Goliath: Life and Loathing In Greater Israel

[RLENT]

I am roughly 120 twenty pages into Max Blumenthal's revealing expose (named in the thread title above) that draws back the curtain on the present nature and current situation of society in the State of Israel. All I can say at this point is I am finding it to be ... profoundly disturbing ...

It describes a complete Bizzaro World racist, apartheid freakshow - bordering on psychosis - with undeniable elements of fascism, that most Americans would probably find difficult to comprehend, let alone acknowledge as truly existing in fact. And yet we never really hear a word about the real scene on the ground in Israel in the MSM ...

An interview by Joshua Frank of Max Blumenthal gives a taste of the book and the raging controversy that surrounds it:

JANUARY 02, 2014

An Interview with Max Blumenthal
Inside Israel’s Apartheid State

by JOSHUA FRANK
Journalist Max Blumenthal’s latest book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel has been one of the most controversial and enlightening books of 2013. It’s a fearless, no holds barred take on life in Israel and the brutal occupation of Palestine. Needless t0 say, not all have been happy with Blumenthal’s take on Israeli culture and politics. I recently caught up with Max to discuss his new book and the backlash he’s received from the pro-Israel coterie. -JF

Joshua Frank: Max, seems your latest book Goliath has really caused a stir among right-wing Zionists and other liberal defenders of Israel, like your Nation colleague Eric Alterman. What’s all the fuss about?

Max Blumenthal: Goliath is the first on-the ground, journalistic portrait of the real Israel that has been whitewashed and covered up by the mainstream American media. The book reveals a society overrun with extremism, with open racism emitting from the highest levels of government, inspiring anti-Arab and anti-African riots from the West Bank to Tel Aviv while the siege of Gaza deepens. Many of the pivotal events I detailed at length through background research and first-hand reporting were buried or ignored by the New York Times and have scarcely been examined even in progressive American media.

The atmosphere I captured in the pages of Goliath is the one that veteran Israelis from Uri Avnery to former Maariv editor Amnon Danker to former Haaretz editor-in-chief David Landau have described in no uncertain terms as fascistic. Through the experience of almost a year on the ground in Israel-Palestine, I was able to capture the feeling of the atmosphere they described and to bring it to life on the pages of my book. Obviously, pro-Israel zealots were not terribly happy about this.

There was also the fact that I did not write Goliath with concern for Israel’s anguished “soul,” or with any abiding belief in the absolute necessity of a Jewish state; that I did not advance the fantastical notion that the Israel that exists behind the 1949 Armistice Lines is a vibrant democracy. And I refused to pay lip service to the idea that the Palestinians were partially at fault for their own dispossession — that “both sides” were responsible for the crisis. This is what you are expected to do if you wish to cater to Jewish-American opinion from a liberal perspective. I refused to take this approach not only because I reject the Zionist narrative but because it is deeply dishonest and actually requires intellectual contortions about the present and the willfull distortion of the past. That my book managed to gain traction despite my rejection of the established liberal Zionist narrative framework was another reason so many viewed it as threatening.

I presented Israel without sentimentalism or nostalgia, painting a portrait of a state that controls all people between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea under a regime of ethnic separation with no national borders. Some of those who have grown accustomed to the hackeneyed liberal Zionist narrative found my factual portrayal of Israeli society deeply discomfiting. And neocon types were absolutely infuriated that I was able to generate publicity and attention. But of all those who have attempted to destroy my book, none have been able to challenge it on its merits or disprove any substantial facts in it. None.

JF: What is it about criticism of Israel that creates such a fervor?

MB: If Zionism had succeeded in building a democratic state that enjoyed normal relations with its neighbors, the international hasbara apparatus that exists to crush criticism of Israel and propagandize on behalf the Jewish state would be superfluous. Unfortunately, this was never the point of the Zionist movement. Israel is the product of a settler-colonial project that requires perpetual campaign of violent demographic engineering against the wishes of the indigenous Palestinian population. The project continues before our very eyes in the Negev Desert, the South Hebron Hills, and along the electrified walls of the Gaza ghetto. Unless you are some kind of bellicose nationalist, there is not much about it to be proud of.

In the post-Oslo Israel that I bring to life on the pages of Goliath, Jewish Israeli society has doubled down on its anachronistic settler-colonial project, entering what could be described as the “neo-Zionist” era. With no hope of achieving international legitimacy and little desire to do so, Israel must call on its partisans across the globe to crush political opposition by all means necessary.

The looming terminal stage of Zionism will be marked by crusades to crush the free speech rights of citizens inside Israel and across the West — to restrict their very ability to organize for the rights of Palestinians. Former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren reflected the increasingly anti-democratic undercurrent of pro-Israel advocacy when he took to Politico to call on Congress to pass laws illegalizing Palestine solidarity activism and punishing Americans for protesting Israeli officials in public forums. 11 students at UC-Irvine have already faced a criminal prosecution for protesting Oren for literally two minuntes during a public event. So the campaign to block me from discussing my book at venues across the United States was of a part with the McCarthyite tactics that form the heart of today’s pro-Israel playbook.

JF: The Obama administration, and in particular Secretary of State John Kerry, are set to present a “framework agreement” to jumpstart new Israel/Palestine peace negotiations. What can we expect to come from this?

MB: We can’t expect much, at least in the sense that Kerry has made the Palestinian Authority an offer it can’t accept. The details of Kerry’s plan are slowly leaking out, and they amount to transforming the already ghettoized West Bank into another Gaza Strip. Kerry is advancing Netanyahu’s main demands, including the erection of a gigantic wall along the Jordanian border that would imprison Palestinians from the east while the Israeli separation wall confines them from the west. Israeli Army Radio has reported that “the Palestinians will be imprisoned between the two fences” – that is theactual language the network used.

Additionally, the US will authorize Israel to patrol the West Bank’s airspace with drones on a 24/7 basis as it already does with the Gaza Strip. Israeli troops will be allowed to maintain a presence on the Palestinian border with Jordan for an indefinite period, but even this is not enough for the Israelis. Israel’s Minister of Defense Moshe Ya’alon is leading a chorus of outrage from cabinet level officials who demand that Israel receive near-permanent control of the Jordan Valley – that’s where much of the West Bank’s arable land is. And the younger, up-and-coming legislators from Netanyahu’s party – the future of Likud – may soon introduce proposals in the Knesset to annex the Jordan Valley.

General John Allen, the retired former commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, has helped devise the arrangements that will consolidate Israel’s control over the West Bank. It is safe to assume that the plan will be a major boon to US and Israeli private security contractors, who will supply the “early warning” systems that will spy on the Palestinians permanently confined to this dystopic, Gazafied Panopticon. Unsurprisingly, Kerry has not faced a single tough question about his plan from the American media. Instead, he was recentlyhailed by Jeffrey Goldberg for his “uncomplicated affection for the promise of Zionism.”

JF: In Goliath you write a lot about realities on the ground in Israel. What were some of the more surprising ones you discovered?

MB: There was no particular incident or event that I was not prepared for when I began the fieldwork for the book. What shocked me was the degree to which Israel was able to fuse Western-style neo-liberalism so seamlessly with settler-colonial apartheid. In Goliath, I described drinking at a bar in a hip neighborhood in Tel Aviv, staring at the nearby luxury “ghost tower” inhabited by wealthy American Jews like Marty Peretz, and listening to fusion jazz emanate from an adjacent club with my t-shirt still saturated in the residue of teargas from the demonstration against the separation wall I attended earlier in the day. That is when it became clear to me how much the Tel Aviv bubble required the Iron Wall.

