"Goliath" by Max Blumenthal

"Parash Hill is a scenic overlook near Sderot, which is one of the underserviced development towns originally constructed in Southern Israel to accommodate some of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who arrived to Israel from Arab nations during the 1940s as impoverished victims of government-led campaigns on expulsion. Parash Hill offers sweeping views of the Gaza Strip, and beyond it is the Mediterranean Sea. Here, hundreds of Israelis gathered at the vista to revel in the violence. For them, the hill offered mezzanine seats for the bombing; they cheered or stared with silent satisfaction while the hometown team exacted blood vengeance on the Enemy. “Of course I’m happy,” a twenty-six-year-old Orthodox Jew told a reporter from the UK’s Sunday Times as he watched Israeli jets bombard the strip. “It would be better if innocent civilians weren’t hurt, but the ones who cooperate with Hamas—that’s their problem.” A secular, middle-aged woman pointed to Gaza and calmly explained to Ulla Terkelsen, a Danish TV reporter, “They should just wipe the whole thing off the map.” With a dramatic wave of her hand, she added, “Yeah, I’m a little bit fascist.” A twenty-seven-year-old student surveyed the scene of picnicking Israelis and lamented, “People in Israel are addicted to violence."  Max Blumenthal in "Goliath"

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Max Blumenthal is a brave man, a brave and honest man.  He is the son of my friend Sidney Blumenthal.

"Goliath" will be published by "Nation Press" on the first of October.  I recommend it.  pl

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Blumenthal

 

 

Comments

[Matthew]

Col: Blumenthal really does the unforgiveable. He lets Israelis talk. And instantly all that hasbara about our "shared values" evaporates.

[MRW]

Blumenthal's opening statement here is
.....................
"Parash Hill is a scenic overlook near Sderot, which is one of the underserviced development towns originally constructed in Southern Israel to accommodate some of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who arrived to Israel from Arab nations during the 1940s as impoverished victims of government-led campaigns on expulsion."
.....................

Blumenthal doesn't make it clear that the expulsions were post-war, nor does he make it clear that they were Israeli government-led campaigns. Instead, he makes it sound like the hasbara BS that Edwin Black tells: "the Arabs carried on the Nazi campaign with mass post-war expulsion of Jews–about 850,000–they were kicked out penniless, and again the Zionists had to rescue them."

A commenter on mondoweiss.net is a retired US Air Force JAG who was involved with international law. His name is Hostage, and his contributions there are encyclopedic and sourced. He also happens to be Jewish.

This is one of his posts on the matter of Edwin Black's claims and the expulsions: http://mondoweiss.net/2012/09/pro-israel-activists-turn-to-cartoons-in-effort-to-tackle-delegitimization-on-campus.html#comment-494616

Specifically, within that post:
.....................
"Readers here may already know that the State of Israel played a central role in instigating the mass exodus of Jews from the Arab countries like Iraq, Yemen, and Morocco. See Memorandum of Conversation, by the Director of the Office of Near Eastern Affairs (Jones), Secret [WASHINGTON,] August 2,1951. Subject: Israel’s Concern Re Peace With the Arabs and Other Matters. Participants: Mr. Theodore Kollek, Embassy of Israel and Mr. G. Lewis Jones, NE, Foreign relations of the United States, 1951. The Near East and Africa, page 815 link to http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1951v05&isize=M&submit=Go+to+page&page=815"
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[Amir]

FYI to a semi-related matter: Bandar and Gang threatening a US citizen:
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/09/23/325635/us-reporter-threatened-by-saudi-arabia/

Dale Gavlak, from AP, is being put under pressure for exposing the use of chemicals by the Saudi financed Jihadi's.

[confusedponderer]

From the mouth of babes ...

[LeaNder]

I read some Sidney Blumenthal articles, before I encountered Max. In any case his name had sticked on my mind and I realized, he was the son of a father who already drew my attention.

But I didn't know much about him so far. Although, the time I checked the article was much slimmer.

I didn't remember you mentioning you knew him.

Max is great, he can also act so wonderfully naive with people whose political positions he does not share.

