Gut Feeling (2024)

Kamera: Nikon FM

Linse: Nikkor-N Auto 24mm f2.8 (1970)

Film: Rollei P&R 640 @ box speed

Kjemi: Rodinal (1:25 / 13:30 min. @ 20°C)

 

- Have you ever had that feeling that something just is not right?

 

- Not only does it not feel right; it feels terribly, terribly WRONG!

 

At approximately the exact same time that I had UN-affiliated assignments in the occupied West Bank (2007-2011), there was also a truly remarkable investigative journalist named Max Blumenthal (b. 1977) doing ground work for his book ‘Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel’ (publ. 2013).

 

In his book, Blumenthal exposes the Israeli zionist apartheid society as it was a little over a decade ago - his book was a warning to the World, and it depicts a critical point in time when Israel was starting to truly blend and merge their expansionist old-school, Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940) European-influenced fascist political apparatus together with the American mad 'rabbi' Meir Kahane (1932-1990)-imported extremist religious and messianic influence from the USA that I myself could see first-hand with the illegal jewish fundamentalist settlers - sick, violent settlers who to a large degree are AMERICAN JEWS - in the Occupied Territories.

 

[--> Please do see this must-see video of the psycho demented and totally insane extremist settler jew Miriam Levinger (1937-2020) from Brooklyn, New York - she was the wife of Moshe Levinger (1935-2015); influential genocidal leader of the Gush Emunim settler movement.

Today, the Gush Emunim movement is represented by Daniella Weiss (b. 1945), leader of the Gush Emunim successor movement called Nahala, or Nachala - please do see her revealing presentation of the Nachala organisation here. <--]

 

Like Blumenthal, I also saw Israeli society - but I was not fully able to put into words what I actually saw back then. This book does:

 

New America Foundation: Max Blumenthal presents Goliath (2013)

 

And today, 10 years later - Israel has gone full-on genocidal.

 

The Zionists have to be stopped - NOW.

 

 

TRANSCRIPT - MAX BLUMENTAHL PRESENTS 'GOLIATH' (2013)

 

Peter Bergen: Welcome to the New America Foundation - it's our pleasure to welcome Max Blumenthal to discuss his new book ‘Goliath - Life and Loathing in Greater Israel’. Max is a journalist who's written for a variety of Publications; the New York Times, the LA Times, Daily Beast, The Guardian and so on; also the author of the 2009 book ‘Republican Gomorrah’ inside the movement the shadow the party which was a New York Times bestseller, and Max is going to talk about the big themes and stories in his book and then I'll engage him in a bit of Q&A and then throw it open to your questions; thank you Max.

 

Max Blumenthal: Thanks a lot Peter and thanks to the New America Foundation and to Anne-Marie Slaughter (b. 1958). I know she can't be here now, but I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this book and have this discussion here. I think I forgot to bring my coffee, which I need. I need this desperately. I was actually kind of hoping if the event wasn't going to be cancelled, that it could at least be pushed forward cuz I'm kind of a night owl and I wanted a few extra hours of sleep but… that was a joke.

 

I want to start the talk actually by discussing the issue of speech suppression around this issue, just really briefly. I understand there has been some kind of effort or complaints about my presence here, and throughout my book tour there have been attempts to shut down various events that I appeared at; all of which were rejected and rebuked.

 

Someone named Naftali Bennett (b. 1972) just spoke at the Brookings Institution and there was no effort to prevent him from speaking at the premier think tank in Washington - and I don't really know if there necessarily should be; even though Naftali Bennett recently endorsed a decision by the National Civil Service administration of Israel to bar religious Jewish women from volunteering in hospitals after 9:00 p.m. for fear that they would date Arab doctors.

 

This was a decision made under pressure from the anti-micegenation group Lehava, and Bennett; who is the Economics Minister of Israel and the head of the pro-settler Jewish Home party, which advocates annexing 60% of the West Bank and depriving Palestinians, occupied Palestinians, of citizenship, consigning them to Jordanian residency and permanent fifth class status, was welcomed at the premier think tank with very little outcry in Washington DC - so there's definititely a double standard and a disturbing wind of repression.

 

We also saw it recently, when Harvard's Hillel House banned the former speaker of the Knesset and the former head of the Jewish Agency, Avraham Burg (b. 1955); barred him from speaking for their audience. Apparently, Avraham Burg was too controversial to hear from. A student at SUNY Binghamton, who was a member of the Hillel House at his university, was ousted from Hillel for attempting to host Iyad Burnat (b. 1973); the Oscar nominated Palestinian filmmaker, for attempting to host a Palestinian at this discussion.

 

A children's art exhibition of children's art from the Gaza Strip was shut down in San Francisco after a campaign of suppression from the local Jewish federations, and these enforcers actually celebrated shutting down an exhibition of children's art, as if they had achieved something; some kind of pro-israel Victory.

