Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

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But, more than this, an ever increasing justification of the brutality they deal out to the indigenous occupants. 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. Anyone who talks that way is deluding themselves", [11] making this statement just two days before privately reaching out to the Palestinian President with Israel's broadest ever peace offer. From a letter from Chaim Weizmann to Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, High Commissioner for Palestine, while the Peel Commission was convening in 1937: "We shall spread in the whole country in the course of time .

Annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was part of the platform of the mainstream Israeli Likud party, and of some other, often more extreme Israeli political parties.

shows in forensic detail the reality of the Israeli mainstream's embrace blatant racism against Arabs and Africans. One story, for instance, relates Blumenthal’s interactions with liberal Israeli novelist David Grossman, who is shown to be afflicted with profound cognitive dissonance regarding the origins of Israeli violence. Then Avi Dichter, the former head of the Shin bet, and part of Tzipni Livni’s Kadima party proposed a law defining Israel’s Jewish character as above, or preeminent, or superior to its democratic charter, and would make Hebrew the official language and strip Arabic of its official language status.

Early Revisionist Zionist groups such as Betar and Irgun Zvai-Leumi regarded the territory of the Mandate for Palestine, including Transjordan, as Greater Israel. The book is the product, the author says, of four years’ work, including more than a year living in Israel and the Palestinian territories to study the facts on the ground. 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.The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country. Dana Shalala, the former Clinton labor secretary or health secretary, (she made such an impact on me that I can’t remember), is a Lebanese-American. Goliath is] the kind of book that you just open to any chapter and quickly get a sense of both the particular and the whole.