GOLIATH: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

welcome to the new america foundation uh it's our pleasure to welcome max blumenthal to discuss his new book goliath life and living in greater israel uh max is a journalist who's written uh 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 that shattered the the party which was a new york times bestseller and uh max is going to talk about the big themes and uh 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 thanks uh is this that's home yeah and if you guys hear me okay you understand that yeah i'll i'll stand and deliver like edward james olmos um thanks a lot peter and thanks to the new america foundation and to uh anne-marie slaughter i know she can't be here now but i appreciate the opportunity to talk about this book and have this discussion here and 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 gonna uh be cancelled that it could at least be pushed forward because i'm kind of a night owl and i wanted a few extra hours of sleep but that was a joke i i i want to start the talk actually by discussing the issue of speech suppression around this issue just really briefly i understand there was no effort to 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 just spoke at the brookings institute 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 pm for fear that they would date arab doctors this was a decision made under pressure from the anti-miscegenation group lahava 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 definitely 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 avram berg barred him from speaking for their audience apparently avram berg 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 iad bernat the palestinian filmmaker 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 anshe hesed which is a synagogue in new york recently shut down a panel on israeli democracy that was to have included j.j goldberg of the jewish daily forward who has attempted and completely failed to savage my book who is a former uh who who is a former israeli member of the israeli 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 tribe fest 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 edits annual conference and then there is one there is the situation inside israel where journalists like uri blau of haaretz have been prosecuted for review 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 of the pro against the proverb plan the plan to remove 40 000 indigenous indigenous veterans from their homes um there's been a 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 their these attacks have been carried out from the heart of the knesset and for palestinian journalists the situ 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 pro-israel groups discourse suppressors moved in to scrub their name from the ceremony and richard engel the nbc bureau chief when he spoke at the ceremony would not condemn that he would not condemn that in any explicit terms al-watan the palestinian 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 uh this kind of repression on a very uh 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 have done and have given people the opportunity to hear my reporting and hear my ideas and to engage with me and to criticize me and so i want to talk about that reporting i want to talk about this book which i wrote um it's about 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 in during a during the culmination of a transitional phase which began at the end of the second intifada with the rise of a regime of hafrada or separation unilateral separation imposed on the west bank in 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 uh generator which was destroyed during this assault along with 80 80 percent of all arable land in the gaza strip along with the american university along with the islamic university along with the sowari chicken farms was destroyed during this destruction israel israel was carrying out national elections and one tren the war drove the elections and helped drive the right wing trend as 95 percent of israelis supported the war during its first week including the merits party the most left-wing party on the zionist spectrum um daniel barthal who is a political psychologist who i interview in my book he's a world-renowned uh 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 caslead and akiva elder 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 bartal 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 who was campaigning under the banner of the israel battenu party a mostly russian party with a promise 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 sippy livni who was the current peace negotiator and at the time was the foreign minister and was running for office 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 ahud barak then the defense minister and the head of the labour party boasted before a russian audience that he would uh he would whack a terrorist on the toilet which was a direct quote from vladimir putin what putin said about his uh campaign in chechnya and this was barack's attempt to outflank lieberman who many feared would actually be elected prime minister especially after lieberman swept high school elections 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 um 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 israeli democracy institute show that those trends have held every subsequent in in every year afterwards so lieberman comes into power as the most bellicose of those campaigning as foreign minister the third most popular party was israel betenu netanyahu emerges as the winner i enter i kind of enter the the scene i decided to take my first extended reporting trip in may 2009 after completing my after completing republican gamora 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 it's certainly more easier for me than it was for analicus miller who is a journalistic colleague of mine who was written for the daily beasts 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 nord judah 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 garib who's here now and george hale who is an american journalist working for mon 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 the former secretary of health and human services under bill clinton ostensibly because she was of the wrong ethnicity she is lebanese uh ironically she was on her way to a conference of college presidents in israel on how to fight palestinians palestine solidarity organizing on campus so her detention for five 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 