 

Ansche Chesed, which is a synagogue in New York, recently shut down a panel on Israeli democracy, that was to have included J.J. Goldberg (b. 1949) of the Jewish daily, The Forward - who has attempted; and completely failed, to savage my book - who is a former Israeli member of the Israel Border Police - not exactly someone you would describe as a delegitimizer. But even this discussion was too much to host at a premier conservative synagogue in New York.

 

TribeFest, the annual gathering of the Jewish Federations, ousted a group of young Jews who attempted to discuss human rights violations in the Occupied Territories, called ‘Young, Jewish and Proud’ - barred them from appearing at its annual conference.

 

And then there is the situation inside Israel where journalists like Uri Blau (b. 1977) of Haaretz have been prosecuted for revealing illegal assassinations carried out by the Israeli Army. There was this week a request by the Israeli police, for all Israeli media to provide all photographs of the protests; which I'm going to discuss later on, against the Prawer Plan - the plan to remove 40,000 indigenous Bedouins from their homes.

 

There have been attacks on NGOs in Israel - Human rights NGOs, including mainstream human rights NGOs like Peace Now; there have been attacks on the New Israel Foundation, attempts to paint them as anti-semitic - these attacks have been carried out from the heart of the Knesset.

 

And for Palestinian journalists the fate has been much worse. Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip were assassinated in a car marked with the letters ‘TV’ on top of the car during the November 2012 escalation because they were affiliated with a Hamas run TV channel - they had no operational involvement in terrorism. And when the Newseum in Washington attempted to recognize them, along with all of the journalists around the world killed in the line of duty; including journalists who worked for Syrian State TV, advancing propaganda for Bashar al-Assad (b. 1965), pro-israel groups - discourse suppressors - moved in to scrub their name from the ceremony. Richard Engel (b. 1973), the NBC bureau chief; when he spoke at the ceremony, would not condemn that - he would not condemn that in any explicit terms.

 

Al-Wattan, the Palestinian TV channel in Ramallah, has had its offices raided and is unable to get its equipment back from the Israeli Army - and therefore is unable to broadcast outside Ramallah. So I understand this kind of repression on a very intimate level through my reporting, and I'm not surprised by it based on what I saw in Israel / Palestine - but I am impressed whenever anyone stands up to this suppression, as the New America Foundation has done, and as many other groups that have hosted me on my tour; and have given people the opportunity to hear my reporting and hear my ideas, and to engage with me, and to criticize me.

 

I want to talk about that reporting: I want to talk about this book which I wrote, which I started writing in 2009 after Israel elected the most right-wing government in its history, and this book is a portrayal of Israel / Palestine during the culmination of a transitional phase which began at the end of the Second Intifada (2000-2005) with the rise of a regime of hafrada, or separation - unilateral separation - imposed on the West Bank and Gaza - which drove bellicose and even anti-democratic attitudes in Israeli society, as Palestinians essentially disappeared from Israeli life; and there was a parallel trend of radicalization in Palestinian society as a result of this unilateral separation.

 

The book begins with Operation Cast Lead - the three-week assault on the Gaza Strip in late 2008 and 2009 - and right as we speak, the Gaza Strip is plunged into darkness - the situation has not really changed. They've had blackouts for a month; their main power generator, which was destroyed during this assault, along with 80% of all arable land in the Gaza Strip - along with the American University, along with the Islamic University, along with the Souhari chicken farms - was destroyed.

 

During this destruction, Israel was carrying out national elections, and the war drove the elections and helped drive the right-wing trend - as 95% of Israelis supported the war during its first week; including the Meretz party, the most left-wing party on the Zionist spectrum.

 

Daniel Bar-Tal (b. 1946), who is a political psychologist who I interview in my book - he's a world-renowned figure because of his work on trauma studies, and specifically on how prolonged conflict has impacted the Israeli psyche, and who did the most extensive survey on Israeli attitudes after and during Operation Cast Lead - and Akiva Eldar (b. 1945), the Israeli journalist, summarized his findings:

 

«Israeli Jews’ consciousness is characterized by a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering» - the fighting in Gaza dashed the little hope Bar-Tal had left that this public would exchange the Drums of War for the Cooing of Doves.

 

The peace process had long been extinguished by this point, along with the Oslo era, and politicians had arisen like Avigdor Lieberman (b. 1958), who was campaigning under the banner of the Yisrael Beiteinu party; a mostly Russian party with a simple promise: ‘No loyalty, No citizenship’ - in other words, if Palestinian citizens of Israel failed to declare their loyalty to the Jewish State, they would be rapidly stripped of their citizenship and removed through various sundry means.

 

There was also Tzipi Livni (b. 1958) - who was the current peace negotiator, and at the time was the Foreign minister and was running for the prime minister's office - who declared: «Our troops behaved like Hooligans in the Gaza Strip - which I demanded of them» - this was an appeal to votes; while Ehud Barak (b. 1942) - then the Defense minister and the head of the Labor Party - boasted before a Russian audience that he would «Whack a terrorist on the toilet» - which was a direct quote from Vladimir Putin (b. 1952); what Putin said about his campaign in Chechnya; and this was Barak's attempt to outflank Lieberman, who many feared would actually be elected Prime minister; especially after Lieberman swept High School mock elections. Lieberman was the voice of the Israeli youth according to the Center for the Struggle Against Racism, which is an Israeli NGO. 68% of Israeli Jews by 2006 said they would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab; nearly half said they wouldn't allow an Arab into their home, and 63% agreed with the statement «Arabs are a security and demographic threat to the State». The subsequent polls by Camille Fuchs of the Israel Democracy Institute show that those trends have held every subsequent year afterwards.