I am filled with memories like this. In one instance, I was sitting in a macrobiotic/vegan restaurant in central Jerusalem with a French tourist who was staying at my flat during the summer of 2010. The tourist grabbed a French-Israeli magazine on a nearby table, flipped to a random page, and began translating an article to me about the dangers Jewish women could face if they dated Arab men – how the Arab male would charm you before he took you captive in his village and beat you into submission. The feeling of having a Jim Crow-style tract read to me in a French accent while I noshed on a quinoa, tempeh and kale platter in a restaurant packed with vegan settlers summed up the whole experience of Israel for me. I was living life in a tech-savvy, gay-friendly apartheid state where oiled up soldier girls in skimpy bikinis tanned themselves to an orange hue on balmy beaches a few kilometers up the coast from a besieged ghetto filled with food insecure refugees. Each day I spent in Israel, I was staring straight at the West’s most vulgar image of itself.

JF: Norman Finkelstein has written about Israel’s vulgar image and the exploitation of the Holocaust, which you expand on in Goliath. Can you talk a little about what this means, exactly?

MB: The state of Israel demands the near-total participation of its Jewish citizenry in the project of controlling and dominating Palestinians. This is not a particularly appealing endeavor, especially for the youth who are forced to conscript in the military at age 18. So the military must find ways to help young people overcome their natural skepticism about army life, while the main institutions of the Jewish state work to cultivate unanimous reverence for the military. Thus an occupying, neocolonial, nuclearized army has been re-branded as the last line of defense against Jewish extermination, with soldier boys and girls just out of high school marched into the West Bank to dominate the angry Arabs cast as the spiritual heirs of Nazi Germany. Without intense indoctrination, an Israeli soldier might fall into a personal crisis the moment he has to rip a Palestinian adolescent from his bed and drags him to a dank cell in the middle of the night. Of course, many do, and wind up offering harrowing testimonies to groups like Breaking the Silence. But the truly frightening thing is that so many do not. They return to daily life without any impulse towards critical reflection.

The cradle-to-grave process of indoctrination has helped provide Israelis with more than the motivation to participate in army life. It has allowed them the psychological space they need to accept and justify the vast desert internment camps the state has constructed for African asylum seekers deemed a demographic threat and identified by numbers, not names; the concrete separation wall erected to prevent what Netanyahu called “demographic spillover,” and, of course, the existence of the Gaza ghetto. The depressing impact of Holocaust exploitation in Israeli life was reflected in a recent poll in which 57.2 percent of Israeli Jews declared support for the idea that “the main lesson of the Holocaust is that we can only rely on ourselves and must not to hesitate to use force without taking the opinion of other nations into consideration.”

(Article continues in post below)

 

[RLENT]

Continued from post above:

JF: How is this perpetuated in the Israeli school system?

MB: The Israeli school system is intimately linked to the military, and in an unprecedented way since Netanyahu’s election in 2009. In Goliath, I documented how Jewish Israeli children have been indoctrinated into the culture of militarism and fear as early as age four, describing how pre-schoolers in the city of Holon were lined up before a chalkboard and forced to ponder the following question: “Who wants to kill us?” I detailed a high school field trip in which teens were taken to an army base to shoot at simulated targets wearing Palestinian kuffiyehs. And I explained the role of the Holocaust in all of this, writing about the trips that 25% of Israeli high schoolers have taken to Auschwitz a year before they enter the military.

These Holocaust tours, called “The March of the Living,” are explicitly designed by the Israeli Ministry of Education to produce more nationalistic attitudes among Jewish youth and a more favorable impression of the army. In his devastating documentary about the exploitation of anti-Semitism, Defamation, the Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir accompanied a group of Israeli students to Auschwitz. He showed how after a week of unrelenting indoctrination, the students were reduced to tears of rage, with some declaring that they wanted to go out and find some Nazis to kill. Of course, the Nazis are all dead, or maybe a few of them had their brains frozen in cryogenics labs somewhere in the jungles of Paraguay. So all that is left to do is lash out at those explicitly designated by Netanyahu and other societal leaders as the Nazis’ heirs: the Palestinians.

JF: Let’s go back to Eric Alterman for a minute. In a recent Salon.com interview you say you knew he’d freak out about the book. How’d you know?

MB: I knew that the initial impulse of pro-Israel writers would be to willfully ignore my boook if they could not poke any significant holes in the facts I introduced, and they have proven that they couldn’t. Having spent time around The Nation, I was aware of Eric Alterman’s reputation as a kind of pro-Israel enforcer, and also someone who was full of shpilkes, almost to a comical degree. He seemed like the perfect candidate to break the boycott on Goliath. So when I learned that Alterman was getting exercised about Goliath’s publication, I made sure he got a note from my publisher informing him that I was eager for his opinion. And I told my publishers to send copies to pro-Israel writers like Liel Liebowitz of Tablet, to Commentary, and to Sohrab Ahmari, a neocon book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. I was operating on the assumption that these characters would revert to type with just a little prompting.

Like clockwork, Alterman returned with a vitriolic, error laden attack on my book in The Nation that was immediately torn to shreds by everyone from Ali Gharib to Chip Manekin to Corey Robin to Phan Nguyen. Alterman must be a serious glutton for punishment, because he followed up with eight more blundering attacks on me, each more embarrassing then the next.

He also participated in a smear campaign against me outside The Nation that relied on warmongering neocons to promote his attacks. As for the others, Ahmari publicly boasted that he threw the review copies of my books in the trash rather than review them, while Liebowitz called my book “a work of fiction” after confirming its most devastating sections as accurate – “generally factually accurate,” as Alterman said of the book. If I ever meet Alterman, I hope I have a box of chocolates on me. It is the least I can do to thank him for his role in getting my book to a second printing.

JF: What other backlash has ensued as a result of Goliath?

MB: I was informed that a local chapter of AIPAC demanded that the Dallas Council on World Affairs cancel the talk they were hosting for me. A far-right Islamophobic, anti-gay group called the Florida Family Association attempted to shut down a Council on American Islamic Relations banquet I was keynoting. Alan Dershowitz denounced me as “anti-American” and basically condemned my parents for conceiving me. The Free Beacon attacked my parents for hosting a book party at their home for me, trying to pressure the Clintons cut all ties with my father, who had worked in the Clinton White House. Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith commissioned a comprehensively false smear piece about my book and my father’s relationship to the Clintons.

John Podhoretz (who has accused me of “******* the ***** of Jew killers”) and red diaper neocon Ron Radosh attempted to pressure the New America Foundation into canceling my talk at their offices in DC. The pro-Israel group StandWithUs attempted to force a community center to cancel an American Muslims for Palestine event I participated in, labeling me and other speakers “extremists” in their letter to the center. Finally, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, just named me the 9th biggest anti-Semite of 2013. Like so many other Jews, I strive to be at the top of my field, so I was really disappointed to find myself so low on this Islamophobic outfit’s blacklist. Next year, I promise to try harder and aim for number one.

JF: Were these the type of reactions you expected would happen for reporting on Israel as you saw it?

MB: Once the Zionist freakout began, the sub-mental smears were predictable. As I said, if they could make a positive case for the Jewish state, they would do so. But they can’t. And so they are left with nothing but risible propaganda and McCarthyite tactics. I suppose it was an honor that John Podhoretz, the son of the man who smeared Hannah Arendt for writing Eichmann in Jerusalem, wound up labeling Goliath,“the year’s most disgusting book.”

