Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

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You will have Israel with democracy for Jews and votes for Palestinian Israelis but with institutionalised discrimination against them in areas such as property rights or army service (only Jews are allowed to do national service which is mandatory, with Bedouin recruits used for the ‘grunt’ jobs: there is no role for Palestinians). And after Dayan’s blitz into the city, an embedded reporter from the New York Herald Tribune surveyed the damage. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Because of the curfew, he couldn’t bury her, so he went out in the yard with his bare hands and dug a grave for her.

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. This law did not pass, but it has been reintroduced by Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, who is his deputy from the Jewish Home party, which has done very well in recent municipal elections. The sub-title ‘Life and Loathing in Greater Israel’ references what is now mainstream thought – the notions embedded in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud (which means ‘consolidation’) Charter of no contiguous Palestinian State, and one Greater Israel stretching from the Jordan to the Mediterranean absorbing to all intents and purposes the Occupied Territories. Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then?

Max Blumenthal’s Goliath generated significant discussion upon its release—including a protracted debate between Blumenthal and Eric Alterman in the pages of the Nation— and considerable criticism of the book’s lack of objectivity. There are various stories regarding the origin of this plan, but the basic idea comes from the Founding Father of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, who said: " "the area of the Jewish State stretches: "From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.

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?Blumenthal gives a convoluted answer that comes down to this: “There should be a choice placed to the settler-colonial population” (meaning the entire Jewish population of Israel): “Become indigenized,” that is, “you have to be part of the Arab world. But once you get past spell-checks and gotchas (for the record, Blumenthal refers to poet Allen Ginsberg as “Alan”; mentions the Canaanite god Moloch, from a Ginsberg poem, as “Mollock”; describes the moshav, a small-holders’ farming village, as a “collective farm,” and much, much more) the critics’ main complaint seems to be that Alterman’s review is the only one that’s appeared in print so far.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday reiterated his position that the vision of Israel holding onto the West Bank and Gaza Strip as part of its sovereign territory was finished.Blumenthal is a fantastic storyteller and has a gift for using subtle sarcasm to great effect—it is detectible without being overwhelming or gratuitous.

Blumenthal also covers Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories, as well as Israeli interaction with neighboring nation-states. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Greater Israel’ refers to the notion of expanding Israel’s territory and sovereignty to encompass what many Israelis describe as their historic Biblical land.You'll find yourself instantly immersed in an engrossing family romance-one part tender, one part train-wreck-and wish you had the entire day to keep reading. Meir Kahane, an ultra-nationalist Knesset member, who founded the American Jewish Defense League and the banned Israeli Kach party, worked towards Greater Israel and other Religious Zionist goals. About 20 to 50 more Palestinian men, sent into the mosque by Israeli forces to extract the corpses and bury them, were shot dead in the graves they had just dug.