 

So Lieberman comes into power as the most bellicose of those campaigning; as foreign minister - the third most popular party was Yisrael Beiteinu - Netanyahu emerges as the winner - and I enter; I kind of enter the scene. I decided to take my first extended reporting trip in May 2009 after completing ‘Republican Gomorrah’, my first book, and I used the same methodology as I did in ‘Republican Gomorrah’ to report on this book. Of course, I had to clear a few more hurdles - I sought to immerse myself in the key institutions of Israeli society and at the flash points of conflict and crisis on the ground; and one of the hurdles I had to clear was to get through Ben Gurion International Airport - this is a lot easier for me than it might be for many of you; certainly more easier for me than it was for Anna Lekas Miller, who is a journalistic colleague of mine, who has written for the Daily Beast’s Open Zion, and was recently deported and sent away for at least 10 years without explanation - ostensibly because she's half Lebanese; she's of the wrong ethnicity. Nour Joudah - who is a Palestinian American teacher who was working at the Quaker School in Ramallah - was also deported for 10 years without explanation; presumably because she was of the wrong ethnicity. Ali Gharib; who's here now, and George Hale, who is an American journalist working for Maan News, recently reported that over 100 Arab Americans a year are deported by the State of Israel. Someone who was hassled and humiliated at Ben Gurion International Airport was Donna Shalala (b. 1941); the former Secretary of Health and Human Services under Bill Clinton, ostensibly because she was of the wrong ethnicity - she is Lebanese. Ironically, she was on her way to a conference of college presidents in Israel on how to fight Palestinians and Palestine solidarity organizing on campus. So her detention for two to five hours at Ben Gurion was sort of poetic justice.

 

I have a much easier time entering - I’m asked; am I Jewish, are my parents Jewish or my grandparents Jewish; what Hebrew school did I go to, what two holidays do I celebrate? I say, you know, do I celebrate any holidays? I say yes; they say: Which ones? And I say I'm in the Secret Service, not the army of God - so Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana; and then sometimes I'll contrive an Israeli girlfriend, which really makes the security officers happy because we may help offset the demographic threat together; so I'll declare that we're going to get married, and have lots of Jewish babies - actually when I did this once, I was waved through an additional security check and didn't have to have my bags hand checked. I understand this Jewish privilege that I gain as soon as I enter the the Israeli controlled frontiers of the Holy Land to be an essential ingredient in this book, that I don't think a Palestinian American journalist - who may have been more talented than me - could have done this book, because they could not have gained access to as many places as me. Many places are simply off limits to you, and when I hang out with my Palestinian American friends in Ramallah, whose friendship I gained here in the US - they often ask me if I can get them through Qalandia; basically sneak them through this checkpoint so they can go to the beach - They're basically stuck in this occupied Bantustan, while I am free to go wherever I want - and I have far less connection to the Holy Land than they and their families do. That is something that I don't take lightly. It's part of the burden of my reporting.

 

So one of the institutions that I sought to insinuate myself into was the Knesset, which was the base of Lieberman's plan, and the right’s plan to strip Palestinian citizens - the 20% minority - of their citizenship rights, or to further consolidate institutional discrimination. I witnessed a hearing of the Constitution committee; in which leaders of mainstream Human Rights NGOs were basically brought before the Knesset, to declare their patriotism and to beg the government not to investigate their funding, and to accuse them of being funded by Europe and to accuse them of anti-Semitism and to incite against them through billboard campaigns; accusing them of taking money from secret European funders. Part of this campaign was carried out by the right-wing student group Im Tirtzu; which was ironically being funded by pastor John Hagee (b. 1940), the leading Christian Zionist pastor in the United States - a foreign funder who has said on camera before his congregation that when the Antichrist returns, he will be «homosexual and half Jewish as Hitler was, with fierce features». You know, a very wonderful individual. They had no problem taking money from him.

 

The Constitution committee was headed by David Rotem (1949-2015); who is advancing laws to strip Human Rights NGOs of their funding - again; more speech suppression. And to Rotem's left sat Michael Ben-Ari (b. 1963) - who is a member of the Kach party, which has been outlawed and is identified by the FBI as a terrorist group - he was elected under the National Union party - he was a former deputy of Meir Kahane (1932-1990), who was banned from the Knesset in 1988 for racist incitement - but mainly because he threatened to deprive Yitzhak Shamir (1915-2012) and the Likud party of votes, or split the Likud party's base.