[LeaNder]

I respect Hostage a lot, but MRW, that may well be, since he read a lot beyond Edwin Black. And he definitively belongs to the people over there who actually knows a lot on what he is writing about. That is not necessarily the majority in either camp. If you ask me. But I haven't been there for a while.

[LeaNder]

In case someone is interested in what Pat actually refers to:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/Max-Goliath

Apart from the fact that MRW nitpicks something out of context, which was not used to bash Max, but apparently "hopmi". No time to check more closely.

[Anna-Marina]

Unwelcome truth:
"The Israeli-Jewish self-image as spiritually superior and peace-loving is a cardinal element in Israeli society's high self-esteem, and has made possible thousands of cases of state-sponsored killings, injuries, torture, abuse, and dispossession."
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ruchama-marton/oslo-%E2%80%98peace-accords%E2%80%99-psycho-political-perspective

[Fred]

Given the conduct of the Obama administration and its supporters I can see an opportunity for Mr. Blumenthal to write a sequel to "Generation Chickenhawk". This time around he can visit the college democrats, or the DFA/OFA acolytes.

[zanzibar]

Reading the few pages of Goliath that are available on Amazon reminds me of what many Israeli technology entrepreneurs have told me in the past.

I invested in several Israeli tech companies during the 80s & early 90s. All the entrepreneurs behind those companies have emigrated. Mostly to the US. They warned me of the creeping fascism under the guise of nationalism and why there was no room for dissent and people like them in Israel. Another point they made was their belief that politics in Israel was leading them inexorably towards another "Holocaust" - blatant ethnic cleansing of Arab muslims.

It seems Max Blumenthal now confirms what these people foresaw couple decades ago.

Will the American people care? Do the R2P Obamanauts & Clintonites care? Of course we know where the neocons stand on this matter. And we know how Max will be treated by our media punditry.

[Geoff Kl]

What is it that max does that makes him brave?

Writing a book that only the like minded will read?

[turcopolier]

Geof Kl

His willingness to stand up for the truth against Zionists like you. pl

[David Habakkuk]

Geoff Kl,

My wife and I are -- a not uncharacteristic phenomenon -- British 'goys', among whose oldest and closest friends are the children and remoter descendants of Jewish refugees from the disasters of European history.

There is no British Jew I know who has anything in common with Netanyahu or Tzipi Livni. Our friends are civilised people, not thugs.

However, I also know that the legacy of the Holocaust makes has made it very difficult for many British Jews either to criticise Israel, or indeed to face up to that what that country has become.

A result is that the moving away of British Jews from Israel tends to be silent. More and more, they will marry out, and merge into the larger mass of people. The most 'Zionist' Jew I knew well married a Welsh girl; the son of my wife's oldest friend, whose grandmother made it here from Vienna in 1939, will probably marry his Irish Catholic girlfriend.

What is absent, as far as I can see, is any coherent non-Zionist version of Jewish identity. Increasingly, I suspect that Zionism may turn out to have been the end of the notion of Judaism as a separate identity -- as distinct from one of the strands into which some future conglomerate identity flows.

It seems to me quite patently the case, however, that for Jews to confront these issues openly does require courage. Indeed, it may be precisely because only the 'like minded' will read his book -- and the minds of most of his fellow Jews are enclosed in a cocoon, as Peter Beinart recently noted -- that the courage of Max Blumenthal is both evident and admirable.

[William R. Cumming]

The real tragedy of the Holocaust IMO is it largely succeeded. No one can look the other way on that success and the fact that it was aided and abetted by many nations and leaders and peoples. Not just the Germans. It was a fundamental of early and latter Christendom that the Jews murdered Christ. And the growth of theories of racial differences in the 19th Century led to an atavistic response that warped the culture of the WEST. Which largely committed suicide in the trenches of the First World War.

Watch out for an America that ends up believing the City on the Hill turned out its lights while in pursuit of power and empire by its elites.

[David Habakkuk]

I failed to check what I wrote properly, and on a sensitive subject it is important to be precise. The next to last paragraph should read:

"What is absent, as far as I can see, is any coherent non-Zionist version of Jewish identity. Increasingly, I suspect that Zionism may turn out to have been the end of the notion of Judaism as a separate identity -- as distinct from one of the strands flowing into some future conglomerate identity."