Israel Sinks Deeper into a Moral Abyss
November 5, 2013
Israeli policy is based on racism, hate, aggression and deceit,
says Max Blumenthal in his book, "Goliath: Life & Loathing in Greater Israel."
A survey of Jewish Israeli attitudes on Operation Cast Lead [Gaza War Dec. 2008-Jan. 2009) concluded that the public's "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... These attitudes are the product of indoctrination."
By Chris Hedges
"Imploding the Myth of Israel"
(Abridged & Edited by henrymakow.com)
Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that rivals the brutality and racism of apartheid South Africa. Its democracy--which was always exclusively for Jews--has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country toward fascism.
Many of Israel's most enlightened and educated citizens--1 million of them--have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists--Israeli and Palestinian--are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns.
Its educational system, starting in primary school, has become an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America's democracy.
And yet, the hard truths about Israel remain largely unspoken. Liberal supporters of Israel decry its excesses. They wring their hands over the tragic necessity of airstrikes on Gaza or Lebanon or the demolition of Palestinian homes. They assure us that they respect human rights and want peace.
But they react in inchoate fury when the reality of Israel is held up before them. This reality implodes the myth of the Jewish state. It exposes the cynicism of a state whose real goal is, and always has been, the transfer, forced immigration or utter subjugation and impoverishment of Palestinians inside Israel and the occupied territories. Reality shatters the fiction of a peace process. Reality lays bare the fact that Israel routinely has used deadly force against unarmed civilians, including children, to steal half the land on the West Bank and crowd forcibly displaced Palestinians into squalid, militarized ghettos while turning their land and homes over to Jewish settlers.
Reality exposes the new racial laws adopted by Israel as those once advocated by the fanatic racist Meir Kahane. Reality unveils the Saharonim detention camp (left) in the Negev Desert, the largest detention center in the world. Reality mocks the lie of open, democratic debate, including in the country's parliament, the Knesset, where racist diatribes and physical threats, often enshrined into law, are used to silence and criminalize the few who attempt to promote a civil society. Liberal Jewish critics inside and outside Israel, however, desperately need the myth, not only to fetishize Israel but also to fetishize themselves. Strike at the myth and you unleash a savage vitriol, which in its fury exposes the self-adulation and latent racism that lie at the core of modern Zionism.
LIFE AND LOATHING IN GREATER ISRAEL There are very few intellectuals or writers who have the tenacity and courage to confront this reality. This is what makes Max Blumenthal's "Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel" one of the most fearless and honest books ever written about Israel. Blumenthal, left, burrows deep into the dark heart of Israel. The American journalist binds himself to the beleaguered and shunned activists, radical journalists and human rights campaigners who are the conscience of the nation, as well as Palestinian families in the West Bank struggling in vain to hold back Israel's ceaseless theft of their land. Blumenthal, in chapter after chapter, methodically rips down the facade. And what he exposes, in the end, is a corpse...
"Goliath" is made up of numerous vignettes, some only a few pages long, that methodically build a picture of Israel, like pieces fit into a puzzle. It is in the details that Israel's reality is exposed. The Israeli army, Blumenthal points out in his first chapter, "To the Slaughter," employs a mathematical formula to limit outside food deliveries to Gaza to keep the caloric levels of the 1.5 million Palestinians trapped inside its open air prison just above starvation; a government official later denied that he had joked in a meeting that the practice is "like an appointment with a dietician."
The saturation, 22-day bombing of Gaza that began on Dec. 27, 2008, led by 60 F-16 fighter jets, instantly killed 240 Palestinians, including scores of children. Israel's leading liberal intellectuals, including the writers Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, blithely supported the wholesale murder of Palestinian civilians...
By the end of the assault, with 1,400 dead, nearly all civilians, Gaza lay in ruins. The Israeli air force purposely targeted Gaza's infrastructure, including power plants, to reduce Gaza to a vast, overcrowded, dysfunctional slum. Israel, Blumenthal notes, destroyed "80 percent of all arable farmland in the coastal strip, bombing the strip's largest flour mill, leveling seven concrete factories, shelling a major cheese factory, and shooting up a chicken farm, killing thirty-one thousand chickens.""Twelve [years old] and up, you are allowed to shoot. That's what they tell us," an Israeli sniper told Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass in 2004 at the height of the Second Intifada, Blumenthal writes. "This is according to what the IDF [Israel Defense Force] says to its soldiers. I do not know if this is what the IDF says to the media," the sniper was quoted as saying.
