The Prawer Plan
In case you hadn't noticed, Israel has been in the news a lot lately. After all, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the U.N. in the midst of an Iranian "charm offensive," just as presidents Obama and Rouhani were having the
first conversation between Iranian and American heads of state since Jimmy Carter's day, and gave the usual hellfire sermon. He said Israel would, if necessary, "
stand alone," implicitly threatening to launch an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities without Washington's support (an act that is, in reality,
increasingly unlikely), and generally acted like the odd man out. Soon after, he made a
comment reflecting his
ignorance of life among the Iranian young -- "If the people of Iran were free, they could wear jeans, listen to Western music, and have free elections " -- and the next thing you knew, indignant Iranian tweets were going up along with
photos of jeans and Western music albums. And so another round of news stories hit the wires.
Only one problem: just about all the "Israeli" news here is focused on its future policy toward Iran, and remarkably little of it on the way Israel continues to eat up Palestinian lands and displace Palestinians on the West Bank and elsewhere, or the way in which Israeli control over so much of the West Bank is
stunting the Palestinian economy. Fortunately, Max Blumenthal, who previously slipped
inside the Republican Party and produced a bestselling book, has spent four years researching the on-the-ground realities of Israel. Today, he offers us a powerful, if grim, glimpse of just where Israel has been and where it's heading, the sort of up-close-and-personal reporting you're not likely to see in the American mainstream media (not, at least, since President Obama tried -- and
failed -- to get the Israelis to stop building new settlements and other housing on Palestinian or contested lands). But think of today's TomDispatch post as just a snapshot. The full picture can be found in Blumenthal's new blockbuster of a book,
Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. It's an odyssey of a trip into a largely unknown Israel and a remarkable, as well as riveting, piece of reportage.
TomThe Desert of Israeli Democracy
A Trip Through the Negev Desert Leads to the Heart of Israel's National Nightmare
By
Max BlumenthalFrom the podium of the U.N. General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
seamlessly blended frightening details of Iranian evildoing with images of defenseless Jews "bludgeoned" and "left for dead" by anti-Semites in nineteenth century Europe. Aimed at U.S. and Iranian moves towards diplomacy and a war-weary American public, Netanyahu's gloomy tirade threatened to cast him as a desperate, diminished figure. Though it was poorly received in the U.S.,
alienating even a few of his stalwart pro-Israel allies, his jeremiad served a greater purpose, deflecting attention from his country's policies towards the group he scarcely mentioned: the Palestinians.
Back in November 1989, while serving as a junior minister in the Likud-led governing coalition of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a younger Netanyahu told an audience at Bar Ilan University, "Israel should have taken advantage of the suppression of demonstrations [at China's Tiananmen Square], when the world's attention was focused on what was happening in that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the Territories. However, to my regret, they did not support that policy that I proposed, and which I still propose should be implemented."