On Friday, Israeli novelist and Israel Prize recipient David Grossman publicly stated that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Yesterday, Oser Kassif, a member of the Knesset, read Grossman’s statement out to the Knesset. He was forcibly removed from the Knesset podium to shouts of “He will not say ‘genocide’ in here!” This reminds me of the period between 1836 and 1844 in Congress, when southern legislators were able to push through the Gag Rule, which prohibited the reading out, printing, or discussion of abolitionist petitions. The Gag Rule effectively ended all mention of abolition in Congress. If Congress didn’t pass it, slaveholder John C. Calhoun warned the Senate, abolition would spread among “the young, and the thoughtless,” and the […]
If you oppose the state of Israel, this post is not for you. Let me repeat: This post is not for you. Many of my readers here, Jews and non-Jews, are already clear about the wrongness of what Israel is doing in Gaza. A subset of those readers are already clear that the State of Israel—as it was designed and constructed as an ethnocracy, an apartheid state, a Jewish supremacist state, what have you—is a historic injustice. This post is not for you. This post is for other people, Jews and non-Jews, who read my work, people who are less settled in their position on Israel and Palestine, people who identify as Zionist or with parts of the Zionist project, […]
Over the years, Eric Alterman has written many articles I’ve disagreed with. I’ve never commented on them publicly because he’s a colleague at Brooklyn College. But in the current issue of the Nation Alterman devotes a column—and then a blog post—to a critique of Max Blumenthal’s new book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. Even if you haven’t read Blumenthal’s book, it’s not hard to see that Alterman is writing out of an animus he can’t get a hold of. His prose gives him away. Alterman writes, for example, “And its [Goliath’s] larding of virtually every sentence with pointless adjectives designed to demonstrate the author’s distaste for his subject is as amateurish as it is ineffective.” A writer more […]
Anyone familiar with Max Blumenthal’s journalism—in print or video (his interviews with Chicken Hawk Republicans are legendary)—knows him to be absolutely fearless. Whether he’s exploring the id of American conservatism or the contradictions of Israeli nationalism, Max heads deep into the dark places and doesn’t stop till he’s turned on all the lights. Courage in journalism requires not only physical fortitude but also an especially shrewd and sophisticated mode of intelligence. It’s not enough to go into a war zone; you have to know how to size up your marks, not get taken in by the locals with their lore, and know when and how to squeeze your informants. Max possesses those qualities in spades. With laser precision, he zeroes […]