Max Blumenthal > Quotes

“By weaponizing the discourse of human rights to justify the use of force against governments that resisted the Washington consensus, this group of well-connected liberals was able to stir support where the neocons could not. Their brand of interventionism appealed directly to the sensibility of the Democratic Party's metropolitan base, large swaths of academia, the foundation-funded human rights NGO complex, and the New York Times editorial board. The xhibition of atrocities allegedly committed by adversarial governments, either by Western-funded civil society groups, major human rights organizations or the mainstream press, was the military humanists' stock in trade, enabling them to mask imperial designs behind a patina of "genocide prevention." With this neat tactic, they effectively neutralized progressive antiwar elements and tarred those who dared to protest their wars as dictator apologists.”
― Max Blumenthal, The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump

“The Tamimis were notable among the people of the West Bank, and not only for their striking appearance. Nearly everyone in the village bore a pale complexion, like Northern Europeans, with hair colored bright blonde or sandy brown, light-colored eyes, and high, sharply angled cheekbones. Their features reflected a lineage drawn directly from the Crusaders, offering a reminder of the many invaders and occupiers whose blood became intertwined with the heritage of Palestine.”
― Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

“Israel remains in a perpetual state of war with no plan to resolve its crisis “Americans will not want their government to spend tax dollars or their president’s clout on helping Israel.”
― Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

“The lessons of the Holocaust have been imparted across the world to promote greater tolerance for minorities and marginalized social groups. But in Israel, they are routinely exploited to advance narrow nationalistic goals.”
― Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

“Yonatan declared after the event. “I am also thinking about the delegations of young Israelis that are coming to see the history of our people but also are subjected to militaristic and nationalistic brainwashing on a daily basis. Maybe if they see what we wrote here today they will remember that oppression is oppression, occupation is occupation, and crimes against humanity are crimes against humanity, whether they have been committed here in Warsaw or in Gaza.”
― Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

“This book makes the case that Trump’s election would not have been possible without 9/11 and the subsequent military interventions conceived by the national security state. Further, I argue that if the CIA had not spent over a billion dollars arming Islamist militants in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, empowering jihadist godfathers like Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden in the process, the 9/11 attacks would have almost certainly not taken place. And if the Twin Towers were still standing today, it is not hard to imagine an alternate political universe in which a demagogue like Trump was still relegated to real estate and reality TV.”
― Max Blumenthal, The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump

“The more the State of Israel relied on force to manage the occupation, the more compelled it was to deploy hasbara. And the more Western media consumers encountered hasbara, the more likely they became to measure Israel’s grandiose talking points against the routine and petty violence, shocking acts of humiliation, and repression that defined its relationship with the Palestinians. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a professional explainer who spent the early years of his political career as a frequent guest on prime time American news programs perfecting the slickness of the Beltway pundit class, the Israeli government invested unprecedented resources into hasbara. Once the sole responsibility of the Israeli foreign ministry, the task of disseminating hasbara fell to a special Ministry of Public Diplomacy led by Yuli Edelstein, a rightist settler and government minister who called Arabs a “despicable nation.” Edelstein’s ministry boasted an advanced “situation room,” a paid media team, and coordination of a volunteer force that claimed to include thousands of volunteer bloggers, tweeters, and Facebook commenters fed with talking points and who flood social media with hasbara in five languages. The exploits of the propaganda soldiers conscripted into Israel’s online army have helped give rise to the phenomenon of the “hasbara troll,” an often faceless, shrill and relentless nuisance deployed on Twitter and Facebook to harass public figures who expressed skepticism of official Israeli policy or sympathy for the Palestinians.”
― Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

“The toxic effects of the West’s semi-covert intervention in Syria—where the United States and its allies contributed billions of dollars to the arming and training of Islamist militias that ultimately fought under the black banners of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—continue to reverberate to this day.”
― Max Blumenthal, The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump

“- [ ] The Gaza Strip is a ghetto of children. Of its 1.8 million residents, a majority are under the age of 18. Most have never left the 360 square kilometers where they were born, raised and confined. There is no discernible future for them beyond the Israeli military occupation that has endured nearly 50 years and a siege that was officially proclaimed in 2007. The formative years of these young people have been marked by three major military assaults. These are their rites of passage. The Palestinians of Gaza have no reason or experience to believe that a fourth war will not arrive soon.

The violence in Gaza has become a ritual that has confounded many outsiders, leading to the rise of simplistic explanations for the bloodshed as the product of religious extremism, endemic anti-Semitism and intractable conflict. But a brief look at the history leading up to the 51 Day War of 2014 presents a different reality.