um 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 hashanah 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 waived through an additional security check it didn't have to have my bags hand checked i understand this jewish privilege that i gain as soon as i enter the israeli-controlled frontiers of the holy land to be an essential ingredient in this book that this book that i don't think a palestinian journalist 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 my palace when i hang out with my palestinian-american friends in ramallah who i whose friendship i gained here in the u.s they often ask me to if i can um get them through calandia basically sneak them through this checkpoint so they can go to the beach they're basically stuck in this occupied bantu stand 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 um it's part of the burden of my reporting so one of the institutions that i um sought to insinuate myself into was the knesset which was the base of lieberman's plan and the rights plan to strip palestinian citizens to 20 minority of their citizenship rights or to further consolidate institutional discrimination i witnessed a hearing of the constitution committee in which leaders of uh mainstream and 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 in tirtsu which was ironically being funded by pastor john hagee 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 a very you know a very wonderful individual they were had no problem taking money from him um and this the constitution committee was headed by david rotem who is advancing laws to strip human rights ngos of their funding again more speech suppression um until rotom's left sat mikhail ben ari who is a member of the party which has been outlawed and is identified by the fbi as a terrorist group um he was elected under the national the national union party um he was a former deputy of mayor kahana who was banned from the knesset in 1988 for racist incitement but mainly because he threatened to deprive yitzhak shamir of and the likud party of votes or split the likud party's base um and i interviewed uh first ben ari in his office with my colleague david sheen and ben ari told us in interest 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 this was you know he was always on the news but he had not been able to successfully pass one law and i said why why he said because likud is doing it for me kahana has won the the governing parties are doing what kahana wanted to do and are advancing his vision and i i'm and he almost admitted that he had become superfluous um and so in by through becoming superfluous he had to continue to try to outflank israel betenu and likud moving further to the right to the point where he told me that i will never say that palestine is jor that jordan is palestine which is kind of what you always 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 and 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 you know 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 um the 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 i mean this is the straightforward style that i got from right wingers it was also figures like ehud barak who is then the leader of the labour 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 mayor kahana and haaretz when barack uh supported this bill haaretz declared that kahana was the real leader of the knesset that his legacy had triumphed um there is there there is a new law being debated in the knesset it was being debated this morning and advanced 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 take uh to to perform military service which would prevent an arab from serving on the supreme court um and this new um 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 janja weed 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 to the 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 they what happened to them when they entered israel is that they were stripped of their right to work or 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 23 2012 there was a full-scale race riot in tel aviv barely covered in u.s 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 firebomb attacks on african schools and african homes across israel before the before the race riot a group of top israeli legislators appeared and men and cabinet ministers appeared before a crowd of a thousand in south tel aviv miri regev 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 that that 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 that also established funding for the saharanim 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 ruben rivlin 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 uh can that held japanese americans during world war ii um 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 percent 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 on mass to judaism they were denied that opportunity there is no path to asylum for them over 99.7 percent 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 um i want to and and so on the new law i mentioned will propose an alternative solution it's being it's 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 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 lowen called sundown towns during the jim crow era in the u.s when african americans were barred through various ordinances from being in u.s 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 the israeli author portrays it as something that terrible that happened but needed to happen for him to be born this is his 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 from on both sides of the green line and lieberman and the right wing the religious nationalist camp lieberman as 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 um the number their number one enemy is hanin zawabi and the ballad party um zawabi is a palestinian-israeli legislator i spent a lot of a decent amount of time with i interviewed her in my book i profiled her and her mentor osmi bashara who's been exiled after being accused of spying for hezbollah and zoabi after sailing on the free gaza flotilla and being almost physically attacked in the knesset upon her return for denouncing the um the bloody raid on the top deck of the ship um has become the most hated woman in israel but the real reason that she's hated and the ballad parties hated and bashar is hated is because of the haifa declaration because of what they have called for 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 bed in 2007 by then shin bet director yuval diskin