{"article":{"id":262007,"heading":"Review: max Blumenthal "Goliath"","author":"Eric Alterman","created":"2013-10-19 20:43:32","modified":"2013-10-30 04:10:27","last_modified":"Wed, 30 Oct 2013 11:10:27","article":"

Max Blumenthal’s Goliath, published by Nation Books, consists of seventy-three short chapters, each one devoted to some shortcoming of Israeli society and\/or moral outrage that the Jewish state has perpetrated against the Palestinians. Some are titled to imply an equivalence between Israel and Nazi Germany (“The Concentration Camp,” “The Night of Broken Glass”); others merely evidence juvenile faux-cleverness (“How to Kill Goyim and Influence People”).

Israel is rarely wholly innocent in the stories Blumenthal tells. Its brutal military occupation of Palestinian land, now entering its forty-sixth year, has not only deeply damaged Israel’s democracy, but also desensitized its citizens to the daily humiliations it inflicts on the Palestinians. But Blumenthal proves a profoundly unreliable narrator. Alas, his case against the Jewish state is so carelessly constructed, it will likely alienate anyone but the most fanatical anti-Zionist extremists, and hence do nothing to advance the interests of the occupation’s victims.

Blumenthal evinces no interest in the larger context of Israel’s actions. Potential threats that emanate from Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, Syria, Iran, etc., receive virtually no mention in these pages. Israel’s actions are attributed exclusively to the myopia of its citizens. Blumenthal blames “Israeli society’s nationalistic impulses,” its politicians who struggle “to outdo one another in a competition for the most convincing exaltation of violence against the Arab evildoers,” its “fever swamps,” its “unprovoked violence against the Arab outclass,” and its textbooks that “indoctrinate Jewish children into the culture of militarism.” It would have been easy for him to at least pretend to even-handedness here. Did it not occur to Blumenthal, for instance, that Palestinians have textbooks as well?

Blumenthal’s accounts are mostly technically accurate, but often deliberately deceptive. In one relatively trivial but revealing example, Blumenthal hides behind the passive voice to repeat the accusation that El Al “airline has been accused of allowing Mossad officers to pose as El Al staffers to collect information on non-Jewish passengers in foreign airports” [italics mine]. Lo and behold, it turns out that the accuser in question was a recently terminated El Al employee who spent nineteen years at the company without ever mentioning any of this (and who presented no evidence for his claim). Nor does Blumenthal even briefly weigh the charge from the standpoint of common sense. Think about it: El Al employees wear company uniforms and are the most visible Israeli workers in any foreign country. Also, the airline’s offices abroad are all well advertised. Is that where you would plant your spies?

Blumenthal’s selectivity often gets in the way of his truth-telling. For instance, he credits Zionist pioneer Berl Katznelson, whom he calls “the Labor Zionist movement’s chief ideologue”—a title that exists exclusively in the author’s imagination—with saying, “The Zionist enterprise is an enterprise of conquest.” Yes, but Katznelson also said, “I do not wish to see the realization of Zionism in the form of the new Polish state with Arabs in the position of the Jews and the Jews in the position of the Poles, the ruling people. For me this would be the complete perversion of the Zionist ideal….” Apparently, there are more things in Labor Zionist history than are dreamt of in Blumenthal’s philosophy.

Blumenthal accuses others of naïveté, but it is he who is the naïf. He condescendingly accuses Aluf Benn, editor in chief of the left-wing Haaretz newspaper, of “underestimat[ing] the prime minister’s cynical gamesmanship” for failing to realize that the real purpose of Bibi Netanyahu’s “hysterical rhetoric” regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons program was to take the world’s attention away from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. (Does anyone else in the world think Bibi was only kidding about Iran?)