Eighty percent of Gaza's residents are refugees from the State of Israel. Their families were among the 750,000 indigenous Palestinians who fled or were forcibly expelled in the period from November 1947 to late 1948 known to them as the Nakba, or the catastrophe. Since Israel was founded, every one of its governments has identified these refugees as a demographic threat whose repatriation would threaten Israel’s Jewish majority and the Zionist project itself. Palestinians in Gaza are ultimately confined and excluded from Israel for one simple reason: They are not Jews. There is simply no place for them in an Israel that defines itself as an exclusive Jewish state, and that will not grant equal rights to these people. That is why Gaza has become a warehouse for a surplus population that the Israeli-American scholar Martin Kramer described as “superfluous young men.” And that is why Gaza resists.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Three and four are reserved for non-Jews, especially Arabs and foreign people of color, who are often escorted to what is commonly known as “the Arab room” for demeaning and time-consuming interrogations. Those who receive a six—the greatest “security threat”—are either Arabs or “hostile” leftist solidarity activists, usually those who had the misfortune to wind up on a Shin Bet blacklist. While Palestinians are detained for an extended period and sometimes blocked from flying, activists are generally deported and banned from Israel for a period of ten years. Palestinians who pass through security procedures receive a special sticker on their passport reading, “Did you pack a bomb by mistake?”
― Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