he singled them out and declared that if they threatened in any way the jewish or democratic state they would be prosecuted many have been since prosecuted and he declared the right to insisted on the right to surveil any of their activists a ballad leader from jaffa sami shahadah 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 um who uh 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 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 hafradar separation who have grown up in the post-oslo era and see the peace process as one big joke who admire naftali bennett 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 uh 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 lahava 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 sfat we 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 as a soul and arab as a son of a which happens to be a favorite chant of the fans of the betar jerusalem football club and they beat him into a coma because a 15 year old girl a 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 at the courthouse um one of the perpetrators boasted that his only regret was that he didn't kill giulani while benzie gopsteen the head of the anti-miscegenation group lahava 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 and 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 proverb plan which was introduced by benjamin netanyahu's policy and planning chief ehud prover 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 alar akib 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 c3 pro non-profit in the united states which is um funding the destruction of alara aqib and supporting the proverb plan uh 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 akib this was meant one of many of the villages that have been targeted under under the proverb plan there are eighty thousand bedouins living in unrecognized villages unrecognized an 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 subsidies um so there's clearly a sense of inequality and under the proverb plan 40 to 70 000 indigenous veterans will be forced from their homes their villages will be generally bulldozed and they'll be moved to un undisclosed locations there's no map right now so we don't know where they'll be moved or to places like rahat and hura which are the only 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 socio-economic scale according to the orr movement which is a para-governmental group an arm of the jewish national fund rahat and hura were built to quote unquote concentrate the bedouin population this really eerie rhetoric of concentration is present again there were i i visited this september along with uh my colleague from mondo ice allison dagger and some of our a few other colleagues a village called umal hiran which was the next village on the chopping block and we met with its residents and they told us of an unending unending um stream of dispossession and removals until they finally wound up in this village which 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 uh 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 like teenagers hear a sound in the basement and so they go into the dark basement and we're going through this dark forest built by the jewish national fund right next to umalhiran 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 this the town council of hiran and he tells us that the bedouins are the real occupiers that the bedouins are building illegally and trying to take over israel and it's his job um to help remove them and replace them with legal construction the night before he and the fellow residents of huron had gone into umalhiran to stake out lots which they would take over after the residents of umahiran were forced into the indian reservation of hura all of iran was built by the jewish national fund and all of the new village will be supply supported by the jewish national fund which was just feted and celebrated by prime minister stephen harper in canada in toronto so the residents of umahiran have started connecting with the other residents of unrecognized villages and staging uh getting ready for the november 30th day of rage against the proverb plan this took place recently it required the new york times to finally report on the prover 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 you know validates the report the value of the reporting in my book um 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 and they were fighting for their very future and lieberman declared nothing has changed since the tower in 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 but this is happening inside the area of israel that will be legitimized under a two-state solution what some call democratic israel and the it is happening before our very eyes unlike what happened in 1948. it's happening it's being filmed on cell phone cameras it's being filmed by news crews it's being reported in our media and 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 probably 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 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 until 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 elite 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 is nothing being done to prevent figures like ari king who fundraises in the u.s 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 the east bank in the west in the east in east jerusalem and replaced 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 um and you know i'm so 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 the this audience will disagree with my conclusions but what i think can't be denied is that the facts on the ground are just are troubling and unsustainable and that they will not change the trends that i describe in my book will only intensify as long as the current status quo is maintained thank you well max thank you for much to think about um you know the 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 um you know words like pogrom or and the chapter headings concentration camp and night of broken glass which of course is a an echo of crystal knocks so tell me about um your decisions to name these chapters um and did you do it i mean was there any intent to what was your intent um thanks for that question which i haven't had much of a chance to answer but definitely the content of those chapters this the content of those chapters inspires the titles and i quoted reuben rivlin who is the grand old man of the likud party who is an eighth generation israeli sabra whose father translated the quran into arabic who tried to give