Blumenthal writes with great admiration of the late Israeli theologian Yeshayahu Liebowitz, who accused the country’s soldiers of behaving like “Judeo-Nazis” and incited them to refuse military service. “Many members of the Zionist left still claim to revere” him, Blumenthal complains, “but few are willing to heed his most consequential advice.” Blumenthal names no names and does not bother to footnote his claim, but to the degree that it is accurate, it is also, per usual, misleading. Jews all over the world “revered” Liebowitz for the brilliance of his Talmud exegesis, not—as Blumenthal might wish—because he called Israeli soldiers “Nazis” and told them not to serve.<\/p>\n","contact":"","link":"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/176691\/max-blumenthals-goliath-i-hate-israel-handbook#","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/plain","summary":"Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York,","numcomment":4,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/","filesize":null,"article_url":"\/news\/2013\/10\/262007.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[{"id":262010,"heading":"Review: Max Blumenthal's book "Goliath"","article":"From Eric Alterman and Reed Richardson at the Nation, reviewing Max Blumenthal's book Goliath : Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.:\r\n\r\n When I was asked to do my column about Max Blumenthal\u2019s book, Goliath, I was of two minds. On the one hand, I like to be a team player. But on the other, whenever I criticize BDS types, I apparently invite an avalanche of personal invective from its fans. (This happens when I criticize neocons on Israel as well, but to be honest, the BDS types appear to have more time on their hands for this kind of thing.) Second, I\u2019ve known the author\u2019s parents since he was a little boy, and whatever the quality of the book, I expected that my honest views of it might threaten three decades of friendly relations.\r\n\r\n\r\nReading what follows, I suspect Eric is not expecting any more invitations to dinner or Canasta at the Blumenthals in the near future. (emphasis mine)\r\n\r\n I expected to disagree with its analysis. I did not expect it to be remotely as awful as it is. Had the magazine not published its excerpt, it would have been easy to ignore. It is no exaggeration to say that this book could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed) without a single word change once it\u2019s translated into Arabic. (Though to be fair, Blumenthal should probably add some anti-female, anti-gay arguments for that.) Goliath is a propaganda tract, not an argument as it does not even consider alternative explanations for the anti-Israel conclusions it reaches on every page. Its implicit equation of Israel with Nazis is also particularly distasteful to any fair-minded individual. And its larding of virtually every sentence with pointless adjectives designed to demonstrate the author\u2019s distaste for his subject is as amateurish as it is ineffective. As I said, arguments this simplistic and one-sided do the Palestinians no good. There will be no Palestinian state unless Israel agrees to it. And if these are the views of the people with whom Israelis of good will are expected to agree, well, you can hardly blame them for not trusting them. \r\n\r\n\r\nMax Blumenthal is currently on a book tour to promote his awful, simplistic, one sided propaganda tract. He'll be coming to an SJP or MSU meeting near you. ","author":"Alterman","parent_id":262007,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2013-10-20 01:02:17","modified":"2013-10-20 01:02:17","fileurl":""},{"id":262011,"heading":"i've heard worse","article":"Sohrab Ahmari ithe Iranian-American book reviewer at the WSJ said he threw away the book. Thats quite a testament.","author":"Burton Mcnally","parent_id":262007,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2013-10-20 05:27:11","modified":"2013-10-20 05:27:11","fileurl":""},{"id":262085,"heading":"Everyone's making fun of max blumenthals Goliath","article":"Some people travel through deserts. Others skydive from space. Max Blumenthal, Sidney Blumenthal\u2019s idiot son, gets his thrills trying to make it through an Israeli airport.\r\n\r\nMax Blumenthal, political hack Sidney Blumenthal\u2019s son, makes things up and makes himself into the center of the story. He\u2019s like Julian Assange, except even lamer. Blumenthal\u2019s claims to fame include being the son of a Clinton aide and making a viral video featuring drunken Israelis badmouthing Obama.