 

And I interviewed first Ben-Ari in his office with my colleague David Sheen - and Ben-Ari made some interesting points to us - because this was someone who had been covered so intensely by the Israeli media - he was always on camera; his histrionics in the West Bank, attempting to prevent outposts from being evacuated, his rampaging with his followers through Jaffa; the Palestinian ghetto of Tel Aviv, chanting «Jaffa for Jews - Arabs out!». He was always on the news, but he had not been able to successfully pass one law; and I said «Why?» He said; «Because Likud is doing it for me - Kahane has won! The governing parties are doing what Kahane wanted to do and are advancing his vision»; and he almost admitted that he had become superfluous - and so, through becoming superfluous he had to continue to try to outflank Yisrael Beiteinu and Likud; moving further to the right, to the point where he told me that «I will never say that Palestine is Jordan, that Jordan is Palestine» - which is kind of what you often hear settlers saying - «Jordan is Israel, it's OURS and it belongs to the Jewish people» - that's how far he was willing to go.

 

So you have Rotem then, at the head of the Constitution committee - which is an important committee, because Israel has no Constitution - Israel has no National identity - the Supreme Court has ruled that identity can only be afforded according to ethnic identity - Jewish or Arab - not Israeli - so the Constitution committee and the Supreme Court are kind of making it up as they go along. And I interviewed Rotem at his home in Efrat; which is a mega settlement in the West Bank - and Rotem told me that what he was doing, was to advance the will of the Israeli public - what the majority really wanted. And I said, «Well, this is the tyranny of the majority - I mean you've introduced a bill, for example, that will authorize the acceptance to communities law, which will authorize communities of under 500, to be able to discriminate on the basis of race or religion; and this bill, by the way, has passed» - and he said; he looked me in the eye and he said: «The tyranny of the majority is the heart of democracy, and it's not tyranny if the majority wants to strip the minority of its rights». I'm slightly paraphrasing, but not much.

 

This is the straightforward style that I got from right-wingers. It was also figures like Ehud Barak, who was then the leader of the Labor Party, who supported a bill to force all new citizens of Israel to take loyalty oaths to the Jewish and Democratic State - this was of course first introduced by Meir Kahane - and Haaretz, when Barak supported this bill, Haaretz declared that Kahane was the real leader of the Knesset; that his legacy had triumphed.

 

There is a new law being debated in the Knesset; it was being debated this morning - it's one of the many laws which is being advanced to basically overrule a Supreme Court ruling and there are also many other laws that are being advanced to strip the Supreme Court of its power, or to stack the Supreme Court with right-wingers - one of those bills will require all Supreme Court Justices to perform military service; which would prevent an Arab from serving on the Supreme Court. And this new law being debated relates to the 60,000 non-jewish African refugees who are living inside Israel right now. These are people who have fled Janjaweed in Darfur; they’ve fled repression in Eritrea, they've fled poverty and genocide across Africa, and they've come to Israel, partly because it's the only industrialized country with a land bridge - connected by land to Africa - through harrowing treks through the Sinai desert, but also partly because they've heard that this place might be a sanctuary; because it claims to embody the lessons of the Holocaust: «Never Again». And what happened to them when they entered Israel, is that they were stripped of their right to work, were prevented from working, and basically concentrated in South Tel Aviv and places like Ashkelon, among the poorest and neediest of Jewish Israeli Society; creating a kind of a new crisis.

 

On May 23rd 2012 there was a fullscale race riot in Tel Aviv - barely covered in US media - with hundreds of thugs rampaging through African areas in Tel Aviv; smashing the storefronts of African businesses, attacking any African they could find - it was preceded and followed by days of fire bomb attacks on African schools and African homes across Israel. Before the race riot, a group of top Israeli legislators and cabinet ministers appeared before a crowd of a thousand in South Tel Aviv - Miri Regev (b. 1965) - who was the chairman of the Interior committee in the Knesset - declared that the Africans are a Cancer in the body of Israel - this was a sentiment that most Jewish Israelis agreed with, according to the Times of Israel, according to a poll by this newspaper. And that incitement; that kind of racist incitement - which is doubled in 2012, according to the Israeli Committee Against Racism - has led to these attacks on Africans and spurred this crisis.

 

To respond to the crisis, the Knesset first passed an amendment to the anti-infiltration act, which would allow the police to arrest any African on the street and detain them without charges, for as long as three years. It also established funding for the Saharonim internment facility in the Negev desert; where currently thousands of non-jewish Africans are sleeping in shipping containers - entire families. The government calls it an internment center - former speaker of the Knesset Reuven Rivlin (b. 1939) called it a concentration camp. I don't know what to call it, but I would volunteer my opinion that it reminds me of Manzanar; which was the camp that held Japanese Americans during World War II, after they were deemed to possess enemy race blood - and Benjamin Netanyahu has explained explicitly, under pressure from figures like Ben-Ari and Rotem, why these Africans have to be held in this camp and ultimately deported - 100% have to be deported, because they threaten the Jewish character of the State - in other words; they threaten the Jewish demographic majority - there is no path to citizenship for these non-jewish Africans; and even when they attempted to convert en mass to Judaism, they were denied that opportunity - there is no path to asylum for them. Over 99.7% have been denied asylum - because they are of the wrong ethnic group and threaten to upend the ethnocratic structure of the Jewish State, and Netanyahu makes no secret of this.