Though mainstream media has yet to acknowledge the existence of Goliath, the book has received extremely favorable reviews from unexpected quarters. Most notably, James Fallows, the Atlantic Magazine’s editor-in-chief, returned with a vigorous defense of my work after attending my talk at the New America Foundation and actually reading Goliath. Fallows dared to take an objective look at my journalism and this is the conclusion he came to:

“Blumenthal has made a sobering prima facie case that there are extreme forces to be aware of, and reckoned with more fully that American discourse usually does. And, very importantly, his doing so is no more ‘anti-Israel,’ let alone anti-Semitic, than The Shame of the Cities and The Jungle and The Grapes of Wrath were anti-American for pointing out extremes and abuses in American society.”

Finally, the response to my book across the country has been nothing short of incredible. With absolutely no mainstream coverage, sizable, extremely energized crowds in cities across America have appeared almost spontaneously to hear me discuss my work. The audiences are diverse, with people of all ages, including hardcore activists and new faces who are generally curious about the issue, but they are all united in their disgust at the repression both inside Israel-Palestine and in the US. Something is happening out there and I truly believe a tipping point is approaching. At the very least, we can conclude that the gatekeepers are rapidly weakening.

As long as the status quo in Israel-Palestine persists, all of the trends detailed in Goliath will intensify. And since 1967, the US has been the primary guarantor of the status quo. So when I speak to audiences around the country, I encourage them to give up all hope on their elected representatives and societal elites doing anything decent or courageous to challenge Israeli apartheid. After all, these are the same people who have enabled apartheid to retrench itself across this country, either by actively driving inequality or through cynical negotiations with the corporate forces behind it. If Americans want to see genuine change in the Holy Land, they can participate in grassroots, Palestinian-led campaigns like the BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanction) movement. This movement is growing rapidly and sending shockwaves through the pro-Israel establishment. And that’s a very good thing considering that Palestinians may have few effective tactics left to resist a project aimed at their absolute dispossession.

Joshua Frank is Managing Editor of CounterPunch and the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, and of Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is now available in Kindle format. He can be reached at [email protected].

Inside Israel's Apartheid State » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

 

[iceroadtrucker]

Tell it like it is Reliant.

The said Goliath above got the United States into WW1 with Germany
The said Goliath above got the United States into WW2 With Germany
The said Goliath above will most likely get the United States into WW3 as well..\
You can bet your BOOTS on it.
I realy dont give 2 hoots if any one agrees with me or disagrees with the above. \
Truth is once the Ball is set in motion I got a feeling WW3 will be played out here in the Untied States. Much like the Orginial Movie RED DAWN.
I can only Suggest Keep your Self in Shape and if your not then Get your self in Shape. Learn to Live off the land You might as well familiarize yourself with the Subj. Weapons Ie Guns, Bows, Snares ect. Or you can forget about the whole thing and go on some crazy TV show about Trucking Couples and Be a TV Star. Now the latter sounds like fun if your a couple and are into trucking. But if your the couple picked You can Rest assured all your loads will be Gravy Train Runs from the Company your driving for. Reality Check. Scottie 2 too Beam up. Energize!!

 

[RLENT]

C-SPAN has just broadcast their coverage of Max Blumenthal's talk @ the National Press Club on his new book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.

Accordingly, it is now available on their website for viewing at the link below. The program length is 1 hour and 21 minutes, and includes questions from the audience:

Book Discussion on [Goliath] - C-SPAN Video Library

 

[muttly]

#Maxischipofftheoldblock
Max Blumenthal is an American journalist, author, and blogger and radical activist that regularly produces fallacious writings on Israeli-Palestinian affairs. Formerly, Blumenthal wrote for the Daily Beast*and*Al Akhbar. Blumenthal is the author of two books: The author of*Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party*(2009),*and*Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel*(2013). Blumenthal graduated*the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 with a degree in history.

Blumenthal's latest grossly anti-Israel book,*Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel,*has received criticism even from outspoken critics of Israel. Indeed, Eric Alterman, of the*The Nation, has dubbed Blumenthals book the*“‘I Hate Israel’ Handbook.” Alterman remarked that he*“did not expect it to be remotely as awful as it is…It is no exaggeration to say that this book could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed).” In the*Jewish Daily Forward, J.J. Goldberg*writes on Blumenthal's book saying that, "Blumenthal doesn’t know the history and ignores the inconvenient bits of the present, which is one reason his book has flopped. Worse, he thinks he knows all he needs to know, and just what readers need to know. He describes Israel’s assault on Gaza without telling of the thousands of rockets bombarding Negev towns for years beforehand. He touchingly recounts the 2004 assassination of Hamas founder Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi but doesn’t mention the hundreds of Israelis killed by Rantissi’s suicide bombers. The Palestinians are guilty of nothing. Israel’s actions are entirely unprovoked, motivated by pure racism."

Blumenthal is highly outspoken in his criticism on Israel, and has been involved in a number of*controversies. For example, Blumenthal allegedly misquoted*Karen Greenberg, the director of the Fordham School of Law's Center on National Security. In his article,*How Israeli Occupation Forces, Bahraini Monarchy Guards Trained US Police for Coordinated Crackdown on 'occupy'*Protests,*Blumenthal quotes Greenberg as accusing Israel of training American interrogators on torture, writing that she said that,*"After 9/11 we reached out to the Israelis on many fronts and one of those was torture...there's been a huge downside to taking our cue from the Israelis and now we're going to spread that into the fabrics of everyday American life?"*Greenberg has explicitly stated that she said no such thing, but Blumenthal refuses to correct his story.*

Blumenthal also claimed on his blog that Benjamin Netanyahu supported the September 11 attacks. Blumenthal crafted a headline in 2011 that read:*Top Republicans to welcome Netanyahu, who called 9-11 attacks “very good,” said anti-US terror helps Israel.*This headline deliberately distorted*the facts. What had occurred is the following: In response to a question about the 9/11 attacks, and its effect on the US-Israel relationship,*Netanyahu had expressed that US-Israel relations would improve. It goes without saying that Netanyahu never said that the attacks were "very good." It is more than likely that Bloomethal is well aware of this fact, but carried on with the publication nonetheless.*

Learn more here:

Blumenthal Defends a Distorted Quote with Another Misquote

Where Max Blumenthal and CAMERA Disagree

The Nation: Book Review

The Jewish Daily Forward:*Max Blumenthal's 'Goliath' Is Anti-Israel Book That Makes Even Anti-Zionists Blush*

The Atlantic on inaccuracies by Max Blumenthal

Campus Figures: Max Blumenthal

 

[RLENT]

#Maxischipofftheoldblock
Max Blumenthal is an American journalist, author, and blogger and radical activist that regularly produces fallacious writings on Israeli-Palestinian affairs.

Hmmm ... such as ?

Are we to have any examples of these fallacious writings ?

Or just take CAMERA's (a pro-Israel organization) word on it ?

Formerly, Blumenthal wrote for the Daily Beast*and*Al Akhbar. Blumenthal is the author of two books: The author of*Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party*(2009),

Yup - a New York Times best-seller ... made it up to No. 15:

*and*Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel*(2013). Blumenthal graduated*the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 with a degree in history. Blumenthal's latest grossly anti-Israel book,*Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel,*has received criticism even from outspoken critics of Israel.

Well ... there are "critics" ... and then there are critics ...

One has to ask them themselves: Just exactly how critical can a person be, when they are a member of The Tribe, and a Zionist ?

Indeed, Eric Alterman, of the*The Nation, has dubbed Blumenthals book the*“‘I Hate Israel’ Handbook.” Alterman remarked that he*“did not expect it to be remotely as awful as it is … It is no exaggeration to say that this book could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed).”

Yes ... and Alterman, who is considered to be a bit of an enforcer of what is appropriate of in terms of criticism of Israel and the Israel-Palestine dialog, also admitted - in his own review - that Goliath was "technically, factually accurate" ...

Oh really ?

So apparently, Alterman apparently just didn't like the tone ... or something ...

