As they say in Spanish "va sumando," or "it adds up." Blumenthal's landmark book is written in extremely accessible journalistic anecdotal style. There is no theory. But the anecdotes just keep adding up, forcing the reader to draw some of their own conclusions, unable to avert their gaze and dismiss each story as just an individual story. The fascist, racist nature of the Zionist system becomes undeniable. And as the book comes to a close, Blumenthal draws the reader to Germany, where the only place that young Jewish Israelis feel at home is within a pluralistic society. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Max is arguing for ethnic pluralism everywhere over an (impossible) ethnic purity in Israel, a country stolen by force of arms, as the basis of the Jewish response to the Holocaust.

When Ian Lustick, the very liberal Zionist political scientist and friend of Blumenthal's father, received Max at UPenn, part of a friendly effort to break the media blackout around this book (in contrast to the wide coverage of his previous book on the Republican party), the reception was friendly but condemnatory. Lustick starts speaking at 22m50s and goes on at great length with his own anecdotal stories. These stories seem to lull the audience into a disarmed position, as the stories repeatedly reinforce Lustick's caring, considerate, anti-racist, liberal credentials. And then, all of a sudden, at the end of all this storytelling, starting at minute 36, he does a few things. First, he accuses Blumenthal of being too anecdotal and not sufficiently serious. Second, he suggests that Blumenthal is making a mountain out of molehill and overreacting. Why can't we just give Israel a little more time? Thirdly, finally, and most importantly, he suddenly springs the anti-semetic label on Blumenthal, accusing him of willing 'the end of Jewish collective life in Israel,' which is probably an accurate accusation, but which deliberately sounds like he is willing the end of Jewish life itself - the complete opposite of what Blumenthal is advocating.

These two positions really sum up the divide inside the Jewish community. Should the response to the Holocaust be "never again, for us," or "never again, for anyone"? It is a divide between exclusionists and universalists, the two great strands of Jewish thinking through the ages. Max is clearly a universalist, as are most Palestinians. Lustick wants his ethnically pure enclave, notwithstanding the cost to the native Palestinian inhabitants of the land - a cost laid bare in page after page of Blumenthal's book. And while the Jewish community debates amongst itself, the Palestinians suffer under the Israeli jackboot and, as also becomes clear through Blumenthal, the soul of Judaism itself corrodes. To understand the panic of liberal Zionists like Ian Lustick, indeed to understand Israel itself, this important book is required reading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upv9KUuks_8 ( )

How depressing - how ironic that a people that suffered so grievously at the hands of the Nazi's should visit such xenophobia and apartheid on others. And oh how we in the West have these facts obscured and hidden from us. Eye opening. ( )

Cataloguing the current political situation in Israel, Blumenthal's Goliath is an important and damning work. Unlike most books on Israel-Palestine affairs, Blumenthal is less concerned with proving which ideology is right or wrong (or whether the definition of “apartheid” matches the situation), and more aimed at using the brute facts of the situation to illustrate the incredible devastation wrought by the Israeli right-wing. I regard myself as a pretty news-conscious guy of the Left, but so much of the book's events came as a shock to me; you do hear some about the plight of the Palestinians in publications such as the NY Times, but even then it's typically couched in what it means for US-Israeli relations. (The most famous book about Israel of the last two decades is specifically about the Israel lobby in US politics, side-stepping any discussion of the occupation itself.)

While Blumenthal isn't concerned with laying out a discrete comparison to apartheid, as mentioned earlier, the stories he tells makes it hard to not think of the parallels to a part of America's history that we're more familiar with: the Jim Crow-era South. Like then, Palestinians and Israeli Arabs face a mixture of both de jure and de facto structural racism, discrimination that not only depresses their economic futures but also exacts a deep personal cost such as police harassment, jail time, separation of families, and violent eviction from their homes.

Some of the stories are so stunning as to make me think of the Indonesian public in The Act of Killing: a sort of blasé indifference that's just as morally damning as if they were directly responsible. And in many cases, they are directly responsible through the universal conscription that makes many execute the practical roles of the occupation. Blumenthal especially indicts the Zionist Left in this aspect; they often willingly enter service as “change from within”, but whatever change they enact is impossible to see, and they often disengage afterwards from any sort of moral responsibility for their actions.

If the book has any flaws, it's in a messy structure. The book is a series of short chapters or episodes that illustrate aspects of the day-to-day reality in Israel and Palestine, sort of like The Forever War by Dexter Filkins. Unlike Filkins, though, Blumenthal isn't evocative enough (and succinct enough) to keep this technique from grinding the reader down. I had to take several breaks of a few days, since the book is so unremittently bleak. (It didn't help that I was concurrently reading a book on the AIDS crisis!) But under full consideration, the book is Important in a way that excuses the flaws, determined to thoroughly catalogue the current Israeli state of affairs, and warn of how it's spiraling out of control.
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For readers such as myself who hope and pray that there will continue to be a place in the Middle East where Jewish people and culture flourish, this book is a painful read. Blumenthal in one short chapter after the other documents how Israel is sliding towards an exclusivist, racist society. While he also provides a good number of stories involving those Israelis who continue to struggle for a more open, truly democratic society, his interviews with a number of the rightest and ultra-rightist politicians now in power make clear that there is little basis for hoping that the current peace process will succeed. Even more regrettable (at least from my point of view) is the obscuring of the core values of Judaism that current Israeli legislation, highlighted by the author, represents. For those who wish to puncture the still all-to-common glorification of Israeli society as a "light unto the nations," this book provides ample ammunition. For those of us who hope and pray that the day where Israelis and Palestinians will live together in a peaceful and just society will soon come, Blumenthal's Goliath bodes ill. ( )

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