“After the war, Eran Efrati, a former Israeli combat soldier turned anti-occupation activist, interviewed several soldiers who participated in the assault on Shujaiya. “I can report that the official command that was handed down to the soldiers in Shujaiya was to capture Palestinian homes as outposts,” Efrati wrote on his Facebook page. “From these posts, the soldiers drew an imaginary red line, and amongst themselves decided to shoot to death anyone who crosses it. Anyone crossing the line was defined as a threat to their outposts, and was thus deemed a legitimate target. This was the official reasoning insides the units.”
Months later, when we met in Brussels to present testimony on Israeli war crimes in Gaza at the Russell Tribunal, Efrati helped me decipher the map I found. He pointed me to a red line drawn on the map that bisected Shujaiya from east to west. It was labeled in Hebrew as “Hardufim,” or “Dead People.” Efrati explained that while the term “Hardufim” was often called out through Israeli army radios when a soldier was killed and required transport from the theater of battle the word was also used to mark free-fire zones in the Gaza Strip where soldiers could kill people regardless of their involvement in the battle.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Qananeh viewed the destruction of Basha Tower as an attack on Gaza's entire journalist community. "They target journalists and civilians to silence the media outlets that hurt the occupier in front of world opinion," he told me. "For us in the media, this isn't the first time and it won't be the last time that the enemy targets journalists or journalism headquarters. The occupation does not distinguish between a civilian, a journalist, and a child. They just target Palestinians in a barbaric manner. This is not going to affect us. We will continue to cover all of the crimes of the occupation. As journalists, we have to be the messengers and deliver the news.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“According to Arad, the Hannibal Directive represented “a radical change from this way of thinking that propped up the value of human life.” It was a disturbing sign of the dominance of a ruthlessly authoritarian right wing, he argued. “Now, in place of the government serving its citizens,” Arad wrote in the Israeli daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, "it is the citizens who are forced to pay with their lives in order to serve the interests of government. This is simply called fascism.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Minister Naftali Bennett was a constant source of political coercion—to pursue the most drastic measures at his disposal against the Palestinians, particularly in Gaza. While”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Abu Said told us his cousin witnessed a missile strike in the middle of a crowd attempting to flee from the Israeli bombardment engulfing the neighborhood. “There was a huge number of martyrs there,” he said, claiming Israeli forces deliberately concentrated their shelling on the crossroads to prevent anyone from escaping. “They trapped us,” he said.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“That day in mid-August, at the eastern edge of the “Soccer Field” now occupied by tents and surrounded by demolished five-story apartment complexes, I encountered a middle-aged man wearing an eye-patch. Introducing himself as Mohammed Fathi Al Areer, he led Dan, Ebaa, and me through the first floor of his home, which was now little more than a cave furnished with a single sofa, then into what used to be his backyard, where the interior of his bedroom had been exposed by a tank shell. It was here, Al Areer told me, that four of his brothers were executed. One of them, Hassan Al Areer, was mentally disabled and likely had little idea he was about to be killed. Mohammed Al Areer said he found bullet casings next to the victims’ heads when he discovered their decomposing bodies days later.
Just next door lived the Shamala family, one of the hardest hit clans from Shujaiya. Hesham Shamaly, twenty-five, described to me what happened when five members of his family decided to stay in their home to guard the thousands of dollars of clothing and linens they planned to sell through their family business. When soldiers approached the home with weapons drawn, Shamaly said his father, Nasser, emerged with his hands up and attempted to address them in Hebrew.
”He couldn’t even finish a sentence before they shot him,” Shamaly told me. “He was only injured and fainted, but they thought he was dead so they left him there and moved on to the others. They shot the rest — my uncle, my uncle’s wife, and my two cousins — they shot them dead.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“I asked Raed if the international community could do anything to help him. “Our message is simple,” he responded. “We don’t need any aid or anything. Just put pressure on the Israelis so they get out of the sea and let us fish and bring a livelihood to our families again.” By October 2014, attacks on Gazan fishermen within the six-mile fishing limit had become routine. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights documented eighteen shooting incidents in the two months after the ceasefire and at least four instances in which fishermen were arrested while working inside the six-mile line. …fishing off the coast in northern Gaza, peppering the crews with rubber-coated steel bullets and arresting seven of them. Not a single rocket was fired into Israel from Gaza in these two months. Amidst the one-way ceasefire, the New York Times described the atmosphere as “a fragile calm.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Unfortunately for Palestinians in East Jerusalem, obtaining a permit from the municipal government is next to impossible, forcing them to build under circumstances the authorities consider illegal. In many cases, their homes are demolished as punishment. “I’m not allowed to build on my own land just because it’s not included in their plan,” he remarked. “If it was a Jew who did what I did it would have been maybe a 3,000 [shekel] fine.” Hussein said that the land behind his home had been expropriated by the city to build a public school, and that the city had begun uprooting the family’s orchards in order to build new access roads for settlers living on land taken from their neighbors. “Forty percent of my family’s land is going to be taken just to build settlers a short cut!” twenty-eight-year-old Muhammad exclaimed.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“The Israeli military had not only torn through the civilian population of Gaza like a buzz saw during the 51 Day War, killing some 2,200 people-more than 70 percent were confirmed as civilians—and wounding well over 10,000; it had pulverized Gaza's infrastructure. Over 400 businesses and shops had been damaged in targeted Israeli strikes, and at least 120 were completely obliterated; 24 medical facilities were damaged, including the Wafa Hospital in Shujaiya, Gaza's only geriatric rehabilitation facility, whose top three floors were razed by tank shelling. A full one third of Gaza's mosques were bombed, from the Al-Amin Muhammad Mosque, a stately structure built in the center of Gaza City with donations from a Malaysian Muslim charity, to the Al-Omari Mosque, a historical treasure that had stood in the same spot in Jabalia since 647 AD until it was brought to the ground by Israeli missiles on August 2. Gaza’s lone power station was decimated by Israeli airstrikes on July 29, leaving most of Gaza without electricity for over 18 hours a day, and sometimes longer. Perhaps the most disturbing figure was the more than 18,000 civilian homes the Israeli military leveled during its assault on Gaza, leaving at least 100,000 homeless or forced to cram into the already overcrowded homes of relatives.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“The invasion of Gaza served as a bonanza for right-wing political mobilization, catalyzing an ultra-nationalist march through the institutions of the Jewish state. The right-wing's wartime success represented the culmination of the process the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling of Hebrew University called "politicide," or the calculated destruction of part or an entire community of people in order to deny them self-determination.