hanin zawabi the chance to talk after the mavi marmara expressing his disgust with the saharanim desert facility and the whole plan to basically put non-jewish africans in an internment center and he simply said uh it's unjewish to have a concentration camp in our country basically i'm somewhat paraphrasing he explicitly used the term concentration camp in ha in uh interview with horowitz so did the israeli architectural ngo bikram and so do many of my many israelis who are campaigning against the saharan 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 um as horrible as it was and though it can't be compared to anything in terms of scale should you know 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 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 the events of um 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 um a threat to the state um so that it simply stems from that and i did want to um invoke these lessons with those chapter titles and the universalist perspective of this history as so many um jewish israelis in this book from across the political spectrum do you i mean and judging by what you've just said i mean if you the peace process is sort of a mirage um i mean john kerry's efforts will yield nothing and if that's the case what is what what i mean what are your and you know you don't have to answer if you haven't if this is sort of outside your lane but i mean what are realistic ideas about the future accommodations that are necessary i mean i've always seen it as my role as a journalist to offer a critique but not necessarily to offer a solution i mean 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 i mean if you just read my book whatever perspective you come from you're not going to find me preaching to you about a solution although i i 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 stand 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 air space 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 u.s will probably support over palestinian demands given the composition of the u.s negotiating team former aipac staffer martin indic and winap analyst david makovsky figures like that and they want 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. so even in the proposal because because of uh lack lack of uh because of food insecurity because of uh lack of ability to get clean water and the anemia rate for children is close to 50 percent um deformities are at a i think one out of four they're like um birth complications um because of uh the fact that um got fishermen from gaza have been driven into poverty because they can't move beyond the three kilometer perimeter they are now trying to import fish through the tunnels the illegal tunnels through rafa which is insane for a territory that's on the mediterranean coast and 80 percent of those tunnels have now been filled with sewage by the um uh evolutionary regime of egypt the uh the the military coup regime of general abdel fattah sisi who is the former uh liaison to a hood barack on collaborating in the sinai so the gaza strip is is in this very unusual situation where you have 1.7 people who are not really allowed to export goods my report at the beginning of my book that israeli administrators who administer minister 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 in the words of dove weiss glass the former aide to a huda olmert and a long time peace negotiator the residents of gaza should be not allowed 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 and so 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 lustig the university of pennsylvania political scientist who talked about abide the possibility of a binational 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 freedom of movement a possibility for ali abu nema has written a really interesting proposal for a single state which and the israeli human rights ngo zilchrod has actually put forward a blueprint for the resettlement of palestinian refugees inside israel-palestine 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 is just we'll get further and further away i've seen it on both sides of the wall just radicalizing attitudes which which years were you living and reporting when you were doing in 2009 until this september um and i didn't get to report my on my trip in august and september in this book so i spent about a total of one year on the ground and four four maybe four and a half years doing writing and research what do you think the overall impact of the arab spring for want of the better term or arab awakenings perhaps a better term has been on the israeli sort of political consciousness i mean yeah the the immediate impact has been very positive for benjamin netanyahu who has 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 and he's also used it to kind of highlight israel as a hood barack portrayed it as a villa in the jungle kind of invoking the famous phrase that theodore herzl used the ram part of civilization against barbarism look at the barbaric arabs killing each other and how dare you ask us to change he's he said you know we are an island of stability and 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 u.s 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 the people in the the arab masses do not like israel very much they have been held at bay by repressive dictators and the more that their will i mean there was a rally in tahrir square of uh possibly of hundreds of thousands of people chanting uh you know one one one million that that we're going to march to jerusalem i don't remember the exact chant um so so that i mean they they feel this but they don't i mean they don't understand i don't know if they really see if if these people in tahrir square see a future for israeli jews in the region which is another reason that it has to there has to be an urgency on looking past the two-state solution and the status quo and finding a way to resolve this through new ideas um i also think that the syrian situation is benefiting israel militarily because bashar al-assad has been a very good ally a backdoor ally for israel he's held the border with the golan heights without challenging israel's occupation they've wanted him to stay in power but he's being weakened and ground down um this is the levitonization strategy advanced by bernard lewis in which arab states are fragmented along sectarian lines and weakened so they can't challenge israel it's at the base of the clean break document that was advanced by neocons during the 90s and influenced the bush administration and hezbollah's pinned down inside