regime and the over-enthusiastic and over-committed newcomers.

This might seem like a more moderate and reasonable position than the one typically adopted by those who will instinctively suggest that the toffs had it coming or even ‘what actual evidence is there of guillotine usage?’ 

But historians are unlikely to be much impressed with either approach.

One thing you learn about bloody revolution is that the blame game essentially makes you an armchair participant and hobbles any attempt at serious analysis.

The October 7 pogrom started this new phase of the war just as the stormings of the Bastile and Winter Palace respectively started the two most famous European revolutions. Neither event is a self-contained explanation, but too often today ‘context’ is used more as a tool for suppressing sophisticated understanding rather than furthering it.

Deep-seated conflicts and radical upheavals in state power come about as a consequence of complex interactions between individuals, groups and the ideas which flow between and around them, plus a range of often peculiar, contingent circumstances, political, economic and social, which transcend — and ought to transcend — our ability to simplistically moralise about them.