Alterman then went on to 8 or 9 more absurd follow-ups to his original review after being called out by a number of critics that just hammered him over his "review" and his subsequent responses to critics ... eventually turning himself into a complete laughingstock and the object of total derision ...

Basically Alterman got trolled by Blumenthal and Alterman bit - hook line and sinker ... here's how it went down:

Max Blumenthal: I knew Alterman would freak out

"Goliath" author tells Salon about life in Israel lobby's cross hairs and the logic of the Jewish state (Updated)

NATASHA LENNARD

Max Blumenthal

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

Thousands of protesters worldwide joined in a “Day of Rage” late last week to decry Israel’s despicable Prawer Plan, a government policy (wildly underreported in this country) to destroy 35 Arab villages in the Negev desert, which will lead to the forced displacement of up to 70,000 Bedouin Israeli citizens.

The plan is further vindication of Max Blumenthal’s central thesis in his new book,“Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel,” namely that Israel’s raison d’etat is the maintenance and expansion of a colonial ethnocracy — the expansion of the Jewish Israeli demographic, the containment of all others.

While Israeli government policies like aggressive West Bank expansion, the Gaza occupation, the warehousing of non-Jewish Israeli Africans and the Prawer Plan fiercely bear out Blumenthal’s point, the author has, since Goliath’s publication, run the gamut of predictably fervid criticism from Israel’s attack dogs within the U.S. commentariat.

But Max Blumenthal is not surprised. The 35-year-old author and journalist knew what he was getting into with “Goliath.” It’s a bold, personal and unapologetic book. Its central thesis — that the very logic of the Israeli state is essentially that of a settler colonial ethnocracy — was, as Blumenthal well knew, bound to draw some flustered censure. On cue, following “Goliath’s” publication, Eric Alterman has written a whopping nine critical pieces (many of them ad hominem in nature) against Blumenthal; BuzzFeed’s Rosie Graycompiled a decrial of Blumenthal; Alan Dershowitz wants Blumenthal’s father, Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to President Clinton (and Salon alum), to be personally denounced by the Clintons for his son’s book.

The younger Blumenthal was ready for the onslaught, which, he says, has played out with absolute predictability. While en route to his parents’ D.C. home (sorry, Mr. Dershowitz, Sid has yet to disavow his progeny), Blumenthal spoke on the phone to Salon about life in the Israel lobby’s cross hairs, and the unique challenges and importance of critiquing the Israeli government’s sugar-coated state narratives, buoyed by its unquestioning supporters in the U.S. The conversation has been lightly condensed for brevity.

“Goliath” does not just tell a story, or a series of stories, it offers a very specific critique of the very logic and ideology undergirding the Israeli state. Was this a hypothesis that you held before immersing yourself in Israeli life and politics to research for “Goliath,” or did your conclusions about Israel emerge while reporting?

My understanding of Israeli society was not upended or altered in any significant way by my immersion in it. I understood what I was getting into when I embarked on my first extended reporting trip to Israel and Palestine in May 2009. This was right after Israel elected the most right-wing government in its history. I decided to do this book because I had been following the situation for years and watching the religious nationalist and extremist trends in Israel and understanding its roots — the foundational structure of the state as a settler colonial ethnocracy. What spurred me to do this book was not some sort of epiphany or sudden understanding of what Israel had become but just a moment in history that, to me, marked the culmination of a transitional period into a permanent right-wing majority in Israel and a permanent right-wing future.

That moment was the national elections carried out during Operation Cast Lead — the three-week massacre of the Gaza civilian population. The assault and the elections propelled one another. You had a defense minister from the Labor Party competing against extreme right-wingers like Avigdor Lieberman, who was openly campaigning to strip Palestinian citizens of Israel of their citizenship rights. There is pretty clear evidence that defense minister at the time, Ehud Barak was running up the body count in Gaza in order to win over the Russian vote and outflank Lieberman as the tough guy. Tzipi Livni, who was running as a centrist, declared “our troops in the Gaza strip behaved like hooligans, which I demanded of them.”

“Goliath” highlights a number of highly specific examples of explicitly racist rhetoric employed by key Israeli politicians. These comments rarely get air in the U.S. media, despite being part of very public Israeli politicking.

That was another reason I decided to do this book. The rhetoric of mainstream Israeli politicians, which is bellicose, paranoid and racist, is so rarely conveyed to the American public. Meanwhile the issue of Palestinian incitement is a constant feature of mainstream American reporting on Palestinian society. There was a comment that formed the title of a chapter in my book, “This belongs to the white man.” And that chapter has been criticized or assailed by liberals like Eric Alterman and J.J. Goldberg. Of course, they don’t address the content of the chapter, and if they did it would probably throw them into some sort of personal existential crisis since their identity as Jews revolves around the ethnocratic state of Israel. And that chapter title is inspired by a quote by Eli Yishai, who served as interior minister from 2009 to 2013, and what he said was that, “these black Africans” — refering to the 60,000 non-Jewish African asylum-seekers living in Israel — “are Muslims who do not recognize that this country belongs to us, the white man.”

It’s an interesting comment given that he is of Tunisian descent and would not be considered white in the U.S. but, as a Jew, it marks him as part of the ethnic overclass and in his own mind he’s therefore “white.” That comment was printed but buried in the bottom of a New York Times article by Isabel Kershner on page A15 or A23 about a massive race riot in Tel Aviv on May 23, 2012, against the African population in which literally hundreds of vandals and thugs smashed the storefronts of African-owned businesses, attacked any African they found in the street and smashed African cars. That story was completely whitewashed in the U.S. — this was a riot encouraged from the highest level of Israeli government after a rally in South Tel Aviv attended by thousands where major Israeli government figures called Africans “a cancer in Israel’s body” and the crowd chanted, “******, ****** you’re a son of a *****.” So there is a clear effort, a concerted effort by American correspondents in Jerusalem, to conceal from the public the horror — and the real horrific state of Israel society — the Moloch that Israel has become. What I sought to do with my book was merely fill the void and show Americans the Israel that Israelis know.

You’ve mentioned that the backlash you’ve received from writers like Alterman and Goldberg did not surprise you. Can you expand a little bit on the shape of the attacks you’ve received and in what ways they have and have not been predictable?

I fully expected the playbook of the pro-Israel propagandists to unfold as follows. First, they would attempt to ignore me and hope the book wouldn’t generate any attention, so that it would just go away, then there would be a freakout. I predicted two months before the book came out that if the Nation gave it any attention (I predicted this in a Real News Interview with Paul Jay two months before the book came out) that Eric Alterman would freak out. That’s exactly what happened. So I expected that.

Alterman broke the Jewish boycott on my book and what he attempted to do was to portray me as an unreliable narrator who didn’t understand Israel and got the facts and the history wrong. But he was dealt a really harsh blow when people like [Charles] Manekin, who is a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland, or Corey Robin at Brooklyn College, who is Alterman’s colleague, tore his argument apart and showed that it was he who got all the facts wrong. So Alterman was flailing; he had been pretty much knocked through the ropes. [editor's note: an accusation initially published here could not be corroborated.] This culminated with BuzzFeed’s completely false smear piece, which should be retracted on the basis of its factual errors, by Rosie Gray.

Then Free Beacon attacked my father for hosting a party for me. I attempted to alert them to the fact that my mother ordered pizza for the book party, which means that she provided material support for delegitimization!

Alan Dershowitz called on the Clintons to denounce my father, since he worked in the White House with Bill Clinton, and he called on my father to denounce me. Of course, none of that happened. The final stage of this terminal phase was to point to a review on [white supremacist] David Duke’s website that was positive about my book, which is just the most pathetic and desperate tactic ever. So there are the three phases: ignore, undermine and smear. And then when all three of those failed, anything goes. So now we are in the anything goes phase. And I don’t know what that means but there are people who are less privileged than me who have experienced the devastating consequences for their work to counter Israeli human rights abuses.