syria and being weakened as well so all of this seems to benefit israel in the near term but we need to look at the arab spring as potentially an arab century and there is no end game in the israeli military intelligence apparatus for controlling for controlling it or dealing with its consequences how much discussion is there of al qaeda's sort of de facto control of much of northern syria is that something that has been discussed or thought about it's discussed more among people i've spoken to in the palestinian authority as a reason for them to continue to be funded and to continue to be supported and they always say you know you don't want us you don't want us okay well then welcome welcome al-qaeda to the west bank i mean this is an autocratic government that is propped up by u.s and gulf aid and israeli aid and really has to justify its existence on the basis of it's increasingly justifying its existence on the basis of that fear so it has strengthened the presence of al qaeda has strengthened fatah and fata also engaged in a propaganda campaign with the military coup government of egypt against palestinian refugees in egypt who are accused of being hamas operatives and are now being um incited against and even attacked in the streets of cairo and they fatah did this in order to help prop up the regime of sisi who is um you know very much in line with their thinking and their style of government great we'll open it up to questions if you have a question can you uh wait for the microphone and identify yourself and we'll start with this gentleman over here hi i'm blake selzer with care international thank new america foundation for hosting this and max for your comments in your preface you i think pointedly state that while you may not agree with all of my conclusions hopefully you'll carefully consider the facts on the ground that appear in the pages of this book my question following up on that is what is your view of the american public um and even more pointedly american policymakers ability to see the facts on the ground and if and relate to that who would you like most to read this book who would i like to most to read this book of america um the american public consistently declares that it supports the state of israel over the palestinians but that support is very thin and it's much lower than ever at the grassroots base of the democratic party it's basically split at the grassroots base of the democratic party and then when you look at the internals the more educated grassroots democrats are the more supportive they are of palestinians i don't see why it has to be an either or question i think it's an unfortunate way of polling people but this is the way that they're polled and so there's a crisis brewing for aipac which has been exposed in the past few weeks because and in the past few months they failed to get they lost on syria and they were exposed it was very unpopular among the american public and they lost on iran and they were exposed this was also very the deal is very popular with the american public but they haven't lost on palestine yet the question is to what extent can the grassroots democratic base have any influence on the kind of democrats who are elected who have very little to gain and a lot to lose uh by embracing even the slightest amount of pressure the kind of pressure that bush won and james baker applied on israel which allowed for the madrid talks to actually take place this is almost off limits now thanks to people like haim saban who basically funded the construction of the democratic national committee headquarters in arlington and who i think was responsible for hosting naftali bennett at the brookings institute and has been a major funder of the obamas and the clintons and terry mcauliffe he had a huge fundraiser for him in virginia so i think people are recognizing that they if they care about this issue and they care about even the kind of two-state solution that j street advances i'm talking about the kids in j street you who i meet on my book tour who don't who don't agree with me that they have no voice in congress and they have no voice in this administration and in this city and so they're turning increasingly to grassroots activism and there is an opportunity for them to make an impact through the bds movement the movement to boycott divest from and sanction institutions that are involved with the occupation and human rights abuses in israel-palestine and this is gaining mainstream appeal to the point where catherine peraltas who is a j street board member has actually called for jews to support bds to fight for a two-state solution i mean this is something you would have never heard of like five years ago gideon levy has just called for israel to be sanctioned in order to end the occupation and he said we can't just limit it at the settlements because tel aviv university and hebrew university and the entire um the en all the institutions of israeli life are involved in the occupation this is not some i mean he's hated in israel but he is in fact shimon peres his former speech writer i mean he's a long time labor movement function labor party functionary so the longer this campaign of suppression and um aggressive lobbying in congress continues the more the bds movement gains strength and moves into the mainstream gentleman here thank you very much i after a very dreary uh portrayal of the situation in israel i was a bit encouraged by your somewhat pos more positive comments regarding things like the bds movement and grassroots movements uh peter bergen asked you about the impact of the arab spring and i'd like you to address the impact of a potentially equally important development and that is the opening of a dialogue between the united states and iran and other western countries this already is resulting in the visits of the iranian foreign ministers in several gulf states hamid karzai apparently is going to visit tehran soon this has a potential for tremendous change greater cooperation between the arabs and so on and it suggests a very important change shift in u.s policy how do you think this will impact the prospects for some solution of the palestinian-israeli conflict and just before you answer a good question can you um identify yourself yes i'm a benjamin tour retired foreign service officer thank you thanks and i guess i would open it up to you as well um because i'm not as i'm i don't have expertise on iran i would just make a few points about how this is impacting the u.s relationship with israel the special relationship which is that a recent poll i