Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

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This book is excoriating and worrying – packed with compelling detail that makes it hard to put down.Exposure to the impressions from his journey through the Land of Israel-Palestine might be outrageous, unsettling, often heart wrenching. In an earlier version of this column, Max Blumenthal was misquoted to have said “The maintenance and engineering of a non-indigenous demographic population is non-negotiable.

Others are assigned a different number, like Nour Joudah, who had attempted to reach her students in Ramallah at the Quaker school she was teaching at. The debate revolves around an unpleasant book published October 1 by Nation Books, titled “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. As Blumenthal reveals, Israel has become a country where right-wing leaders like Avigdor Lieberman and Bibi Netanyahu are sacrificing democracy on the altar of their power politics where the loyal opposition largely and passively stands aside and watches the organized assault on civil liberties where state-funded Orthodox rabbis publish books that provide instructions on how and when to kill Gentiles where half of Jewish youth declare their refusal to sit in a classroom with an Arab and where mob violence targets Palestinians and African asylum seekers scapegoated by leading government officials as "demographic threats.

Meanwhile many Palestinians across the occupied Palestinian territories are being pushed out of their homes and lands, from Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah and the Palestinian neighbourhoods in close proximity to the site of Al-Aqsa Mosque – referred to by Israelis as the Temple Mount – to the South Hebron Hills and areas all over the West Bank. He personally witnessed improper and outrageous behavior by Israeli citizens and their soldiers and he brings the Israeli Knesset into full perspective. Through his far-ranging travels, Blumenthal illuminates the present by uncovering the ghosts of the past,the histories of Palestinian neighbourhoods and villages now gone and forgotten how that history has set the stage for the current crisis of Israeli society and how the Holocaust has been turned into justification for occupation. Armed with a critic's eye and a sharp pen, Blumenthal sets out to document what he regards as the fulfillment of Yeshayahu Leibowitz's darkest prophecy regarding the Israeli occupation.

With Israelis going up on Parash hill, which is a hill above the Gaza Strip, to actually watch the killing take place, to watch the bombing take place, to cheer it on, and meanwhile they were electing the most right wing government in their history; 75 to 80 members of the 120 member Knesset were from right wing parties. And so, I think we have been looking at these laws, a lot of these laws are opposed by liberal groups inside Israel like the Associations for Civil Rights in Israel. But at the same time, Yousef mentioned my last book which was a best seller, and it was a best seller because I was able to get fresh air in the main stream media. Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4. This is coupled with a status quo that maintains an Israeli military occupation over Palestinians and a system of apartheid as recognised by the world’s leading human rights organisations, including Israel’s own B’Tselem, whilst also encouraging and solidifying the establishment of Israeli settlements.A decade before, in the 1967 war, Israeli troops had in effect undone the partition accepted in 1948 by overrunning the West Bank and Gaza Strip. As Israeli leaders are becoming increasingly and publicly dismissive of the notion of an independent Palestinian state and the rights of Palestinians to their lands, and as illegal Jewish-only settlements continue to swallow Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, is the pursuit of a Greater Israel, whether explicitly or implicitly, on the Jewish state’s political agenda? In a letter to his son later that year, David Ben-Gurion stated that partition would be acceptable but as a first step.

Jim Miles, in his review in Foreign Policy, described it as "a powerful and distressing book for a view on what life in modern Israel is like. It is one of the most important titles published on the Israel-Palestine conflict in the past few years. Currently, the most common definition of the land encompassed by the term is the territory of the State of Israel together with the Palestinian territories.Racism is always present throughout the society as a whole and mimics everything the Jews themselves went through in Europe. The debate and criticism, however, usually missed the point: Blumenthal presents a preponderance of evidence that leads inevitably to a sort of judgment that surpasses the verisimilitude of balance. Der US-amerikanische Historiker, Journalist und Bestsellerautor Max Blumenthal hat sich insbesondere mit der Politik der Republikanischen Partei und Israels auseinandergesetzt.