 

The new law I mentioned, will propose an alternative solution - I think it's been passed in the Knesset, it’s been authorized. Under the alternative solution, because the Supreme Court struck down the amendment to the anti-infiltration act, Africans will be able to leave a new detention or internment facility during the day - they'll have to check in three times a day - they will not be allowed to work - and at at night they have to report back and sleep in this facility, because they cannot sleep among the Israeli public, they can't be allowed that opportunity. It reminds me of what James Loewen (1942-2021) called sundown towns during the Jim Crow era in the US, when African-Americans were barred through various ordinances from being in US cities and towns, including Chevy Chase, Maryland after dark - so through this new alternative solution; Israel could become the world's largest Sundown town.

 

This is part of a process which began in 1948 - non-jewish Africans are experiencing it, but Palestinians were the original victims - and the original anti-infiltration act was passed in 1954 to uproot tens of thousands of Palestinians who had attempted to reunite with their families, with their farmland, after 1948 - so it's important to see this as a continuous process - not as Ari Shavit (b. 1957), the Israeli author portrays it; as something terrible that happened, but needed to happen for him to be born - the argument he advanced in the New Yorker. But something that, you know, we just have to get over, and let bygones be bygones. It has to be seen as something that's happening every day to Palestinians, on both sides of the Green Line. And Lieberman, and the rightwing, the religious nationalist camp - Lieberman is a secularist - they understand it that way; they do understand it as a continuous process - but they understand it as a continuous process that needs to be finished, because there is this ethnic minority inside Israel which they consider a Trojan Horse or a Fifth Column.

 

Their number one enemy is Haneen Zoabi (b. 1969) and the Balad party - Zoabi is a Palestinian Israeli legislator who I spent a decent amount of time with; I interviewed her in my book - I profiled her and her mentor Azmi Bishara (b. 1956), who's been exiled after being accused of spying for Hezbollah; and Zoabi, after sailing on the Free Gaza Flotilla (2010) and being almost physically attacked in the Knesset upon her return, for denouncing the bloody raid on the top deck of the ship, has become the most hated woman in Israel.

 

The real reason that she's hated, and the Balad party is hated, and Bishara is hated, is because of the Haifa Declaration; because the kind of transformations that they have called for: They have demanded that Israel become a state of all its citizens, whether without religious or ethnic preferences, and for that reason; and that reason alone, they have been declared traitorous and a threat - actually, in a letter issued by the Shin Bet in 2007; by then Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin (b. 1956) - he singled them out, and declared that if they threatened in any way the Jewish or Democratic State, they would be prosecuted. Many have since been prosecuted, and he insisted on the right to surveil any of their activists - a Balad leader from Jaffa; Sami Shehadeh (b. 1975), told me that he doesn't tell their party membership this; but the entire party leadership is currently under surveillance - and that also goes from my left-wing Jewish dissident friends in Israel, who participate in anti-occupation protests - many of them have been called in for Shin Bet interrogations. But the issue is, that they have challenged the ethnocratic character of the State, and Lieberman and the right see them as traitors and want to remove them - and this is partly why Lieberman and the right have the hearts and minds of Jewish Israeli youth, the majority of Jewish Israeli youth; who declare year after year that they'll refuse to sit in a classroom with a fellow Arab - whose psyche has been impacted by the policy of hafrada, or separation - who has grown up in the post Oslo era and see the peace process as one big joke; who admire Naftali Bennett (b. 1972), who just spoke at Brookings.

 

And so the Cry of this generation is to finish ’48 - ’48 is not finished. We hear this cry in the letter of state-funded rabbis - hundreds of religious authorities, who are State appointed - declaring that it is against Jewish law to rent apartments to non-jews, and we hear it in the letter issued by their wives, declaring that it is against Jewish law for Jewish women to date Arab men, for Jews and Arabs to have relationships. And we see it in the burgeoning anti-miscegenation movement that they inspired; through groups like Lehava, which have issued kosher certificates to businesses that refuse to employ Arabs and other non-jews, which have pressured landlords to stop renting to non-jews; including Palestinian college students in Safad.

 

We see it in the youth who they have inspired, the youth who attacked Jamal Julani; the 19-year-old Palestinian in Zion Square; in the center of Jerusalem - right near where I lived for several months - chanting «Death to Arabs», and «A Jew is a soul, an Arab is is a son of a Bitch» - which happens to be a favorite chant of the fans of the Beitar Jerusalem Football Club. And they beat him into a coma because a 15-year-old girl friend of theirs had complained that he had made a pass at her - she admitted to lying later on - but this carries echoes of the submerged past of the United States and of the lynching of Emmett Till (1941-1955). At the courthouse, one of the perpetrators boasted that his only regret was that he didn't kill Julani; while Bentzi Gopstein (b. 1969) - the head of the anti-miscegenation group Lehava; whose sister group Hemla has received State funding - declared that these youth lifted Israel's national pride off the floor.