think taken by the israeli democracy institute it was reported in the jerusalem post two days ago showed a majority of israeli jews in response to this deal declaring that their government should find new allies and turn away from the u.s during the obama era but 70 don't think they will find any new allies so that's kind of a nihilistic opinion speaking of allies you know turkey was obviously a very close ally of israel and and the i mean a big scene in your book is uh is the flotilla and what happened i mean tell tell us give us a sense of what uh that relationship is now and uh what it means well david ben gurion when he was named david greene uh studied in turkey and i think in the days of the ottoman empire and he worked much of his adult life to build this relationship with turkey as part of his uh um policy of winning alliances with non-arab states in the region like turkey or ethiopia and we saw that kind of relationship collapse uh at least briefly after the mavi marmara which was heavily supported which is the gaza fight which was a turkish boat in the gaza flotilla which was heavily supported by recep erdogan and his government which is an islam islamist oriented government sort of a more an islamic republican-style government government and they i mean i think they they helped put up the money for this boat this was almost like an official government boat that was being sent as a message to say we care about people of gaza and we also want to reorient our relationship in this region because we we recognize that we're sort of an indispensable partner of the united states and this was followed by an effort to recognize the armenian genocide in the israeli knesset which obviously the turkish government fervently opposes i think there was there was one point when abe foxman had attempted to stifle attempts to recognize the armenian genocide because of the position of the israeli government and its relationship with turkey and so this was just simply done as an effort to punish turkey i was at the turkish embassy right after the mavi marmara raid and i witnessed hundreds of everyday israelis from tel aviv who had come out through a call on facebook to basically shout at the at this empty office building they somehow wound up chanting death to arabs even though turks are not arabs but that was just kind of kind of an impulse and they burned turkish flags there was just mass hatred of erdogan he was linked to iran and al-qaeda and hitler in the israeli media it always kind of follows from there but i do see an attempt at a rapprochement since netanyahu formally apologized for the raid and i found his apology really interesting since he said that this raid he initially said that the raid was an effort to attack israel and it was backed by al qaeda and world jihad if you're going to apologize for the raid um you kind of are basically negating what you said before and admitting that everything you did was you know propaganda propagandistic in nature um but uh yeah i don't really think that in in the long run it's impacted the relationship um with israel and that also has to do with um us imperatives and u.s demands um and again and i'm not an expert on turkey but this is what i observed it what was interesting i guess is that anyone can be designated as an enemy any nation can be designated as an enemy and linked to al qaeda and hitler if they are seen as applying external pressure on israel and of course one of the most hated figures in israel is barack hussein obama all you need to do is watch some of my videos from jerusalem the night after barack obama's historic speech in cairo to understand the depth of resentment um towards him has that changed over time no and it's intensified i mean avigdor lieberman the top diplomat of israel has called for israel to find new allies caroline glick who is the i think editor-in-chief of the jerusalem post and as a former adviser to netanyahu has called for israel to forge a special relationship with china since china doesn't care about human rights abuses and to move away from the u.s i think it's inevitable that we'll see the special relationship cracking not because of any initiatives in washington but because of the mood of the israeli public the gentleman over here thank you thank you peter max thanks for being the voice of the voiceless uh not only for people on the ground but for a lot of us that have faced lawsuits and threats personal and and um and philosophical for a long time uh especially those of us with jewish names i'm tom gettman i'm i worked for an ngo in the middle east for five years i associate myself with my care colleague and his feelings and i want to ask a bit of a personal question have you found a growing number of people who have experienced what you've experienced who are sort of associating into a group of people that will give you support in public so it's not just being assailed constantly and threatened because i think there's a there's a growing group of people who are willing to put their heads up above the parapet uh particularly since you've verbalized things that uh the rest of us couldn't get out thanks very much well there's more than enough of us to have a minion at this point i mean really really i mean it has i guess um in in jewish life i've had trouble sometimes going to synagogues and hearing a sermon that was supportive of you know israeli repression against palestinians during the second intifada this was a big problem for me and now you know living in new york we have uh you know passovers and all kinds of ceremonies and it's and it's not exclusive to jews but there's just the room is filled with people who feel like i do who are who are passionate about this issue and uh who refuse to be emotionally blackmailed and are willing to pay the price or willing to make the sacrifice to speak out and a lot of this takes place under the banner of jewish voice for peace which is i think one of the most important new organizations in this country on the on this issue which is pretty open about campaigning for bds in the jewish community and which now has an email list of over 100 000 members when i go to um ramallah and stay there we have a we had a little uh yom kippur dinner when i was just there with my friends there there's a there is a jewish community there um they're not but they they don't interact with palestinians through this kind of colonial relationship that raises an interesting hypothetical question which is if you were not jewish and wrote this book what would the reaction be well i wouldn't have been able to write this book