Max Blumenthal has a book coming out on the Gaza onslaught of last summer, called The 51 Day War, and it’s just gotten a rave review in Publishers Weekly:
Blumenthal’s (Republican Gomorrah) latest is a heart-wrenching narrative of being caught in the middle of wartime…. Blumenthal, who was on the ground for part of the offensive, bore witness to the loss of life, shelter, and possessions—but never hope—among Gaza’s Palestinian residents. His experiences in Gaza shed valuable light on the miserable living conditions there, while also fueling Blumenthal’s rebuttal to defenses of the strikes as justifiable responses to terrorism. He portrays Israel’s response as vastly disproportionate, particularly emphasizing the toll on Palestinian economic development. While vividly recounting firsthand experience and interviews with Gaza residents, Blumenthal also carefully charts the ascension of the right wing in Israeli politics and offers a jaundiced eye on the maneuvers of the Israeli government. The result is a harrowing, transfixing narrative of a people’s ordeal that will provoke and challenge any reader more accustomed to pro-Israel perspectives.
His book also got blurbs from Reza Aslan, Juan Cole, Avraham Burg, Pat Lang and Noura Erakat. Covering the waterfront!
But Blumenthal’s last book, the incisive Goliath, which bore witness to the rise of a militantly racist, right wing political culture in Israel, was virtually blacked out by American mainstream media. Chris Hedges and Andrew Sullivan got the story, but Eric Alterman attacked it in the Nation of all places, followed by Alan Dershowitz; and Terry Gross, who had interviewed Blumenthal when he went after Republicans in his first book “refused to have me on,” Blumenthal told Alex Kane, “and a lot of other hosts have just basically helped stitch the fabric of this curtain of silence.”
The New York Times in particular ignored the book. Even as the book went into a second printing. Even as the Israeli people confirmed Blumenthal’s reporting by going to the polls and electing the most reactionary government in Israeli history.
That blackout really ought to end. As it is, the Times is playing into its own irrelevance here. It runs happy-talk accounts of Israel’s willingness to talk peace, its chief correspondent claims that only a “small strain” in Israeli society wants to hold on to the West Bank– and meantime, practically every minister in government has declared Israel’s alleged right to Palestinian land and its new Foreign Ministry boss states on Facebook that it’s time for Israel to redraw the borders of Palestine.
This is Max Blumenthal’s great strength as an observer of the conflict. He and I have frequently disagreed about how bad things are; I’ve resisted his message, saying it can’t be that bad, Max. But he’s been right time and again; he has a more accurate record than anyone else when it comes to predictions of the slope of Israel’s spiritual/political decline. He has never been taken in by the liberal Zionist propaganda, i.e., by an unconscious tribal identification with Ashkenazi elites; he’s bravely documented the currents of intolerance and fascism in that society going back five years to when he and Joseph Dana reported “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem” and the American media suppressed it. It’s time Blumenthal’s view is engaged; it’s irresponsible not to engage it. Go ahead, take him on, disagree with him. But give him a platform. That’s the news from Publishers Weekly.
As much as we hope they would, we also know they won’t.
To do so would be to deal a death blow to their own ideology. There is not a single liberal Zionist in the MSM who can engage Max and win. None. He knows that country better than almost any Western journalist, probably the best. He knows the real Israel, he isn’t blinded by tribal loyalty like most of the people reporting from there.
To invite Max would be to annihilate their own credibility, it would be a death sentence to their own moral authority(such as it is). It would be fatal and as such it will never happen.
But that’s okay. That’s why the BDS movement is winning. The NYT ignored it, too, until it attacked it head-on on page 1.
Max will get his dues before long, but it will not be by gracious Times’ editors, fearful of his attacks on Jewish apartheid, but by brave liberal students who are in the Ivies as I write this, who will take this on in the coming decades as they rise through the liberal institutions and purge them of bigots like Alterman, like Rudoren, like Bronner and all the rest of them.
Then – and only then – will Max get his due. Long overdone.
Re: the issue of Max B.’s access to the world media including the NYT: I empathize with the passion of those who are trying to get media attention. Bernie Sanders and Max B. and not Hillary’s hair color, I hear you.
I was thinking about Max’s Goliath the other day. The denouement of the book occurs with the expatriate Israeli youth in Berlin. This is the essence of preaching to the choir. The narrative sense created by this structure is an automatic “Go jump in the lake, Max,” from anyone with a tad of Jewish identity (as in Jewish readers) or a tad of empathy with Jewish identity (as in nonJewish readers).
Reporting on the civil war in Jewish American life is one of MW’s missions. But the attempt to affect that civil discourse or uncivil discourse, would involve some level of identity. If not, you are only speaking to the like minded, those who have already rejected identity. According to Pew (and historical logic) the group rejecting identity is growing, so the audience is there, but the essence of MW is alienated from the crowd that has not rejected identity.
BTW on the topic of Blumenthal’s prescience…
Here’s this report that the UN is considering putting the IDF in the same camp as Boko Haram etc for targeting children:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4662561,00.html
Little by little the world wakes up.
“…the Times is playing into its own irrelevance…”
Unfortunately, the Times is not irrelevant at all. It is perhaps the most effective propaganda tool the Zionist movement has. Not to mention the Times infamous service to our corporatist government and the machinations of our criminal Empire. The notion that the Times “needs to do” this or that creates a legitimizing paradigm for this propaganda rag.
Rather than beseeching the Times to do what is obviously beyond the scope if its intent, we “need to” reject and discredit this organization at every turn, otherwise it will continue to be regarded as an acceptable source of information.
The issue for Americans is what we’re being deprived of in terms of public interest. Ben Bagdikian, the former dean of Berkeley’s school of journalism, wrote:
But I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.
The issue is who is doing the silencing, and in service of whom.
Israel has clearly infected our campuses and public discourse; it is dictating what we can know and hear, controlling it with the lack-of-access crybaby label they misname ‘anti-semitism’. I could give a shit what Israel thinks or mewls on about. But I give a damn that a bunch of criminal monkeys across the pond think they can cover my eyes, ears, and mouth, and, barring that, think they can bitch-slap and intimidate anyone who can tell me what they’re up to using US resources and treasure.
The shame is on the NYT’s head. “Buncha’ pussies.” And tearing this country down because they’ve forgotten they’re American citizens first. And so am I.