A number of writers and theorists — philosopher Judith Butler comes to mind — have written about the dangers of conflating critiques of Israel or Zionism with anti-Semitism. As Butler wrote last year, “[T]he Jewish people extend beyond the state of Israel and the ideology of political Zionism. The two cannot be equated. Honestly, what can really be said about ‘the Jewish people’ as a whole? Is it not a lamentable stereotype to make large generalizations about all Jews, and to presume they all share the same political commitments?”

You have been smeared as anti-Semitic and extremist for your critiques of Israel. What do you think is the effect (social, cultural, political, ideological) of charging Israel’s critics with anti-Semitism?

I wrote this book at a time when these charges had been weakened to the point where it’s difficult to actually single out real anti-Semites and marginalize them because the pro-Israel has cheapened anti-Semitism to such a degree that it no longer contains the discursive power it used to.
The only way to avoid this kind of backlash is to not report accurately on Israeli society or to use the tried and true and trite hackneyed frames to frame this critique in terms of your concern for the soul of Israel, which means that you are a lover of the Jewish state and its soul. I don’t believe that any state with its own interests and policies has a soul. Israel is not a person and I sought to address it without sentimentality or nostalgia or ideological blindness. This is why the book is being attacked because it is just an unvarnished view of Israel at its most extreme. I address the roots of the crisis in the foundational structure of the state as an exclusively Jewish entity that strives for ethnic purity through violent demographic engineering, most of which was carried out by the Labor wing, by the left wing of the Zionist movement. It’s because of that that I have deprived myself of any allies with the American Zionist movement, which is very influential in our politics and our media, and they are seeking to castigate me and I think they’re shocked at how much support I have received in online media and social media and on the road. My talks are heavily attended and I’m getting strong support from fellow Jews. The audience at my talks are heavily Jewish. Many people describe themselves to me as recovering Zionists. So it’s just a red line that is set for you and when you cross it and start to really address the reality as I experienced it without this mock sensitivity to a state that is engaged in apartheid and settler colonialism, you can expect a certain level of castigation. I guess what has surprised me the most: how weak the attacks have been and how strong the support has been. I think we are witnessing a sea change of opinion in this country, even if we may not have reached a tipping point.

I think that people a lot of people who have been engaged with this issue for a long period have been waiting for a book like this to be written by someone who is a foreign correspondent but who has the Jewish privilege to be able to access all areas controlled by Israel. A Palestinian-American journalist could not have written this book.

(Article continues at link below)
​

Max Blumenthal: I knew Alterman would freak out - Salon.com

 

[RLENT]

For example, Blumenthal allegedly misquoted Karen Greenberg, the director of the Fordham School of Law's Center on National Security. ... Greenberg has explicitly stated that she said no such thing, but Blumenthal refuses to correct his story.

Well no, not exactly ...

Nice attempt at hasbara via smear by CAMERA tho' ...

MAX BLUMENTHAL RESPONDS TO SLEAZE CAMPAIGN WAGED BY ATLANTIC MONTHLY’S EX-DETENTION CAMP GUARD JEFFREY GOLDBERG…AND WHY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY’S SLEAZE REMINDS US OF PUTIN’S RUSSIA…

​

By Max Blumenthal and Mark Ames

​

From Detention Camp guard to neocon troll,
you’ve come a long way, baby!​

(Updated below) Last Friday, The eXiled published Max Blumenthal’s devastating exposé (cross-posted from Al-Akhbar) on the intimate ties between the Israeli occupation security forces, the Bahraini monarchy’s democracy-crushing goons, and police forces across the USA responsible for brutally suppressing the Occupy protests over the past several weeks. As one might expect, the trolls are already out for blood. The Atlantic Monthly‘s former Israeli Detention Camp guard, Cpl. Jeffrey Goldberg, today posted a sleaze-hit on Blumenthal’s article.

Since there are no facts in the story that can be called into question, the way they’re going after Blumenthal is by getting one of the sources to deny her quotes (or sort of deny, it’s hard to even tell now) which she had given to Blumenthal in an on the record interview. This would not be the first time a highly damaging and contentious bit of reporting, which contained no factual errors, was attacked this way: Ron Suskind, for example, suffered similar attacks in which quoted sources denied their quotes, in a campaign designed to undermine the damaging impact of his book Confidence Men.

As Blumenthal writes in response to Cpl. Jeffrey Goldberg [see below], what’s ridiculous is that Karen Greenberg, the source who is now backing away from her on-the-record quotes, has already published similar statements in her own work. Moreover, Greenberg’s quotes are used as evidence in the article’s reporting; they are “color” for the facts meticulously documented. Take out Karen Greenberg’s quotes, and nothing about the article changes.Since this campaign is being spearheaded by Jeffrey Goldberg, a former Detention Camp guard and neocon hack who’s proven over and over how unreliable he is (Goldberg recently blamed the Norway massacre on Muslims; he also “reported” that there were ”extensive ties” between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and attacked journalists who questioned the rationale for invading Iraq), we call bull****. In fact, we’re disgusted by this, because we’ve dealt with these same sleazy, vicious attacks ourselves, both in Russia, and here, by Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic Monthly no less.

Doing real, independent, investigative journalism is difficult enough in this country, and speaking truth to power can be dangerous to one’s career. That alone can scare away people from reporting, publishing or even lending a quote to a investigative article that might upset people. But there’s something especially cowardly about the way American journalists and editors and their sources shy away from taking those risks for the truth, when the threat here in America isn’t torture and death as it is in Russia, but rather, the threat here is measured in career ladder rungs. I have worked in countries where people risk getting murdered for reporting the truth; The eXile itself was shut down by The Kremlin following accusations that our paper was guilty of “extremism,” the codeword used to crack down on all dissent (read the US Embassy wikileaked cables on the Kremlin attack on The eXile). People like former Detention Camp guard Jeffrey Goldberg would’ve fit right in with those four Kremlin agents who raided The eXile in 2008.

As our readers know, Jeffrey Goldberg’s comrades at The Atlantic Monthly specialize in corruption and hit pieces disguised as journalism. Just six months after the Kremlin forced me out of Russia, Goldberg’s colleague at the Atlantic Monthly, Megan McArdle, led a sleazy campaign to discredit a scoop I co-wrote with Yasha Levine exposing the Tea Party as an Astroturf campaign backed by the Koch brothers and FreedomWorks. But the article’s impact was blunted thanks to Megan McArdle, who waged a campaign to discredit our scoop. As it turned out, McArdle’s husband worked for FreedomWorks, doing Astroturf projects, while Megan is practically a daughter to the Kochs (or if not that, she does do parties for the Kochs). Here’s what McArdle wrote in defense of her beloved Koch brothers: ”astroturfing doesn’t really seem like their [the Kochs'] style. I’ve seen Koch in action at private events, and though I’ll respect the privacy, I’ll say that even in the company of other like-minded rich people, he displayed rather a mania for honest dealing.”

Indeed. McArdle’s husband now works at the Koch-founded libertarian Reason magazine; this past October, Megan McArdle was listed as the emcee for a Charles Koch gala dinner, featuring Master Koch himself as the main speaker.

Corruption and cronyism are the meat and potatoes of the Atlantic Monthly business model. Which is exactly why we stand by Max Blumenthal’s honest, independent, and professional reporting. If anyone gives a **** about the degradation and decline of this country, they too will stand up for Blumenthal and let Goldberg and the Atlantic Monthly know what they think about this.