if i wasn't jewish because i couldn't have gotten to the places i got to do this whole experiment where you did well it would be easier to label me an anti-semite as it was done to walton mersheimer and it would uh but there there's also a certain sense of rage or betrayal that i've done this you know that i've you know created this black box that you can open um and i but but but i i just i i feel like something's happening out there i was attacked by eric alterman of the nation who said that um you know this book is the book of the month for the hamas book club or hamas um and and uh you know mercilessly attacked from right wingers neocons you know the whole very predictable line of attacks but the pushback was extreme i mean there was so much pushback on social media there was um chip mannequin the professor of jewish studies at the university of maryland pushing back um i was attacked in the jewish daily forward english edition and so the yiddish edition interviewed me and wrote a very positive review of this book which i found interesting and so will it be in the paperback you know is it kind of a i hope that the book will be translated into yiddish definitely and lots of languages um and you know the attacks on the book have been fascinating since they've they've they've they've ranged from you know alterman at the nation to the to literally to commentary and so it's really the fulfillment of the old woody allen joke of commentary and descent coming together and forming dysentery generally in the back tv if the israeli right is not that eager to have a palestinian state so what is their answer to the so-called demographic threat yeah so what's the answer that's that's a great question and naftali bennett i wish that someone had asked him that question at brookings where he was allowed to portray himself as some kind of liberal because naftali bennett has been very explicit about his blueprint for dealing with the demographic threat and he wants to annex area c which is 60 of the west bank where most of the settlements are and the settlers are and the fewest amount of palestinians are just consider first of all that area c was established through the oslo accords which provided a pretext for this annexation i mean how did how did the how did arafat and his negotiators even allow that to happen many of them weren't able to even see the map until there was this signing ceremony so bennett is just seizing on what was kind of allowed to happen at oslo and he has argued that there are so few palestinians in area c that they can be given the opportunity to take israeli citizenship if they swear loyalty to the jewish state then the palestinians in area a which are the the four population clusters the bantu stands will be given jordanian residency and bennett will give them more freedom of movement but they'll basically be confined to this kind of situation that east jerusalem palestinians are and and it has to be understood that east jerusalem is constantly being cleared of palestinians because israel has set a demographic threshold of 72 percent for the jewish majority it needs to maintain so there have been over i think over 10 000 home demolitions since the beginning of the oslo accords as a result of this policy the left wing of the the zionist spectrum in israel the mainstream parties has argued with bennett that there are too many palestinians in area c in other words there's too much of a demographic threat so there's this argument over the preservation of ethnocracy if the west bank can be annexed but this is this is bennett's plan and he thinks that it's sustainable and that if they just take the two-state solution off the table and annex it that pro-israel elements in washington will take care of the rest and they'll basically get away with denying the palestinians a state or any sense of equality it will then move to a discussion of apartheid there would be no controversy over the term apartheid anymore because it will be a single state that has consolidated the institutional discrimination of one group over another on an ethnic basis and so that's why netanyahu is trying to forestall bennett's very popular plan the uh netanyahu actually appointed the levy commission um headed by edmund levy who's an israeli jurist to explore the possibility of annexing the west bank and bringing into uh fruition of one state and levy said we can do this let's let's do it and so he basically spiked the report and buried the whole thing and this was a big issue during the elections i mean and bennett attacked netanyahu from the right for spiking this report so i think this is coming annexation is coming and already if you go to the west bank now you'll see in like susia and which in the small palestinian villages they're under relentless attack and pressure to move the israeli government has openly declared that the residents of susia which is south of hebron must move to the city of yata and basically vacate that area for settlers and they're so they're the demolitions are already happening and we're witnessing annexation before our eyes under the guise of a peace process and an endless plan for two states the academic uh the academic uh new america trustee i i don't know whether you've seen the movie uh the gatekeepers but it's actually quite fascinating it's an interview with the last six heads of the shin bed um and what emerges by the end is sort of a confession by these people who run the secure israeli security apparatus that the occupation and the whole security control of the palestinians is sort of eating away at the moral foundations of of the israeli nation so the ques my question is if if that's being recognized within the security apparatus uh isn't that reason for hope that the pendulum will start swinging back i i i guess i agree with your i i have the same perspective on that film that it was really remarkable to hear these shin bet chiefs recognize the corrosive effect of occupation on israeli society it's something that you know they would recognize in the pages of my book including in my sections on the education system and how early children during early education are cultivated to be soldiers and to excuse me participate in the domination and control of palestinians uh this is they're not being really raised as good citizens necessarily um or in a democratic culture they understand that but they come to it too late all of these figures have participated in massive human rights abuses and i mentioned yuval discon earlier who issued the letter against balad warning them that they threatened the jewish or democratic