 | |
| Author | Public Affairs |
|---|---|
Publication date | October 2013 |
| ISBN | 9781568586342 |
Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel is a 2013 book by Max Blumenthal. The book examines what Blumenthal characterizes as Israel's aggressive shift to the far-right, and its crackdown on local activism. In the preface, Blumenthal says that "Americans' tax dollars and political support are crucial in sustaining the present state of affairs" in Israel. [1]
The book received a positive review by Nancy Murray in the academic journal Race & Class , calling it "a work of unsettling but scrupulous and courageous truth-telling". [2] It was also positively reviewed in the Journal of Palestine Studies by Steven Salaita, who called it "one of the most important titles published on the Israel-Palestine conflict in the past few years". [3]
Eric Alterman, writing in The Nation , said "Goliath is a propaganda tract...this book could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed)". [4] Blumenthal responded in another issue of the magazine, saying that the Alterman review was a smear, loaded with inaccuracies that are refuted by several authors. He defended his comparison of Israeli actions with those of Nazi Germany. [5] [6] Alterman wrote a total of nine critical pieces on Goliath. [7]
The book was criticized by J.J. Goldberg in an opinion piece in The Forward , saying it was biased against Israel, and pointing to errors in spelling. [8] Petra Marquardt-Bigman in The Jerusalem Post criticized how the book compares the Israeli state to Nazi Germany, calling it a form of "bigotry". [9]
Publishers Weekly wrote that the book is "a blunt look at a country where citizens are clearly divided into the "haves" and the "have nots"." [10]
Nina Burleigh, writing for The New York Observer , stated that the book is "a journalist's view of the country" that "balances" against the pro-Israel view promoted by the country's government that was "especially insightful" about left-wing, pro-Palestinian Israelis, although she felt the book was not being harsh enough on Islamist figures, calling the treatment "naive". [11]
James Fallows, the former chief speechwriter to U.S. president Jimmy Carter, wrote in The Atlantic that Goliath "is no more 'anti-Israel', let alone anti-Semitic, than The Shame of the Cities , The Jungle , and The Grapes of Wrath were anti-American for pointing out "extremes and abuses in American society." [12] Glenn Greenwald described the book as "eye-opening and stunningly insightful", and Charles Glass wrote that "anyone who thinks he knows what is happening in Israel and its occupied territories will think again after reading this great work". [13] Jim Miles, in his review in Foreign Policy, described it as "a powerful and distressing book for a view on what life in modern Israel is like." [14] Kirkus Reviews described it as "A rich, roiling examination" of the country, [15] while John Hudson in Foreign Policy described the book as an "indictment of Israel's treatment of Palestinians". [16]
Goliath was awarded the 2014 Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for An Especially Notable Book. [17]
Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a Jewish state through the colonization of a land outside Europe. With the rejection of alternative proposals for a Jewish state, it eventually focused on the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, a region corresponding to the Land of Israel in Judaism, and of central importance in Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinians as possible. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became Israel's national or state ideology.
Eric Alterman is an American historian and journalist. He is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and the author of twelve books.
Rashid Ismail Khalidi is a Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East and the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He served as editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies from 2002 until 2020, when he became co-editor with Sherene Seikaly.
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is a book by John Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, Professor of International Relations at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University, published in late August 2007. It was a New York Times Best Seller.
Israeli apartheid is a system of institutionalized segregation and discrimination in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and to a lesser extent in Israel. This system is characterized by near-total physical separation between the Palestinian and the Israeli settler population of the West Bank, as well as the judicial separation that governs both communities, which discriminates against the Palestinians in a wide range of ways. Israel also discriminates against Palestinian refugees in the diaspora and against its own Palestinian citizens.
Max Blumenthal is an American journalist, author, blogger, and filmmaker. He was a writer for The Nation, AlterNet, The Daily Beast, Al Akhbar, Mondoweiss, and Media Matters for America, and has contributed to Al Jazeera English, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He has been a writing fellow of the Nation Institute. He is a regular contributor to Sputnik and RT.
Palestinian literature refers to the Arabic language novels, short stories and poems produced by Palestinians. Forming part of the broader genre of Arabic literature, contemporary Palestinian literature is often characterized by its heightened sense of irony and the exploration of existential themes and issues of identity. References to the subjects of resistance to occupation, exile, loss, and love and longing for homeland are also common.
Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the modern State of Israel, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palestine—a region partly coinciding with the biblical Land of Israel—was flawed or unjust in some way.
Nathan Thrall is an American author, essayist, and journalist based in Jerusalem. Thrall is known for his 2023 nonfiction work A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, and is a contributor to several literary magazines. As of 2023 he is a professor at Bard College in New York state.
