In the war of Judaism versus democracy, another "battle royal" of truly biblical proportions, this book tells us not only that the bible's most famous biblical outcome has been reversed, but also that it isn't even close, David, democracy, loses, and loses big time to Judaism, the modern-day nuclear-armed Goliath of tribalism and racism.
Sadly, but finally, in this book, "Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel," Max Blumenthal's forces us to face, straight up, one of our worse hidden fears about the state of Israel: That this besieged little middle eastern nation, our little brother nation, one that we have protected as if it was our sacred duty since it was in the womb, has become, right before our own eyes, the 21st Century's first full-bred racist and fascist state: literally an "international ogre" that is turning into a modern-day dystopia.
On our watch the sweet milk that was once Israel, is turning decidedly sour right before our own lying eyes.
But how is it that in our own life time, the heart-felt dreams of a Jewish homeland come true -- one free of the evils of the kind of racism and anti-Semitism like that imposed on German Jews by Adolph Hitler -- has now been turned completely on its head?
This author tells us that it has happened because Israelis demographic fears of neighboring Arabs has metastasized into wanton crimes and violence against the Palestinians and other Arabs under Israel's occupation. The Israeli predilection for violence, coupled with justifications based on visceral racial fears, has turned that little nation into a modern-day race-based nightmare.
The author allows the facts to speak for themselves, but this book clearly begs an important question laid bare in its subtext: Could a reality that turns the dreams of a free and democratic Israel into the only living ghost of Hitler, be any starker or be a greater moral contradiction? I believe his answer would be no, and further, that Israel's moral flip-flop from "defending democracy" to "defending Jewish racial purity," is truly one of biblical proportions.
In ten groups of themes, which make up 73 on the ground vignettes, this author, applying his considerable skills as a reporter, tells us vignette-by-vignette how Israel, with a hefty amount of U.S. support, has turned from a nation that redeemed itself through its own creation, literally rising from the ashes of the horrors of Hitler's gas chambers, to today's modern-day proxy for Nazism: a nuclear-armed nation that is coming dangerously close to repeating some of the worse atrocities committed against the Jewish people during the reign of Hitler's Nazi Germany? This is not a script that anyone could make up, nor one that any historian could have predicted, or any reporter could have invented. But sadly, it is objective reality on the ground in Israel today. Read this book and weep!
Rather than rehearse the book's many gory details here, I will end by saying this: When the author's details are striped of Israel's racist rationalizations and excuses for its own wanton violence, and laid out side-by-side, an organic pattern that is not unfamiliar to history or to contemporary international relations reveals itself. Unfortunately, it is the same pattern that Hitler used. The formula is this: collective images of racial fears and collective national ideals of racial purity clash, creating a grotesque imperative that can never be satisfied? As a result, together, and inexorably, the combination of racial fears and ideals of racial purity, create a shroud of "We versus Them" moral blindness, behind which any and all national sins in the name of, and in defense of, said racial purity can be rationalized and justified.
In Netanyahu's Israel, moral norms have been sacrificed on the altar of Jewish racial purity, made subordinate to racist ideals and placed in the service of those same twisted racist ideals. Then the Netanyahu government has used these same racial and demographic fears to whip up and animate public sentiment both in Israel and in the U.S., to justify his twisted policies, their bloated military budgets and the destructive violent frenzies executed against "the Palestinian Other" -- as the implacable and permanent demographic enemy to Jewish existence -- which is to say, to Jewish racial purity.
The fact that many American politicians know what is going on in Israel and yet will not tell the American people, but continue to support Netanyahu's policies (like the Israeli lap dogs we know they all are), is almost as shameful as what Israel is doing to those under its occupation. This book, once and for all, will end any speculation about Israeli intentions about peace in the Middle East.
Kerry, you can come home now. Israel will self-destruct on its own accord, for the same reasons that, and on its own time-table, and in the same way that Hitler did: pursuing an unattainable racist dream of Aryan racial purity. Only this time it will be in pursuit of Jewish racial purity. Five stars
