Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel 1st Edition

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning investigative journalist whose insight and integrity I trust, and I don't really trust all that many people.
I put off reading this book for quite a while, even for two months after purchasing it sat on my bookcase waiting its inevitable turn. I knew that I would face emotional and ethical conflicts from its contents, this is not a book to be read lightly.
Simply put, "Goliath" is powerful, much like the mythical character that is its namesake. It is a brutal reminder of the uncivilized origins of Judaism and not only through the state of Israel, but in its influence around the world as Judaism's barbaric offspring continue daily to assault reason.
You find that Israel learned too well the cruelties of ethnic and religious persecution from the Spanish Inquisition, Russian pogroms, Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa, and pre-Civil Rights United States and used these places as blueprints for their new ethno-state starting in 1947.
The tactics employed daily throughout the occupied territories are eerily reminiscent of these historic mistakes and its tactics and propaganda are now being reimported to the United States in particular.
I now find myself reluctant to call Israel a nation as that lends an air of respectability to what has be perpetrated. Interestingly, utilizing largely American taxpayer money to foster the narrative of "civilization", "democracy" and "progress", a ethno-fascist regime has grown in place of these ideals.
The culture of Israel shamelessly continues to use the atrocities of The Holocaust as a propaganda smokescreen to obscure the behavior that so well mirrors the villains of that same history. I never thought I would feel a sense of shame in participating in the opening ceremonies of my local Holocaust Museum as a child, but the quoted words and fanatical behavior of Israelis definitely pushes me in that direction. As I continued to read of the daily desecration of that memory in the name of ethnic nationalism I must say that I am disgusted.
"Goliath" covers some of the background of the Israeli colonial territories in the Arabic Peninsula as far back as 1947, but mainly focuses on the era of 1990-2012, with an emphasis on the 5 year period Blumenthal spent witnessing history in Israel firsthand. He came to know its internal politics and struggles intimately as this was made easier for him due to his Jewish ethnic background. From besieged Gazan villages to the halls of the increasingly fascist Knesset, Blumenthal probes the striated layers of Isreali-Palestinian social constructs to the best of his ability.
I won't go into too much detail, but I must say that this book will turn your stomach one way or another. It may also turn your views on the subject as well, whether you actually care for human rights, international integrity and democratic ideals or whether you have fallen for the Israeli propaganda that the revisionists have sold to the world and US in particular. You will not forget this document, ever.
If Israel is truly the shining beacon of democracy in the middle-east, then religious ethno-nationalism should be its mortal enemy. However, in this troubled land, that enemy has been embraced with open arms and panicked heart, a slap in the face to all Holocaust victims and survivors, Jewish or otherwise, alike.
"Tapuz, a website for Israelis living abroad, hosted a 2005 forum on the topic of leaving Israel. According to the site's administrator, Limor Abis, the most frequently cited explanation for why they left was, 'The question is not why we left, but why it took so long to do so'." (Chapter 73, "Exodus")
This discussion is not over, unfortunately in many ways it is still just warming up and beginning to burn through the fog of state and religiously-sanctioned propaganda shrouding this small territory. All it may take for this fascist kettle to boil over is one more rash action. Whether the action of a government with no standing Constitution after 70 years, its ghetto-living minority, or of their neighbors, the cousins of the ghetto-living minority. If you wish to be prepared to understand this nearly inevitable day, this book is an excellent place to begin your education.

I must confess, there is every reason under the blooming sun for me to read, and to thoroughly enjoy my reading of, this book, but so far, after more than one year of owning it, I have only dipped my toes in it. Why? The very last thing I want is some excuse to hate Israel more than I already do, for the barbaric treatment that it has doled out since 1948 to the Palestinians. I have been to Israel a number of times. I am an American Jew; someone who not only takes great pride in being Jewish, but one who considers himself Jewish before being American. I have read widely in the literature about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict-by now the slow annihilation of the Palestinian people by a rabidly chauvinistic Israeli government, and its mobilized ranks of racist, Zionist fanatics, as well as an infrastructure dedicated to wiping the historic memory of the Palestinians, and Israeli respect for their human and civil rights, off the page. For many years I taught college-level courses on the Conflict and on Middle Eastern history. Blumenthal offers my views to be confirmed, in spades. Again, if you want a rather hostile look at Israeli government and society, in its treatment of the Palestinians, this book is recommended. If you are a confirmed Zionist, or support the existence of the State of Israel in its present form, I do not at all recommend this book.

Recommend anyone who wants to learn more about Israel and Palestinians read it. Very revealing.

GREAT BOOK! The whole Truth and NOTHING But The TrutH ABOut WHATS REALLY GOING ON IN PALESTINE!!!!!

Max Blumenthal is great. He speaks the truth, that's all you need to know

In the Middle East, another war of biblical proportions is taking place. It is the war between Judaism and democracy. This book tells us that the most famous outcome in the bible, the tale of David slaying Goliath, is now being reversed. This time around, David (Israeli democracy), loses, and loses badly to the Middle East's new conservative run, nuclear-armed Goliath of Israeli neocolonialism, tribalism and racism.

Whatever else this book does, it forces us to face straight up, one of our worse hidden fears about that besieged little middle eastern nation: Right before our eyes, little brother Israel, has become the 21st Century's first full-bred racist and fascist state. But how is it that in our life time, the collective guilt and heart-felt dreams for a Jewish homeland come true -- one free of the evils of the kind of racism and anti-Semitism imposed on European Jewry by Adolph Hitler, has now been turned completely on its head?