Here is Max Blumenthal’s response to Cpl. Jeffrey Goldberg, first posted on Al-Akhbar and reprinted here with permission of the author:

After Al Akhbar English published my report, “The Israelification of American domestic security,” [1] the usual group of anonymous ultra-Zionist trolls began attacking me on Twitter. They didn’t challenge any of the facts I brought forth in my piece — they couldn’t because they were all true — but instead questioned whether Karen Greenberg, who I quoted, would have said such things to me about Israeli influence on American torture policy.

The Twitter trolls apparently enlisted former Israeli prison guard [2] and current online occupation enforcer [3] Jeffrey Goldberg as their captain. Goldberg went to Greenberg directly and asked her if I quoted her accurately (Goldberg called the full-time pro-Israel trolls “Goldblog readers”). After being prodded, Greenberg claimed [4] to Goldberg, “I never made such a statement. I’ve never seen any proof of this.”

Greenberg has been a friend of mine and has helped me in the past. In 2009, for instance, she hosted me for a discussion [5] at her former Center for Law and Security at NYU of my book, “Republican Gomorrah.”
I am not sure why Greenberg would deny the statement she made to me on the record unless she was intimidated by Goldberg and the pro-Israel forces he represents. But the salient fact is that I did quote her accurately, word for word, and I stand by my reporting.

Greenberg’s statement to me did not come out of the blue: A book she co-authored with Joshua Dratel, “The Road to Abu Ghraib,” contains a lengthy section [6] on Israeli court rulings authorizing torture and torture techniques refined by the Shin Bet. In a subsequent article, Greenberg and Dratel proposed questions [7] for Donald Rumsfeld about torture. Here is one: “Did your discussions of torture involve consulting experts in Israel..?”

I imagine that Greenberg wishes she had made a more qualified statement to me on Israel and torture, or that she did not make such a remark at all. But she said what she said and I quoted her accurately.
It is revealing that Goldberg chose to focus on an issue that was at best peripheral to my story, which dealt entirely with the subject of Israeli training of American local and federal law enforcement. It appears that he was unable to challenge my factual reporting, or to deal with the uncomfortable substance of it, so he sought to change the subject.
​

Update: Looks like the source, Karen Greenberg, is changing her story about her quotes. First, let’s go back to what Greenberg told Jeffrey Goldberg:

“I never made such a statement. I’ve never seen any proof of this.”
​

In other words, Ms. Greenberg claims to Jeffrey Goldberg that Blumenthal made up the words. It’s cut and dry: she never said those words that Blumenthal printed. Period.

But she told a different story to Adam Sewrer of Mother Jones. Instead of accusing Blumenthal of inaccurately quoting her words, she claims that his story reported the “sense of the quote” inaccurately. Here is what Greenberg told Mother Jones:

“What I remembered saying to him was you ought to look at these allegations that others have made about Israeli training in interrogation techniques. I did not intend to assert these allegations as fact…the entire sense of the quote is inaccurate.”
​

So which one is it, Ms. Greenberg? First, she tells Jeffrey Goldberg that she “never made such a statement” and therefore Blumenthal flat-out lied. No two ways about it. Then Greenberg tells another reporter that Blumenthal’s mistake wasn’t that she “never made such a statement” but rather, that, like, you know, the sense of the quote was inaccurate–you dig, baby?

By changing her story like this, Karen Greenberg has thoroughly discredited herself. If you can’t even get your own story straight, how the Hell can a Jeffrey Goldberg use you to discredit someone else?

This looks like a classic case of a squeamish source who regretted giving the interview, tried to backpedal, but lacks the sort of experience in dissembling and sleaze that a real pro, a Jeffrey Goldberg for example, has down like a motor function.

Sorry Jeffrey, back to the sleaze-drawingboard for you.

NEW UPDATE:

(UPDATE NEW: Adam Sewrer just admitted on twitter that he published this anonymous, bizarre smear-attack on Max Blumenthal in 2008, under the name “dnA,” accusing Max of being a racist for not supporting Obama. Why does Mother Jones pay a smear-monkey creep like this, who smears fellow-leftists and uses Mother Jones to continue a bizarre personal campaign against Max Blumenthal?)

It turns out that Adam Sewrer has a quote-mashing problem. He can’t decide what Karen Greenberg actually told him, and his erratic behavior suggests he still doesn’t have a clue. At last count, Adam Serwer offered four different versions of the same quote by Karen Greenberg—each quote he insists is word-for-word reported directly, yet each of the four quotes posted or tweeted out is different. Not sure about you folks out there, but I’ve never conducted an interview according to quantum laws, in which one quote exists as four different quotes at the same time.

All of this came out in a brief Twitter exchange, part of which we are reposting here for your reading pleasure:

(The rest of the Twitter exchange can be found at the link below)​

Max Blumenthal Responds To Sleaze Campaign Waged By Atlantic Monthly's Ex-Detention Camp Guard Jeffrey Goldberg And Why The Atlantic Monthly's Sleaze Reminds Us Of Putin's Russia? - By Max Blumenthal and Mark Ames - The eXiled

​

 

[RLENT]

Max's response to JJ Goldberg - who cowardly declined to debate Max one on one (Alterman also declined to go one on one with Max ... but eventually said he he would ... if he was paid $10,000.00 plus expenses):

A Response to JJ Goldberg of the Forward

Leave a reply

Picking up where Eric Alterman left off, and defending his thousands of words of error-laden invective, JJ Goldberg of the Jewish Daily Forward has turned out an indignant non-review (see the latest Alterman flubs here) of my book that reveals its chapter titles but fails to discuss their contents. Goldberg warps the responses of Alterman’s many critics, failing to provide links, and concludes with a distorted account of an exchange I had with Ian Lustick, mangling my quotes to falsely to suggest I had demanded the mass departure of Jewish Israelis from historic Palestine. Goldberg might have once been a sharpshooter in the Israeli Border Police, but in his attempt to reinforce Alterman’s attacks, he badly misses the mark.

Echoing Alterman, Goldberg expresses outrage with the titles of the chapters in Goliath but makes no attempt to present what I actually wrote in them or why they are titled as they are. For instance, he bemoans the name of my chapter, “This Belongs To The White Man,” but does not mention that the title was merely a reference to the notorious statement by former Interior Minister Eli Yishai, who said the following about non-Jewish African asylum seekers in Israel: “Most of those people arriving here are Muslims, who think the country doesn’t belong to us, the white man.”

Ignoring the hard facts presented in Goliath, Goldberg has spent the years since Israel elected the most right-wing government in its history projecting his political wishful thinking onto the country’s pro-settler leadership, imagining everyone from Benjamin Netanyahu to Shaul Mofaz (check out this howler) as potential peacemakers, which is not unlike describing Rob Ford as the political future of Canada.

Goldberg has labored to sustain his trance-like optimism in the face of the reality of record settlement construction as well as other harsh realities. After the Egyptian military staged its coup, an act that has led the U.S. to cut military aid, Goldberg warned that any reduction in military aid to Egypt would “kill Mideast peace hopes,” writing that “America’s billion-dollar-plus annual aid package to Egypt does not exist for Egypt’s benefit, but for Israel’s.” Apart from this strange formulation, as though Egypt only exists for the U.S. as a function of his notion of what its policy should be toward Israel, he completely neglected to mention the U.S. at all, as though the U.S. has no independent interests or principles of our own at stake.

To clarify Goldberg’s distortions for readers of The Forward: Goldberg claims I did not “tell[] of the thousands of rockets bombarding Negev towns for years” before Operation Cast Lead. However, I wrote on the first page of my book that “Hamas’s armed wing…fired dozens of rockets” in November 2008.