 

We see the calls to finish 1948 in the recent initiative of the World Zionist Organization; an executive arm of the Israeli government, to move 100,000 Jewish settlers into the Galilee - which is inside the Green Line - in order to balance the Arab demographic threat. This idea of demographic balancing is anachronistic and peculiar in this era, but it is also essential to maintaining the Jewish character of the State of Israel. And we see the calls to finish ’48 in the Prawer Plan - which was introduced by Benjamin Netanyahu's policy and planning chief Ehud Prawer - to remove most of the indigenous Bedouin population, living in unrecognized villages in the Negev desert.

 

I did a lot of reporting in the Negev desert, which you'll find on the pages of Goliath. I reported on the destruction of Al-Araqeeb, which is one of the first unrecognized villages to be targeted under this plan, which had not been announced at the time. And I wrote about arriving to the village at night, being hosted by the villagers and waking up to the sound of bulldozers and watching homes be tossed away like empty crates, watching their residents, including a young girl, sit out on her bed in the middle of the desert and basically watch her future destroyed. I wrote about how that village has been destroyed 51 times - 51 times since I witnessed its destruction; and I wrote about how the Jewish National Fund - a 501(c) nonprofit in the United States; which is funding the destruction of Al-Araqeeb and supporting the Prawer Plan, plans to build a forest in collaboration with GOD TV - an Evangelical Christian Zionist TV network in the UK - which has declared its intention to beautify the land of Israel for the return of the Messiah - and they will build a Pine Forest in the heart of the Negev desert on top of the ruins of Al-Araqeeb.

 

This was one of many of the villages that have been targeted under the Prawer Plan - there are 80,000 Bedouins living in unrecognized villages - unrecognized village means that you're unable to hook up to the public water supply; you can't connect to the public electricity grid, even though if you see these villages as you're driving through the Negev - most lay under electricity wires - they're unable to have public health clinics, public schools, and all of their construction is declared illegal - illegal simply because they are of the wrong ethnic group.

 

There are Jewish settlements - that are small Jewish towns; placed right near these unrecognized villages - which are free to hook up to public services and get massive State subsidies - so there's clearly a sense of inequality - and under the Prawer Plan, 40 to 70,000 indigenous Bedouins will be forced from their homes. Their villages will be generally bulldozed, and they'll be moved to undisclosed locations - there's no map right now, so we don't know where they'll be moved; or to places like Rahat and Houra, which are two of the only towns that the State of Israel has built for its Arab population; and which are in effect Indian reservations that exist at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. According to the OR movement, which is a para-governmental group; an arm of the Jewish National Fund - Rahat and Houra were built to «concentrate the Bedouin population». This really eerie rhetoric of concentration is present, again.

 

I visited this September along with my colleague from Mondoweiss, Allison Deger, and a few other colleagues, a village called Umm al-Hiran; which was the next village on the chopping block - and we met with its residents and they told us of an unending - unending stream of dispossession and removals, until they finally wound up in this village - which has now been authorized for destruction by the Israeli government. They have already had to repeatedly bail out their sheep - which are impounded by the Israeli Green Patrol to deprive them of sustenance, and they actually have to pay bail on their sheep - and they told us about a group of settlers - this is inside the Green Line, but they called them settlers - and they called them the ‘Jews in the Woods’; and I said: «What are the ‘Jews in the Woods’ - is this like a Mel Brooks movie, like Robin Hood: Men in Tights or something? Like, this sounds unusual». And we drove through the Yatir Forest at night - it was kind of like a scene from a horror movie, where the teenagers hear a sound in the basement and they go into the dark basement. And we're going through this dark forest built by the Jewish National Fund right next to Umm al-Hiran, and we finally arrive at the base of the forest, and we come to this compound - surrounded by barbed wire and fences - and our colleague Phil Weiss gets out and starts shaking the fence and says «Shalom! Shalom!» and suddenly the gate opens, and we're inside talking to one of the village leaders - who is one of the heads of the town council of Hiran - and he tells us that the Bedouin are the real occupiers - that the Bedouins are building illegally and trying to take over Israel, and it's his job to help remove them and replace them with legal construction. The night before, he and the fellow residents of Hiran had gone into Umm al-Hiran to stake out lots; which they would take over after the residents of Umm al-Hiran were forced into the Indian Reservation of Houra. All of Hiran was built by the Jewish National Fund and all of the new village will be supported by the Jewish National Fund, which was just Fed’ed and celebrated by Prime Minister Stephen Harper (b. 1959) in Canada, in Toronto.

 

So the residents of Umm al-Hiran have started connecting with the other residents of unrecognized villages and getting ready for the November 30th Day of Rage against the Prawer Plan; and this took place recently - it required the New York Times to finally report on the Prawer Plan; and they called it a resettlement plan - they didn't call it what it was; which is an expulsion plan. It was another whitewash by the New York Times; and something that I think validates the reporting in my book.