\r\n\r\nBlumenthal is following that up with Goliath, the epic story of how he made it through an Israeli airport in one piece. (Actually it\u2019s a deranged screed about how Israel is the devil. Don\u2019t take it from me, Eric Alterman at The Nation, far on the left said, \u201cit could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club.\u201d\r\n\r\nSure millions of people visit Israel every year. But only Max Blumenthal has the courage to turn his uneventful trip through an Israeli airport into a piece of suspense fiction.\r\n\r\nRead and prepare to be thrilled.\r\n\r\n Before any trip to Israel-Palestine, I receive a dizzying array of advice from jour-nalist and activist friends on how to pass through Israeli security with minimal harassment.\r\n\r\nYou could just arrive without any bombs. That usually works for me.\r\n\r\nBlumenthal has been to Israel plenty of times, despite hating Israel more than Arafat hated showers. He\u2019s managed to get in and out of the country before. But like every self-dramatizing jorno-brat visiting a foreign country, he has to make himself into the story.\r\n\r\nIsrael makes a lot of money from tourism. It makes a chunk of it from protest tourism which is why whiny leftist parasites like Max Blumenthal have the run of the country. They usually only get kicked out when they start throwing stones at soldiers.\r\n\r\n A Jewish-American writer for a Palestinian diaspora publication told me she always wore blue-and-white clothing\u2014the colors of the Israeli flag\u2014and a gold Star of David necklace, and flirted openly with security officers of the opposite sex.\r\n\r\nSomehow I don\u2019t think this has anything to do with getting through security.\r\n\r\n A left-wing Israeli activist advised me to behave in an irritable, churlish fashion, blurting out terse responses to questions from security officers to avoid creating the perception that I was overcompensating for any \u201canti-Israel\u201d intentions.\r\n\r\nEven left-wing Israelis are screwing with Blumenthal. I don\u2019t blame them. I would advise him to shout that he has a bomb to avoid creating the impression that he\u2019s overcompensating for having a bomb.\r\n\r\n They reminded me about Lily Sussman, the twenty-one-year-old Jewish American college student detained in December 2009 by the Shin Bet at Israel\u2019s border with Egypt because she was carrying suspicious items, such as an Arabic phrasebook.\r\n\r\nLily Sussman was crossing the border from an enemy country. Not the airport. Big difference. They suspected that she was carrying a bomb for a Muslim boyfriend. That sort of thing has happened before. Her laptop got totaled and she has never shut up about it since.\r\n\r\nI hear she has a memorial to the laptop in her backyard.\r\n\r\n After deciding that I was too lazy to purge my computer and cellphone of Arab contacts, I concluded that I had nothing to hide and that the Israeli intelligence services could not possibly be foolish enough to treat me as a security threat.\r\n\r\nSo the preceding paragraphs have been a waste of time. Blumenthal has gone to Israel before. He knows he\u2019s self-dramatizing.\r\n\r\n I then reminded myself that I was an Ashkenazi Jew who would be automatically afforded special rights according to the designs of Zionism.\r\n\r\nTell it to all the Norwegian leftists who get through Israeli security and then begin throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers. They do it without any Ashkenazi Jewish privilege.\r\n\r\n My Jewish privilege would be borne out during many trips in and out of Ben Gurion Airport.\r\n\r\nAlso Max Blumenthal\u2019s Jewish privilege was frequently borne out in his visits to Home Depot and Starbucks where he was given a toilet seat and a tasty latte in exchange for money\u2026 only because of his Ashkenazi Jewish privilege.\r\n\r\nTo the extent that he has any privilege, it\u2019s being the spawn of a top Democrat who could easily get a senator on the phone to the Israelis if his son is delayed an extra 5 minutes in the airport.\r\n\r\n Whenever a security officer greeted me with the requisite opening question, \u201cAre you Jeweesh?\u201d I have learned to casually respond, \u201cOf course.\u201d\r\n\r\n If I were ever asked if I had any Israeli family, I would tell them about all my imaginary cousins in Tel Aviv or about my imaginary Israeli girlfriend. \u201cAre you thinking of marrying your girlfriend,\u201d a young female security officer asked me once., sure am!\u201d I said with a bashful smile, bringing a satisfied grin to the face of the officer. Because the maintenance of a Jewish demographic majority is Israel\u2019s national priority, the production of Jewish babies is a key national priority. With my promise to inject top-grade Ashkenazi Jewish sperm into the ovum of a young Jewish Israeli woman, I was marked with a level-one security classification.