APARTHEID
The 2008 murderous rampage is not, as Blumenthal understands, an anomaly. It is the overt policy of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who advocates "a system of open apartheid." Israel, as Blumenthal points out, has not lifted its state of emergency since its foundation. It has detained at least 750,000 Palestinians, including 10,000 women, in its prisons since 1967.
It currently holds more than 4,500 political prisoners, including more than 200 children and 322 people jailed without charges, Blumenthal writes, including those it has labeled "administrative detainees." Israel has a staggering 99.74 percent conviction rate for these so-called security prisoners, a figure that any totalitarian state would envy...
The racist narrative, once the domain of the far right and now the domain of the Israeli government and the mainstream, demonizes Palestinians and Arabs, as well as all non-Jews. Non-Jews, according to this propaganda, will forever seek the annihilation of the Jewish people. The Holocaust, in which Israeli victimhood is sanctified, is seamlessly conflated with Palestinian and Arab resistance to occupation.
The state flies more than 25 percent of Israeli 11th-graders to Poland to tour Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps a year before they start army service. They are told that the goal of Arabs, along with the rest of the non-Jewish world, is another Auschwitz. And the only thing standing between Israelis and a death camp is the Israeli army.
Israeli high schools show films such as "Sleeping With the Enemy" to warn students about dating non-Jews, especially Arabs. Racist books such as "Torat Ha'Melech," or "The King's Torah," are given to soldiers seeking rabbinical guidance on the rules of engagement. Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, the authors of the 230-page book, inform soldiers that non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and may have to be killed in order to "curb their evil inclinations."
"If we kill a gentile who has violated one of the seven commandments [of Noah] ... there is nothing wrong with the murder," Shapira and Elitzur write. The rabbis claim that under Jewish law "there is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults." ...
RACIST POLICE STATE
As Blumenthal documents, even Israeli Jews no longer live in a democracy. The mounting state repression against human rights advocates, journalists and dissidents has reached the proportions of U.S. Homeland Security. The overtly racist cant of the political elite and the masses--"Death to Arabs" is a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches--has emboldened mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, to carry out indiscriminate acts of vandalism and violence against dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and the hapless African immigrants who live crammed into the slums of Tel Aviv.
Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that eerily resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits "small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel's Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of 'suitability to the community's fundamental outlook.' " And all who denounce the steady march of Israel toward fascism--including Jewish academics--are attacked in organized campaigns as being insufficiently Zionist. They are branded as terrorists or collaborators with terrorists. As a headline in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz read: "The settlers are the real government of Israel."..
The disillusionment among idealistic young immigrants to Israel dots the book. As one example, Canadian David Sheen is recorded as saying that everything he had known about Israel and Palestinians was, in Blumenthal's words, "a fantasy cultivated through years of heavy indoctrination."
Scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who died in 1994, warned that the rise of a virulent racism would consume Israeli society. He knew that prolonged occupation of the Palestinians would spawn "concentration camps" for the occupied and that, in his words, "Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it."
But few, then or now, cared to listen. This is why Blumenthal's new book is so important.
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion Publisher, Zuade Kaufman Editor, Robert Scheer
© 2013 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
Related-
Book Sends Zionist Spin Machine into Overdrive
Makow - Israel's Descent into a Moral Abyss
YouTube Israel's New Generation of Racists - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPzYExjz6Io
-------- IDF Line up and Shoot Three Little Girls
Makow Comment- This article suggests that Israelis have been brainwashed and mobilized as a blunt instrument of Illuminati world domination. "Progressive" Jews, their worst critics, are saving the Jewish soul by speaking out and deserve credit. Meanwhile, Organized Jewry promotes miscegenation, mass immigration and multiculturalism for the goyim in the West, while supporting racism and apartheid in their homeland, Israel.
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First Comment by Tony E.
Why is this Israeli doctrine of endless war so surprising.....We only need to look at the blueprint, The Old Testament.
"The Lord is a man of war; Yahweh is his name." - Exodus 15.3.
"Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves." -Numbers 31.17,18
"Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon interest, but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon interest, that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all that thou settest thine hand to in the land whither thou goest to possess it." -Deuteronomy 23:20
Either Christians, & good Jews need to understand the satanic god made in the image of man that they have been worshiping named Yahweh is actually Satan, humanity will not evolve.
JG said (November 6, 2013):
As for Tony E's comment the KJV of the Old Testament does not highlight the words of GOD in red. You have to be able to know
when GOD is speaking and when Moses was speaking.
Also, you must reference the Septuagint done in the Greek language from 300A.D.
I have both the Red Letter Edition of the Sword Bible and the Greek Septuagint and they read not identical to the Masoretic Text used in the KJV.