This author tells us that it is happening because Israeli's demographic and racist fears about neighboring Arabs has metastasized into wanton crimes and embarrassing politically motivated violence against the Palestinians and other Arabs under Israel's occupation. The Israeli predilection for violence, coupled with justifications rooted in visceral racial fears, is systematically turning Israel into a modern-day race-based dystopia.

To his credit, the author allows the facts to speak for themselves, and they do so loudly and clearly. But even so, this book still begs the overriding question laid bare in its subtext: Could the reality on the ground, that turns the dreams of a free and democratic Israel into the only living ghost of Hitler really be as stark and as morally contradictory as they are portrayed in this book? I believe his answer and the answer given by any reasonable reader will be yes they are. And further, I believe that the reader will also conclude that Israel's moral flip-flop from "defending democracy" to "defending Jewish racial purity," is truly one of biblical proportions, and one that portends only bad things in the future for Israel and for the International Community.

In ten groups of themes that make up "73-on the ground vignettes," this author, applies his considerable skills as a reporter to tell us vignette-by-vignette how Israel, with a hefty amount of U.S. political, PR and financial support, has turned itself from a nation that redeemed itself through its own self-creation, literally rising from the ashes of the horrors of Hitler's gas chambers, into today's embarrassing, living-modern-day proxy for Nazism itself: Israel has become a nuclear-armed international bully and outlaw that is growing dangerously close to repeating some of the worse atrocities committed against the Jewish people during Hitler's reign?

These are not scripts that anyone could make up, nor are they facts that an historian could have predicted, nor can they be dismissed out of hand as just more anti-Israeli propaganda. Sadly, they have an unmistakable coherence and ring of truth that all point in the same direction. So much so that after reading this book, a reasonable reader will surely agree that the 73 vignettes presented here represent a scary but objective snatch of the reality existing on the ground in Israel today. It is a reality that portends a very dark future for Israel, one that, if the U.S. is not careful, could also rub off on it.
Just look at the way Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has silenced all progressive voices in Israel and has led a vanguard of proto-fascist thugs into the Knesset, and how he has been bent on goading Obama into another ill-fated war on Israel's behalf, by attacking Iran?

Rather than rehearse the book's vignettes, all full of unbelievably gory details, I will end by summarizing the logic of Benjamin Netanyahu's (who refers to himself as "King Bibi") neo-Colonialism: Netanyahu's vision for Israel is as a regional neocolonial power forever maintaining itself in a steady-state of unending low-intensity warfare with its enemies, all non-Jewish Arabs. He has called on Israeli Jewish citizens to "steel" themselves for the long-haul, for this unending battle for the purity of Jewish blood, a long period of "one-way peace" in which Israel alone continues to enjoy relative peace, prosperity and tranquility, while Palestinian urban centers are systematically, bombed, uprooted and decimated. It is a combination of "in place" "Judaification" and "ethnic cleansing" -- clearly a 21st Century variant of Hitler's own lebenstraum.

When the author's 73 vignettes are laid end-to-end they form an unmistakable pattern, a recognizable arc that is not unfamiliar to history or to contemporary international relations. It is the same arc that animated Hitler and that was used as justification for the genocide in Rwanda:When "manufactured" images of racial fears are coupled with myths of racial purity, invariably they will begin to clash with national ideals of democracy, liberty and justice. When this happens, a cheap kind of visceral nationalism rooted in a collective subconscious based on racial imperatives is created and nurtured. These race-based imperatives that constantly animate the society are always insatiable. As a result, the national cause reduces to a kind of cheap, simple-minded "We-versus-Them" mindset, a collective paranoia, the main feature of which is that the national consciousness is thereafter shrouded in a haze of moral blindness. It is the kind of haze behind which any and all national sins can be rationalized, justified and hidden -- all in the name of, and in defense of, a mythical racial purity.

In Netanyahu's newly created immoral universe, Israeli citizenship demands "as a given" and as a precondition, that moral norms be sacrificed on the altar of Jewish racial purity. Patriotism itself (reflected in the often heard Israeli cry "no loyalty no Citizenship") is made a hostage to, and subordinate to, racist ideals -- the same as was the case in Nazi Germany. There is one thing that this book makes clear and it is that there is no such thing as being an Israeli citizen without being a Jew?

During Hitler's reign, the same twisted racist morality was placed in the service of dreams of a "Juden-free Germany," ruled by a pure Ayran race. Today in Israel it is placed in service of a dream of an Arab-free ethnically-cleansed, pure Jew run, Israel.

The Netanyahu government thus has used the old Hitler canard of whipping up racial fears to animate public sentiment in order to justify his new-colonial policies, their bloated military budgets and "planned" destructive frenzies to be continuously perpetrated against "the Palestinian Other" -- mostly with U.S. purchased weapons. At the same time, he continues to skillfully use AIPAC and CNN as his American PR mouthpieces. All the better to keep hidden from outsiders, the racial realities on the ground in Israel.

The problem with Netanyahu's devious plan is that instead of being survival-extending for Israel, in the end it is just as likely to be survival-ending, and ending in a maximally self-destructive way.

The fact that many American politicians know what is going on in Israel, and yet will not tell the American people, nor will they discontinue their support of or denounce Netanyahu's self-destructive racist policies, is almost as shameful as what Israel is doing to itself and to those under its occupation. This book will end once and for all any speculation about Israeli intentions about peace in the Middle East.

John Kerry, you can come home now? Israel will self-destruct on its own accord, time-table and in exactly the same way that Hitler did: pursuing an unattainable racist dream. Five stars