Similarly, Goldberg claims I did not “mention the hundreds of Israelis killed by…suicide bombers.” In fact, I devoted an entire chapter of the book to Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a remarkable Israeli academic whose daughter, Smadar, was killed by a suicide bomber. I discuss at length her and her husband’s experience after their daughter’s murder and how they became two of their society’s more outspoken opponents of the Israeli occupation. I go on to detail Israeli society’s response to suicide bombings during the Second Intifada in my chapter, “The Big Quiet,” explaining how it influenced the rise of hafrada, or Israel’s policy of demographic separation.

Goldberg further takes issue with an exchange between Ian Lustick and me during an October 17 discussion of Goliath at the University of Pennsylvania. But, not providing the link to the video, he produced a badly mangled version of my remarks.

Here is the context to the exchange in question: Lustick had remarked that Israeli society could increasingly be described as “fascistic,” suggesting that Israel had possibly crossed a moral Rubicon, then asked me to take on the role of God and decide whether to destroy “Gomorrah,” even though there were some “good” people living inside it – people like the Israeli dissidents, critics and reformers I profile extensively in Goliath.

My response proposed a direction for preserving the presence of Jewish Israelis in a future Israel-Palestine while stripping away the violent, inhumane mechanisms of demographic engineering, endless dispossession and the walls that have pitted Israeli Jews against the Arab world. My prescription was essentially a rejection of Ehud Barak’s explicitly colonial view of Israel as a Europeanized “villa in the jungle.”

Philip Weiss of the Mondoweiss.com website transcribed parts of my answer and summarized the rest. Here is the relevant part of transcript, which Goldberg omitted. (The full exchange arrives around 38:00 in the video):

“As for the Jewish Israelis… These are Israelis who are attracted to Europe, who do not feel that they are part of the Arab world. And it’s that attraction to Europe, that manifestation of Herzl’s famous quote, that the Jewish state will be ‘a rampart of civilization against barbarism,’ which has led to the present crisis and the failure of Zionism. Because there is absolutely no way for Jewish people in Israel/Palestine to become indigenized under the present order, and that’s really what has to happen. You have to be willing to be a part of the Arab world, because you’re living in the Arab world. If you don’t, then you have to maintain this system and continue to harden the present system.”
​

My meaning is plain: That the walls must come down — the separation wall, the legal walls of ethnic discrimination, and the psychological walls — as a basis for true peace.

Goldberg claimed without evidence that “Lustick appear[ed] stunned,” when Lustick nodded in acknowledgement of my answer and did not express any perceptible displeasure; nor did he state any to me. In fact, what I said was intended to support what Lustick wrote in his recent essay on the “Two State Illusion” for the New York Times, Lustick offered a remarkably similar vision of an alternative future allowing Israeli Jews to live in peace in the Middle East; in which ultra-Orthodox Jews and Mizrahi Jews of Arab descent – groups routinely derided by liberal Zionists like Goldberg as retrograde and politically burdensome — could emerge as their society’s bridge builders, forging practical alliances with Palestinians:

“In such a radically new environment, secular Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank could ally with Tel Aviv’s post-Zionists, non-Jewish Russian-speaking immigrants, foreign workers and global-village Israeli entrepreneurs. Anti-nationalist ultra-Orthodox Jews might find common cause with Muslim traditionalists. Untethered to statist Zionism in a rapidly changing Middle East, Israelis whose families came from Arab countries might find new reasons to think of themselves not as ‘Eastern,’ but as Arab. Masses of downtrodden and exploited Muslim and Arab refugees, in Gaza, the West Bank and in Israel itself could see democracy, not Islam, as the solution for translating what they have (numbers) into what they want (rights and resources). Israeli Jews committed above all to settling throughout the greater Land of Israel may find arrangements based on a confederation, or a regional formula more attractive than narrow Israeli nationalism.”
​

I mentioned in my reply to Lustick that his question related to a debate that was raging among many of my leftist friends and acquaintances in Tel Aviv. As I detail in the final chapter of Goliath, “The Exodus Party,” a number of my human rights-minded Israel friends have chosen to exercise the secondary, “emergency” passports that provide multitudes of Ashkenazi Jewish Israelis with EU citizenship, and they have moved to places like Berlin and London. Then there are others, like the Israeli journalist Haggai Matar, who are seeking means of assimilating themselves into the wider culture of the Middle East.

Goldberg has claimed, “Outside the far-left and anti-Israel blogosphere, ‘Goliath’ has been ignored.” But it is Goldberg who has ignored reviews by figures like Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz’s military and political correspondent, and Akiva Eldar, the Israeli journalist and author who served as chief political columnist for Haaretz for 35 years — writers who could hardly be described as “anti-Israel.” Eldar wrote that, “a significant part of [Goliath’s] strength lies in the effect that is naturally created when a foreign correspondent describes the reality of your life and surroundings. Thus, as if from a bas relief, details are raised to which the local eye has become so accustomed that it no longer notices their existence.”

I hoped to engage Goldberg in a discussion about his critiques of my book and about the future of Israel-Palestine. Unfortunately, that debate will apparently not take place. When Atlantic editor Robert Wright invited Goldberg to engage with me on the online political debating forum Bloggingheads, Goldberg declined, as Alterman did before him.

 

[skyraider]

Sometimes it is easy to lose focus on old Isreal and the size of their neighbors.

Israel and New Jersey in the seat of your pants are about the same size: Israel is 8000 sq miles with a population of 7.9 million. I think the Nazis killed around 6 million of them in WW2.

New Jersey is about 8,730 square miles with a population of 8.8 million, and guess what, the Nazis did not kill many New Jerseyians in WW2. You can look it up if you want.

Jordan is 34,445 square miles and real close to Israel, population in Jordan,6.3 million.

Syria has 71,000 square miles and a population of 22 million.

Egypt has 386,000 square miles of land and a population of 80 million.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Israel is a little bitty spot in the road , like a dot. I really do not understand why folks pick on them as they as a people have been through enough.

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=jord...gl=us&ei=4t3NUrPJEorXkQfnlIHwCA&ved=0CKoBELYD

 

[RLENT]

Blumenthal also claimed on his blog that Benjamin Netanyahu supported the September 11 attacks. Blumenthal crafted a headline in 2011 that read:*Top Republicans to welcome Netanyahu, who called 9-11 attacks “very good,” said anti-US terror helps Israel.*This headline deliberately distorted*the facts. What had occurred is the following: In response to a question about the 9/11 attacks, and its effect on the US-Israel relationship,*Netanyahu had expressed that US-Israel relations would improve. It goes without saying that Netanyahu never said that the attacks were "very good." It is more than likely that Bloomethal is well aware of this fact, but carried on with the publication nonetheless.*

Oh the sheer horror of it !

Oh ... wait ... what's this?:

Report: Netanyahu says 9/11 terror attacks good for Israel

The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv on Wednesday reported that Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu told an audience at Bar Ilan university that the September 11, 2001 terror attacks had been beneficial for Israel.

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

Netanyahu reportedly made the comments during a conference at Bar-Ilan University on the division of Jerusalem as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians.

(Article continues at link below)

Report: Netanyahu says 9/11 terror attacks good for Israel Israel News | Haaretz

(BTW Mutt - thanks for posting the link to CAMERA on this one - it's where I got the link to the Haaretz article above - good job !)

 

[RLENT]

Sometimes it is easy to lose focus on old Isreal and the size of their neighbors.

Israel and New Jersey in the seat of your pants are about the same size: Israel is 8000 sq miles with a population of 7.9 million. I think the Nazis killed around 6 million of them in WW2.

No Israel didn't exist during WWII ... so the Nazis couldn't have killed any Israelis.

In any event, what relevance does the size of country have to do with whether or not it is conducting itself in accordance with international law ?