state with their calls for a state of all its citizens or a real democracy and diskin appears in this as this kind of enlightened figure um so we see this constantly in israeli society and it's a genre it's a subgenre of israeli films that i call the shooting and crying genre waltz with bashir is another one where all these soldiers talk about this horrible all these horrible things they did in lebanon as if it were some dream and then they just kind of move on um you see it um constantly constantly um huda olmert is a perfect example of it he's attempted after just being stained with corruption and then overseeing operation cass lead being explicitly accused of human rights crimes in the goldstone report um for what what happened in the gaza strip uh trying to reemerge as this enlightened figure and attacking netanyahu for harming israeli democracy so all these figures are completely complicit and none of them are challenging um the actual imperatives for why the shin bet has to exist why palestinian citizens of israel have to be monitored all the time why are they looked at as a threat they're looking more at just the consequences in israeli society because these figures tend to just simply be more secular more highly educated and they identify with the enlightened public and that therefore identify with the labor party and they see netanyahu as their opponent mair dagan from mossad is another one of these figures another figure who is asak hasher many of you haven't heard of him he's a professor of philosophy at tel aviv university he's an expert on kant emmanuel kant and he filed an appeal against this book that i write about in in a chapter in my book called torat hamelech which is basically written by two settler rabbis and it is basically a guide on when it's permissible to kill non-jews they understand it that way that's how maori of the israeli newspaper characterized it as well and kashar filed an appeal with the supreme court to basically prosecute the authors or bar the book from publication but kashar himself is the in-house philosopher for the israeli army who created the rules of engagement for operation cast lead and he has designated all residents of the gaza strip as quote unquote the terrorist non-dangerous neighbor in other words they're not civilians who can be protected under the geneva conventions this is really the basis of asymmetrical warfare that the u.s is using in tribal regions and pakistan so kasher has attempted to portray himself as this enlightened figure and he's complained about the rise of religious nationalism and the danger they're doing to israeli society but in fact he just sees them as a competitor because they've tried to write rewrite the rules of engagement through a kind of bellicose jewish nationalist framework when he's done it through a kind of philosophical framework based on europe what he considers european enlightened ideas what the impact on the palestinians has basically been the same all along so the issue isn't really these these figures are necessarily the occupation it's the imperative of israel to control palestinians including palestinians of israel perpetually take one more question this lady here um i'm allison glick no relation to caroline i don't think um it's all right um so you mentioned eric alterman and those of us who have been thinking and writing and reading about this part of the world for years aren't surprised about attacks although i think i'm a little bit surprised about the the irrationality of some of the attacks especially from people who would otherwise be seen as progressive and i wonder what your thoughts are about that the type of attacks from uh people on the left and if you relate them to the dynamic that you observed in israel-palestine if you relate them to what's clearly becoming the victories of the bds campaign or if you find answers to those questions in another type of analysis yeah thanks for that question just before i moved to it i wanted to recommend a really good film which features former israeli military judges called the law in these parts by ranan alexandrovitz and i think you can probably find it online but this i think is one of the best films about the occupation because it actually goes into the the logic of it and explains how it was constructed i'm on the attacks i don't really want to get into like you know a pissing match with alterman or any of these people i expected the attacks and the fact is that you know a balloon needs hot air to rise so they've helped sell my book i mean that's a fact i thank them um on some level i i mean i'm a little bit disturbed that alterman's been able to write nine kind of derogatory attacks on me on the nation website and in the nation um and that there hasn't been more internal push back there but i expected the attacks anyone who writes about this and does a good job of it i think should expect the attacks and you have to be willing to kind of pay the price what they show is a lack of confidence in the kind of country that israel has become and a lack of confidence in answering the challenge in my book akiva elder who has been worked for haaretz is like a chief political correspondent for 35 years and doesn't really necessarily agree with me saw my book as a challenge that had to be answered he also saw it as an israeli who had experienced many of the things that appeared in the pages of my book and he said that these things had kind of faded into a kind of bass relief in his life he'd forgotten that they were happening he'd become so immune to them and he basically in his review of my book thanked me for reminding him and reminding people that this was happening so it's a challenge that has to be answered and what the debate should be about is how to answer the challenge those who are attacking it and attacking it not on the merits without reading it or trying to simply prevent that debate from happening because they're engaged in a fighting retreat that's a good place to end it thank you very much max thanks for coming you

Channel: New America

Views: 49,936

Rating: 4.830565 out of 5

Keywords: Israel (Country), Palestine (Region), Palestinian People (Ethnicity), Max Blumenthal (Person), Jewish People (Ethnicity)

Id: kQ9F2MTgG4I

Length: 82min 12sec (4932 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2013

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[u/zora1230]

Thanks for the upload mate. I love this guy, at least his book Republican Gomorrah on the republican party, Ralph Reed, and evangelical Christianity. My friend and I found him on Democracy Now.