 

And Avigdor Lieberman responded to these protests - which were very very vehement - people were fighting for their very lives; they're fighting for their ancestral land there and they were fighting for their very future - and Lieberman declared «Nothing has changed since the tower and stockade days - we are fighting for the lands of the Jewish people and there are those who intentionally try to rob and seize them» - he said that about the Bedouins; this is inside the Green Line - again, I haven't left the Green Line in this entire discussion. I will do so during Q&A; and I've done extensive reporting on the West Bank and on what's happening inside the Gaza Strip.

 

This is happening inside the area of Israel that will be legitimized under a two-state solution, what some call «Democratic Israel». And it is happening before our very eyes; unlike what happened in 1948 - it's happening and it's being filmed on cell phone cameras; it's being filmed by news crews, it's being reported in our media - and we're all well aware of it. And our government has said nothing about it. The State Department has said nothing to condemn it. The Obama Administration has said nothing to condemn it - there's no initiative in Washington to stop it - and there may not be.

 

And there's very little effort to stop - from my vantage point - the trends that I described, that are corroding Jewish Israeli Society - that are bringing to power figures like Lieberman; who is engaged in a pact with Netanyahu, that will allow Netanyahu, that will merge his party with the ruling Likud party; allowing Netanyahu to stay in power till 2017 and making Lieberman his natural successor. There is nothing being done - very little external pressure - to stop figures like Shimon Gapso from emerging as Mayors and local leaders of places like Nazareth Illit - Gapso has said that he will fight tooth and nail to prevent any non-jewish symbols from being displayed in his town; including Christmas trees on Christmas, and that he's merely carrying out the legacy of Herzl and Ben Gurion. There's nothing being done to prevent figures like Aryeh King (b. 1973); who fundraises in the US, from being elected to the Jerusalem Municipal Council - this is someone who recruits what he calls «strong men» to physically remove Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem and replace them with Jewish settlers - and has done so repeatedly.

 

All of the trends in my book will intensify under the current status quo; encouraged right here in Washington. I come to a lot of conclusions in my book, and I'll come to further conclusions in my talk with Peter - I'm not going to pull any punches - and I'm sure there will be people in this audience who will disagree with my conclusions. But what I think can't be denied is that facts on the ground are troubling and unsustainable, and that they will not change the trends that I describe in my book - they will only intensify as long as the current status quo is maintained. Thank you.

 

Peter Bergen: Well, Max, thank you for much to think about. The critiques of your book seem to be not so much about the facts - many which; you know, you've obviously done an amazing reporting job - it's more about the tone in the book, and specifically words like ’pogrom’, and the chapter headings ’Concentration Camp’ and ‘Night of Broken Glass´ - which of course is a an echo of Kristallnacht - so, tell me about your decisions to name these chapters - and what was your intent?

 

Max Blumenthal: Thanks for that question; which I haven't had much of a chance to answer - but definitely the content of those chapters inspires the titles - and I quoted Reuven Rivlin (b. 1939); who is the Grand Old Man of the Likud party - who is an eighth generation Israeli sabra; whose father translated the Quran into hebrew - who tried to give Haneen Zoabi (b. 1969) the chance to talk after the Mavi Marmara; expressing his disgust with the Saharonim desert facility and the whole plan to basically put non-jewish Africans in an internment Center - and he simply said «It’s un-jewish to have a concentration camp in our country» - I’m somewhat paraphrasing - he explicitly used the term concentration camp in an interview with Haaretz - so did the Israeli architectural NGO Bimkom - so do many Israelis who are campaigning against the Saharonim facility - and I think what they're doing is; they're taking the lessons of the Holocaust and looking at it from a universalist perspective - and simply saying Never Again to anyone - and that the Holocaust, as horrible as it was; and though it can't be compared to anything in terms of scale - should inspire us today; to combat against human rights abuses, and to combat against racist incitement and anti-democratic laws - you know, it all began with anti-democratic laws and with racist incitement. And as Martin Luther King (1929-1968) said - «The ultimate conclusion of racism is genocide». So, the critics of these chapters apparently hate the universalist perspective on the Holocaust and the idea of Never Again to anyone; and they simply want to enforce a segregationist perspective on the Holocaust, where you can't see the events of Kristallnacht and think about that - even though you've been raised to see the Holocaust and Nazi Germany as the ultimate Evil - you can't think of that when you see right-wing thugs singling out people in South Tel Aviv for their ethnicity and smashing their storefronts and firebombing their homes; because they are of the wrong ethnicity and have been declared a threat to the State. It simply stems from that; and I did want to invoke these lessons with those chapter titles, and the universalist perspective of this history; as so many Jewish Israelis in this book from across the political spectrum do.

 

Peter Bergen: And judging by what you've just said; for you the peace process is sort of a mirage - I mean, John Kerry’s efforts will yield nothing; and if that's the case - what are your - and you know, you don't have to answer if this is sort of outside of your lane - but I mean; what are realistic ideas about the future accommodations that are necessary?