With whether or not it is committing war crimes ?

Committing human rights violations ?

New Jersey is about 8,730 square miles with a population of 8.8 million, and guess what, the Nazis did not kill many New Jerseyians in WW2. You can look it up if you want.

I suspect that the folks from New Jersey who lost family members and loved ones in WWII might see it a little different.

Israel is a little bitty spot in the road , like a dot. I really do not understand why folks pick on them as they as a people have been through enough.

This might imply that you need to become better informed about what exactly is going on Israel ...

Pick up a copy of Blumenthal's Goliath ... I guarantee that you'll see Israel in a whole new light.

As to "why folks pick on them" ... you do understand that the author of the book in question in this thread is, himself, Jewish don't you ?

Why do you think he might be inclined to be critical of Israel ?

Do you have any theories about that ?

 

[Brisco]

Max Blumenthal is an American journalist, author, and blogger and radical activist that regularly produces fallacious writings on Israeli-Palestinian affairs.

Times Five............

 

[RLENT]

Brisket,

R u even sure u know what a fallacy is ?

 

[skyraider]

No Israel didn't exist during WWII ... so the Nazis couldn't have killed any Israelis.

The following came from Wikipedia
Historical Israelites[edit]


The Merneptah stele. While alternative translations exist, the majority of biblical archeologists translate a set of hieroglyphs as "Israel", representing the first instance of the name Israel in the historical record.
The prevailing opinion today is that the Israelites, who eventually evolved into modern Jews and Samaritans, are an outgrowth of the indigenous Canaanites who had resided in the area since the 8th millennium BCE.[7] The name Israel first appears c. 1209 BCE, at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the very beginning of the period archaeologists and historians call Iron Age I, in an inscription of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah. The inscription is very brief and says simply: "Israel is laid waste and his seed is not". The hieroglyph accompanying the name "Israel" indicates that it refers to a people, most probably located in the highlands of Samaria.[8] Over the next two hundred years (the period of Iron Age I) the number of highland villages increased from 25 to over 300[9] and the settled population doubled to 40,000.[10] There is general agreement that the majority of the population living in these villages was of Canaanite origin.[9] By the 10th century BCE a rudimentary state had emerged in the north-central highlands,[11] and in the 9th century this became a kingdom. The kingdom was sometimes called Israel by its neighbours, but more frequently it was known as the "House (or Land) of Omri."[12] Settlement in the southern highlands was minimal from the 12th through the 10th centuries BCE, but a state began to emerge there in the 9th century,[13] and from 850 BCE onwards a series of inscriptions are evidence of a kingdom which its neighbours refer to as the "House of David."[14]

 

[RLENT]

The following came from Wikipedia

Be careful ... a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing ...

Once you eat of that tree (knowledge), you're required to walk all the way down the path. No closing or covering of the eyes allowed.

Historical Israelites

Irrelevant ... we aren't talking about "historical" Israelites (a thing that no longer exists) ... we're talking about the modern ones ... which did not exist prior to the declaration of the "state" of Israel's existence, on May 14, 1948.

BTW - did you know that it appears that at least roughly 50% of the modern Palestinians appear to be descendants of the original Hebrews ?

Ever hear of Israeli Tsvi Misinai ?

Or his Project_on_Palestinians ?

Tsvi Misinai claims that the majority of the Palestinian people—including those with Israeli citizenship or residency, known variously as Arab citizens of Israel, Arab Israelis, Israeli Arabs, including the Bedouin Arabs of Israel—are descendants of the ancient Hebrews, as most of the world's Jewish ethnic divisions are. Furthermore, he claims that at least half of them are quietly aware of this fact. ...

Tsvi Misinai validates his theory of the Hebrew origin of Palestinians on the basis of various findings in terms of historic-demographic, historic-geographic, national-territorial, genetic, behavioural-religious, nomenclature and linguistics, and Palestinian cultural and oral traditions. In his book Brother shall not lift sword against brother, he details numerous testimonies of their Jewish ancestry by Palestinians and Bedouins, and cites the anthropological studies conducted by Israel_Belkind, one of the organizers of the Bilu movement, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (both the first Prime Minister and the second President of Israel, respectively).

Misinai also cites the following three genetic studies as lending credence to his theory. Among the genetic studies referred to by him include recent genetic studies conducted by Professor Ariella Oppenheim of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on the male Y chromosome which revealed that the present day Jews and Palestinians represent modern descendants of a core population that lived in the area now constituting the state of Israel and the Palestinian territories, since prehistoric times.

In 2001, the Human Immunology magazine published a genetic study conducted by Prof. Antonio Arnez-Vilna, a Spanish researcher from the University of Complutense in Madrid, who discovered that the immune systems of the Jews and the Palestinians are extremely close to one another in a way that almost absolutely demonstrates a similar genetic identity.

Furthermore, a 2002 test by Tel Aviv University researchers, determined that only two groups in the world—Ashkenazi Jews and Palestinians were genetically susceptible to an inherited deafness syndrome.

If the above is true, then it would would mean that we, as a nation, are funding the dispossession, ethnic-cleansing, and slo-motion genocide of modern day descendants of the ancient Hebrews ... by their own brethren.

How will you answer up for that when you are called to account ... especially now that I've handed you the info ?

IOW: you're no longer unaware or ignorant of the possibility ... which makes you culpable, if you remain complicit.

 

[RLENT]

Ever hear of Israeli historian Schlomo Sand ?

Israeli Historian: Palestinians Are Biological Descendants of Bible's Jews

Bit of a conundrum ain't it ?

Possibly something one might not want to be on the wrong side of the eventual history of ...

 

[RLENT]

I'm now 300+ pages into Max Blumenthal's Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel ... and it's far worse (in terms of the reality reported) than I ever could have possibly imagined.

It's not at all hard to understand why this stuff doesn't get covered in the American Mainstream Media ... if Americans had just half a clue they would be aghast and thoroughly repulsed by it.

Racism pervades the entire society ... aimed at everything from black African refugees to Palestinians to "Arab Israelis" (aka Palestinians with Israeli citizenship) ... and even to Sephardic and Mirazhi Jews by their Ashkenazi (white European) Jewish brethren, who consider them to be trash, if not actually savages.

Kids are indoctrinated (by the state) from a very young age with this racism (racial superiority) and paranoia of anyone not Jewish (and even some that are) ... that results in an apparent inability to feel any empathy towards those that aren't part of the tribe ... and an attitude (and dramatization) of sadistic cruelty towards "the other" ...

Personal rights and individualism is always subservient to the collective and the state ... and for those non-Jewish citizens they are often non-existent.

It is an extremely disturbing look into a very dystopian Israeli society.

 

[RLENT]

Phan Nguyen's hilarious takedown of Eric (***clown-In-Training) Alterman's Goliath "review", Part One:

Eric Alterman on Palestine and Israel, part 1: The liberal Zionist dilemma

And Part Deux:

Eric Alterman reviews the latest 'Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club' selection (part 2)

There are links to three more critiques (by other authors) of Mr. Alterman's "skillz" (much lulz) embedded at the beginning of the second article linked above.

If you want some insight into use of logical fallacies (Brisket this means you) the above are quite entertaining.

 

[RLENT]

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher
than the heart can imagine.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

[Brisco]

Brisket,

R u even sure u know what a fallacy is ?

Of Course...........................

fal·la·cy
noun \ˈfa-lə-sē\

: a wrong belief : a false or mistaken idea

: the quality of being false or wrong

The "Author" of this article has a History of writing Fantasy Stories...........or Shooting Stories out of his Assss........................

And you JUMP all over this article like it really means something...........or has some sort of Importance to it.

Sheeeeeezzzz...................