Press can’t justify red carpet for Oren tract and blackout for Blumenthal’s ‘definitive account’ of Gaza

This weekend Michael Oren’s book Ally has made the New York Times bestseller list. It hasn’t hurt Oren that the Times and Washington Post have both rolled out the red carpet for the book, the 92nd Street Y hosted the Israeli for a down-home chat, and Wolf Blitzer interviewed Oren on CNN. Presumably synagogue reading groups have also been buying up the book– which is Oren’s effort to reconstitute the close relationship of Israeli and American Jews by saying, We are the new Jews; we fight for you and give you Jewish pride, you have to be grateful and give us support.

The same thing happened with Ari Shavit’s book, My Promised Land two years ago. That book also was an effort to reconstitute the close relationship of Israeli and American Jews by saying, We are the new Jews, we ethnically cleanse villages and are so goodlooking we have lots of anonymous sex in Tel Aviv nightclubs and give you Jewish pride, the least you can do is support us back. Shavit got on all the important talk shows and the 92nd Street Y and got excerpted in the New Yorker and even did fundraising for AIPAC. Synagogues gobbled up his book.

Doesn’t our press owe something of the same treatment to Max Blumenthal? I think so. Blumenthal is out with his second book about Israel in two years, this one an anatomy of the Gaza war of a year ago: The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. We are right now experiencing the anniversary of that murderous summer. But unlike Oren and Shavit’s tribal tracts, Blumenthal’s book is written from a universalist standpoint, and is part of the movement among young left-lib Americans to separate our country from the Jewish state. Blumenthal has a track record: in Goliath, his last book, he documented Israel’s racist turn, which the MSM only caught up with when Netanyahu got reelected.

Blumenthal is Jewish and went on Birthright as a young man: so that he too might one day serve in the US army of writers Oren and Shavit count on to support Israel. He is from a politically-well-connected family (Max ibn Sid), still he said, No thank you, I don’t want any part of that racist country. He did Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem after Obama was elected, and his new book explains to Americans why Palestinians in Gaza have undertaken violent resistance.

That’s a great story, more compelling than Oren’s fantasy of virulent anti-Semitism in West Orange, N.J., that impelled him to immigrate to Israel, more inspiring than Shavit’s lectures to American Jews about maintaining Jewish peoplehood.

The media virtually blacked out Blumenthal’s last book. I don’t think that policy can continue, especially now that the media are more frank about the role of the Israel lobby and claim to be free of its influence. Are you really free of its influence? Then show us. Asa Winstanley’s rave review of 51 Days at Middle East Monitor leaves the press less and less of an excuse to ignore this book. Wolf Blitzer should have Blumenthal on, the Times should profile him, Terry Gross should interview him, David Remnick should have a Q-and-A with this young Jewish writer at the 92d Street Y.

Winstanley:

This is the definitive account of the 2014 Israeli war on Gaza. Max combines the very best of humanistic, on the-the-ground journalism with detailed documentation backing up every point he makes.

And he covers every aspect. Through his eyes, and the eyes of his colleagues, contacts and friends in Gaza, we see the ruins, the rubble, the pain, death and destruction inflicted on the people of Gaza by Israel and its allies. We see hope and despair, but most of all we see the Palestinians people themselves.

In The 51 Day War, Max has an important section covering the military aspects of the war. But where the corporate media covering this would probably focus on the might and majesty of Israel’s overwhelming military force and its praise-worthy ability to kill Palestinian children, Max documents a most under covered aspect of the war: the defensive liberation struggle of the Palestinian resistance factions, led by Hamas, Palestine’s Islamic resistance movement.