 

Max Blumenthal: I've always seen it as my role as a journalist to offer a critique but not necessarily to offer a solution. In my first book I offered a pretty slashing critique of the Republican party - I think the book has been vindicated by the path the Republican party has taken under the control of the Christian right and the Tea Party - and I didn't really offer the Republican party a solution for resolving its crisis - and in this case, in my book - whatever perspective you come from, you're not going to find me preaching to you about a solution - although my analysis and my framing has offended some people - I do think that the two-state solution first of all has never been earnestly seriously proposed - the Palestinians have always been offered a kind of Bantu state, and have always been offered sort of a recipe for political fragmentation between Gaza and the West Bank - they've never been afforded the opportunity to elect their own leadership; they've never been offered control of their own borders - the borders have never really been set - they've never been offered control of their own airspace, of their own water - which mostly sits beneath the mega settlement of Ariel - and details were just leaked of what the Israelis want; which the US will probably support over Palestinian demands, given the composition of the US negotiating team - former AIPAC staffer Martin Indyk (b. 1951) and WINEP analyst David Makovsky - figures like that - the Israelis want the Jordan Valley, and they want early warning stations across the West Bank - they want to still have a security presence in the West Bank; which means that the West Bank will remain occupied. Meanwhile there's no discussion about the Gaza Strip; which the United Nations has warned will become uninhabitable by 2020 - because of food insecurity; because of lack of ability to get clean water; the anemia rate for children is close to 50%; child deformities are at, I think one out of four; birth complications; the fact that fishermen from Gaza have been driven into poverty because they can't move beyond the 3 kilometer perimeter - they're now trying to import fish through the tunnels; the illegal tunnels through Rafah - which is insane for a territory that's on the Mediterranean coast, and 80% of those tunnels have now been filled with sewage by the ‘coupvolutionary’ regime of Egypt - the military coup regime of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (b. 1954) - who is the former liaison to Ehud Barak on collaborating in the Sinai - so the Gaza Strip is in this very unusual situation where you have 1.7 million people who are not really allowed to export goods. I report at the beginning of my book, that Israeli administrators who administer The Siege are actually counting the calories that each resident of the Gaza Strip is entitled to - because they're able to control the lives of Gazans to that degree - to the degree of how many calories they eat. In the words of Dov Weissglas - the former aide to Ehud Olmert and longtime peace negotiator - «The residents of Gaza should be put on a diet but not allowed to starve» - so that's the situation they're in. It's not addressed by the peace process.

 

You asked about looking beyond it - yes, we have to look beyond this failed idea of two states and look at some of the ideas that might have been proposed by Ian Lustick (b. 1949); the University of Pennsylvania political scientist who talked about the possibility of a bi-national state - in other words, looking beyond the idea of Palestinian sovereignty or a Palestinian State; towards the idea of equality for all people - equal rights for all people between the river and the Sea.

 

Ali Abunimah (b. 1971) has just written a really interesting proposal for a single state - which the Israeli human rights NGO Zochrot has actually put forward - a blueprint for the resettlement of Palestinian refugees inside Israel-Palestine - an actual, physical blueprint where their communities can go, without uprooting Israeli Jews - so there are all these interesting proposals out there. There's the Haifa Declaration that I mentioned, from the Balad party; which is very similar to the kind of situation that allowed for a treaty between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, and offers that kind of scenario - but as long as we continue on the path that we're on - as I said, the trends will continue - and the possibility for reconciliation between Israeli Jews and Palestinians will just get further and further away - I've seen it on both sides of the wall; just radicalizing attitudes.

 

Peter Bergen: Which years were you living there and reporting, when you were doing [the book]?

 

Max Blumenthal: In 2009 till this September [2013], and I didn't get to report on my trip in August and September in this book. I spent about a total of one year on the ground, and maybe four and a half years doing writing and research.

 

Peter Bergen: What do you think the overall impact of the Arab Spring - for want of a better term; or Arab Awakening is perhaps a better term - has been on the Israeli sort of political consciousness?

 

Max Blumenthal: The immediate impact has been very positive for Benjamin Netanyahu; who's pointed to Syria and pointed to the chaos in Egypt and said; «This is what will come to OUR shores and what will occur in the West Bank if we give up ONE inch». He's also used it to kind of highlight Israel as Ehud Barak portrayed it; as a ‘Villa in the Jungle’ - kind of invoking the famous phrase that Theodore Herzl used - ´The rampart of civilization against barbarism’ - «Look at the barbaric Arabs killing each other, and how dare you ask us to change?», he said. «We are an island of stability in a sea of tumult» - so it sort of benefited Netanyahu and his political imperatives and his effort to carry out a policy of peace without peace - which is essentially occupation maintenance. It's helped him push back against any US pressure, but I don't think that in the end it's going to be very positive for the kind of imperatives that Netanyahu seeks, and for the State of Israel as this kind of fortified ‘Villa in the Jungle’ - which actually to me resembles more of a Masada type fortress.

 

[...]

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