Tag: book reviews

This book review was originally published in DAWN in November 2014

Anyone who follows the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon becomes familiar with the basic issues that are impediments in the way of a political settlement: the status of Jerusalem, the Jewish-only settlements that cut through the occupied West Bank, the separation barrier dividing Palestinian villagers from their agricultural land.

Pakistanis are overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and most of our discussion focuses on how Palestinians experience daily life under occupation. While these issues are obviously important, there has been much less focus on the effects of conducting the military occupation on Israelis themselves. Brutalizing another people obviously imposes great psychic costs on the society that is carrying it out, requiring the dehumanization of the “Other”.

One source that addresses the price that Israelis must pay in order to sustain the occupation is Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel by American journalist Max Blumenthal. A first-person account based on five years that Blumenthal spent traveling through what he refers to as “Israel-Palestine” (acknowledging that there is de-facto one state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River), the book provides a unique perspective on the darker undercurrents of Israeli society. The author’s privileged status as a Jewish-American allowed him to travel to areas that would have been inaccessible to a reporter of another background, particularly one of Arab or Muslim origin.

Israelis often refer to their country as the “only democracy in the Middle East,” defending this claim by pointing out that the Knesset (parliament) contains elected representatives of Palestinian Citizens of Israel — referred to within the country as “Israeli Arabs” in order to deny them their identity as Palestinians. However, these representatives from “Arab parties” are often viewed as fifth-columnists. Blumenthal describes an incident that took place in the summer of 2010 when Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian Israeli parliamentarian from the Balad Party, addressed her colleagues after the Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship that had attempted to break Israel’s blockade on Gaza.

Though she had been promised five minutes to speak, the parliament’s speaker ordered Zoabi to leave the podium after a minute and a half, most of which was consumed by heckling and interruptions. Blumenthal writes:

As she passed through the Knesset gallery, legislators lunged at her again, one by one, shouting, ‘Where is your knife?’ and calling her a ‘terrorist’. Finally, a female security guard lifted Zoabi off her feet and attempted to carry her out of the main hall. But when she reached the door, Zoabi broke free from the guard, stomped back into the hall, took a seat in her chair, and crossed her arms in a defiant pose while the red-faced screamers surrounded her, their violent fury restrained only by a wall of security guards and a few of Zoabi’s colleagues from Balad. Many Israeli liberals were shocked by the spectacle, but the scenes were nothing new in Israel’s Knesset.

Not only was there no condemnation of the treatment of an elected representative of the minority population, Zoabi was actually punished for her remarks. She was stripped of her diplomatic passport and barred from addressing the assembly or participating in committee votes for a full parliamentary season. The fact that a parliamentarian representing a constituency that forms 20 per cent of Israel’s population is treated as a traitor for resisting the official narrative reveals a society in which dissent is too great a threat to tolerate. Continue reading Review: Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel by Max Blumenthal