Mondoweiss is a news website that began as a general-interest blog written by Philip Weiss on The New York Observer website. It subsequently developed into a broader collaborative venture after fellow journalist Adam Horowitz joined it as co-editor. In 2010, Weiss described the website's purpose as one of covering American foreign policy in the Middle East from a 'progressive Jewish perspective'. In 2011, it defined its aims as fostering greater fairness for Palestinians in American foreign policy, and as providing American Jews with an alternative identity to that expressed by Zionist ideology, which he regards as antithetical to American liberalism. Originally supported by The Nation Institute, it became a project of part of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change in June 2011.
Criticism of Israel is a subject of journalistic and scholarly commentary and research within the scope of international relations theory, expressed in terms of political science. Israel has faced international criticism since its establishment in 1948 relating to a variety of issues, many of which are centered around human rights violations in its occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Mouin Rabbani is a Dutch-Palestinian Middle East analyst specializing in the Arab-Israeli conflict and Palestinian affairs. Rabbani is based in Amman, Jordan and was a Senior Analyst for the International Crisis Group, the Palestine Director of the Palestine American Research Center, a Project Director for the Association of Netherlands Municipalities, and a volunteer and General Editor for Al Haq. Rabbani is currently a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, a co-editor of Jadaliyya, and a Contributing Editor to the Middle East Report.
Ali Hasan Abunimah is a Palestinian-American journalist who has been described as "the leading American proponent of a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict". A resident of Chicago who contributes regularly to publications such as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, he has served as the vice-president on the board of directors of the Arab American Action Network, is a fellow at the Palestine Center, and is a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada website. He has appeared on many television discussion programs on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and other networks, and in a number of documentaries about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, including Collecting Stories from Exile: Chicago Palestinians Remember 1948 (1999).
The Khan Yunis massacre took place on 3 November 1956, perpetrated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the Palestinian town of Khan Yunis and the nearby refugee camp of the same name in the Gaza Strip during the Suez Crisis.
The AMCHA Initiative is a non-partisan organization aiming to combat antisemitism on campuses through investigation, documentation, and education in order to protect Jewish students from assault and fear. AMCHA was founded in 2012 by University of California Santa Cruz lecturer Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and University of California Los Angeles Professor Emeritus Leila Beckwith. The term Amcha is Hebrew for "your people" or "your nation."
Steven Salaita is an American scholar, author and public speaker. He became the center of a controversy when the University of Illinois did not hire him as a professor of American Indian Studies following objections to a series of tweets critical of Israel's bombardment of Gaza in 2014. He also experienced similar controversy during the hiring process at the American University of Beirut in 2016.
Palestinian stone-throwing refers to a Palestinian practice of throwing stones at people or property. It is a tactic with both a symbolic and military dimension when used against heavily-armed troops. Proponents, sympathizers, as well as some analysts have characterized stone throwing by Palestinians as a form of "limited", "restrained", "non-lethal" violence. Such stone-throwing can at times prove lethal: over a dozen Israelis, including women, children, and infants, have died as a result of stones being thrown at cars. Some Palestinians appear to regard it as symbolic and non-violent, given the disparity in power and equipment between the Israeli forces and the Palestinian stone-throwers. The state of Israel has passed laws to sentence throwers convicted of the charge to up to 10 years imprisonment even without proof of intent to harm. In some cases, Israelis have argued that it should be treated as a form of terrorism, or that, in terms of the psychology of those who hurl stones, even in defense or in protest, it is intrinsically aggressive.
Amiel Vardi is an Israeli classical scholar, an authority on Latin literature, and an activist on behalf of Palestinian rights. A native-born Jerusalemite, he teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and lives in the German Colony neighbourhood of that city.
Anti-Palestinianism or anti-Palestinian racism refers to prejudice, collective hatred, and discrimination directed at the Palestinian people for any variety of reasons. Since the mid-20th century, the phenomenon has largely overlapped with anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians today are Arabs and Muslims. Historically, however, anti-Palestinianism was more closely identified with European antisemitism, as far-right Europeans detested the Jewish people as undesirable foreigners from Palestine. Modern anti-Palestinianism—that is, xenophobia with regard to the Arab people of Palestine—is most common in Israel, the United States, and Lebanon, among other countries.
Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi is a Palestinian-born American scholar, activist, educator, editor, and an academic director. She is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, Race and Resistance Studies, and the founding Director of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) at San Francisco State University (SFSU). Colleen Flaherty of Inside Higher Education described her as "a controversial figure in an already controversial field".