\r\n\r\nMax Blumenthal really overestimates the quality of his sperm.\r\n\r\nSecurity officers don\u2019t ask you if you\u2019re Jewish to give you clearance. They\u2019re doing it to try and establish why you\u2019re here and also to get you talking. Once they have an identity for you, they can more easily notice discrepancies. Similarly a Christian pilgrim might be asked which churches he\u2019ll be visiting.\r\n\r\nIsraeli security has fantastically little interest in Max Blumenthal\u2019s sperm. It\u2019s interested only in whether he\u2019s associated with terrorist groups or smuggling anything into the country. In the process it gets him talking about himself.\r\n\r\nBlumenthal stupidly thinks he\u2019s getting security clearance and \u201cputting one over\u201d on the officers. He could just as easily tell them that he\u2019s a left-wing activist who hates Israel and wants to document the Zionist devil close at hand. It would probably get him through the airport even faster on honesty points.\r\n\r\nBut Max Blumenthal, like most left-wing idiots, wants to be the star of an adventure and to pretend that he\u2019s outsmarting those fiendish Israelis.\r\n\r\n Each time I reach the kiosk at passport control on my way into Israel-Palestine, I do my best to appear calm, and even a little bit bored, while the officer examines my documents. With bated breath I wait for the loud thump of the metal visa stamp when it meets the pages of my passport.\r\n\r\nBlumenthal, like most compulsive liars, switches back and forth from admitting that he has no concerns to pretend to be agitated.\r\n\r\nThus concludes the exciting adventure of Max Blumenthal\u2019s uneventful trip through the airport. Stay tuned next week when Max Blumenthal will brave a Zionist Starbucks and wait with bated breath as the barista draws him a pumpkin late.\r\n\r\nWill he abuse his Ashkenazi Jewish privilege by refusing to tip her? Stay tuned.\r\n\r\nMaybe if Max Blumenthal ever has an honesty breakdown, he would admit that he could stroll through BGU in a Hamas t-shirt, a suicide bomb belt and a button reading, \u201cMy Dad is a Hillary Clinton Advisor\u201d.\r\n\r\nBecause that last one\u2026 that\u2019s his real privilege. It\u2019s not about race. It\u2019s about whose idiot son you happen to be.","author":"daniel greenfield","parent_id":262007,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2013-10-29 05:26:53","modified":"2013-10-29 05:26:53","fileurl":""},{"id":262093,"heading":"Eric Alterman's knockout of max Blumenthal's goliath","article":"Congratulations to Max Blumenthal. The Nation has, over the decades, published any number of extremely harsh critics of Israel and Zionism. But, as far as I\u2019m aware, never before has anyone defended the analogizing of the behavior of Israeli Jews to that of the war criminals who led Nazi Germany. Such arguments are, unfortunately, consistent with both the quality of Blumenthal\u2019s judgments and the honesty of his journalism.\r\n\r\nBlumenthal\u2019s letter is no less dishonest and disingenuous than his dreadful book (a book, I hasten to add that has received virtually no attention in the print media, save in my column). I will answer each and every one of his charges in the order he makes them and then I hope and pray I will finally be done with this mishegas forever.\r\n\r\nBlumenthal\u2019s preamble to his charges is, shall we say, confusing. He writes, \u201cThese enforcers, recently aided and abetted by Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s right-wing government, have painted critics who do not toe the party line or journalists who report uncomfortable facts as anti-Semitic, self-hating Jews or cheerleaders for terror. Readers of The Nation should recognize this kind of smearing as a form of McCarthyism.\u201d I sure hope they do because I\u2019ve addressed these issues so frequently in this and so many other publications for the past thirty years that it would be fair to call them an obsession. For instance: Here is one recent example from The Nation. Here is one from The International Herald Tribune. Here is one from the Center for American Progress. Here is one from The American Prospect. Here is one from The Daily Beast. Here is one from The Forward. And here is one from Moment, etc., etc. As to Blumenthal\u2019s alleged point, however, I did not call him anti-Semitic, self-hating or a cheerleader for terror. I did not even mention any of these things.* His claim to McCarthyite martyrdom is therefore rather misplaced, to put it mildly.","author":"The nation","parent_id":262007,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2013-10-30 04:10:27","modified":"2013-10-30 04:10:27","fileurl":""}]}