"Murders, localized massacres, the elimination of leadership and elite groups, the physical destruction of public institutions and infrastructure, land colonization, starvation, social and political isolation, re-education, and partial ethnic cleansing are the major tools used to achieve this goal," Kimmerling wrote in his classic 2003 biography of Ariel Sharon, the rightist war-nor politician and then-Prime Minister he cast as the architect
of the practice.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Among the first journalists to make it into the town was Tamer al-Meshal of Al Jazeera Arabic. Al-Meshal arrived in Khuza’a as hundreds of traumatized refugees fled int he other direction, many carrying decomposing bodies wrapped in blankets. The road was littered with the corpses of those cut down by Israeli tank fire as they tried to escape. Among the bodies was that of a teenage girl killed a few meters in front of her wheelchair. In a home at the eastern edge of town, al-Meshal found a pile of burned bodies in a bathroom spattered with dried blood and pieces of flesh.
On August 2, when a seventy-two-hour ceasefire finally took hold, Ghadir Rujeila was found by refugees who had been straming out of the village. She lay dead six meters in front of her wheelchair, crumpled along the side of the road, filled with shrapnel and partly decomposed. The teenage girl had apparently attempted to chase after her fleeing family before Israeli tank fire cut her down Left behind in the chaos, she bled to death alone.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“That’s where the humiliation started,” recalled Muhammad Najjar. “They were shooting directly at us, so we had to lay on the ground. We put our hands on our heads and took off our clothes without being ordered to because that is what we used to witness on TV when you run into special forces. We kept screaming, ‘Civilians! Civilians!’ But they didn’t respond.”
From the tank, a soldier called out for an elderly man to step forward from the terrified group, which had huddled behind a large mound of dirt. Najjar said when the man emergedthe soldier shot him to death without explanation. Next, the soldier ordered another man forward, demanding he strip and turn around. Finally, the group was allowed to march forward behind the naked man, continuing their escape along a road strewn with dead bodies of the elderly, the weak, and those not able to escape the shells that were still landing all around. At the gates of Khuza’a, Najjar phones the ICRC one final time. Once again, they refused to dispatch an ambulance. And so the march continued west until the refugees found cars to take them to the main hospital in Khan Younis.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Over the sound of gritty break-beats and stirring string samples, The Shadow and Subliminal defended cops and lonized army service, upending the anti-authority sensibility that defines traditional rap culture. When the two self-styled Zionist rappers performed during the bloodiest days of the in-tifada, their audiences often erupted with chants of "Death to Arabs!"
In June, following the abduction of the three Israeli teens, Subliminal took to Facebook to lash out at a Palestinian-Israeli member of the Knesset, Haneen Zoabi, who had objected to her interviewer's characterization of the kidnappers as terrorists. "I'm not ashamed to say that I hope she'll be run down [in an auto accident] and die, or slip in the bath and rip her head off, or eat a rotten egg and die of food poisoning, or anything.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Al-Najjar was in his home with fifteen members of his family after a night of heavy bombardment when a tank shell hit their house. With the house surrounded by Israeli soldiers, al-Najjar beseeched the troops in Hebrew to allow him and his family to leave. Instead of permitting them to seek refuge elsewhere, the troops seized al-Najjar, forced him to strip and paraded him through the streets to the Kuuza Mosque to be interrogated.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“The casualty count at this point in the war gave new urgency to the strategy Qassam Brigades commander Muhammad al-Deif had overseen. By August 3, just after the Israeli army enacted the Hannibal Directive in Rafah, the Israeli death toll stood at just over sixty-seven—almost exclusively soldiers and military personnel. Meanwhile, the Israeli army had killed more than eighteen hundred residents of Gaza, among whom 80 percent were civilians, according to estimates by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights. While Al-Qassam aimed to kill soldiers in close quarters engagements, the Israeli army had resorted to the Dahiya Doctrine, employing disproportionate force to batter Gaza's civilian population in vain hopes that they would turn on Hamas.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“The people here are civilians. They are doctors, teachers, businessmen—they're the best of society. So why else destroy this tower but for the savagery and barbarism of the Israelis that target everything on this land: humans, stones and plants? Why else but to plant terror and fear and kick people out of their land?"
Israeli violence had become such a consistent feature of Gazan life that few of Barawi's neighbors were terribly shocked by the destruction of their homes. "We actually got used to all the explosions," he reflected. "Everyone was prepared for their ceilings to collapse on them so they sat in their apartments and played with their kids and did what they normally do. We prepared while watching TV or doing mundane things just to move from this world into the next.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Rabbi Aviner, an early Kook disciple wrote, Israel was called “to be holy, not moral, and the general principles of morality, customary for all mankind, do not bind the people of Israel, because it has been chosen to be above them.”
― Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

“With the sound of exploding bombs growing closer, Qadan and his family escaped again, to his brother's house in western Rafah, where they remained for the next three days. Qadan told me he did not seek shelter in an UNRWA school because Israel had begun shelling those, too. There was no sanctuary anywhere in the Gaza Strip, not in UN-operated schools, nor in hospitals.
According to the UNRWA, by Saturday, August 2, the Israeli military had attacked a full third of Gaza's hospitals, along with fourteen primary healthcare clinics and twenty-nine ambulances belonging to either the Red Crescent or the Ministry of Health.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“The wounds Homs described were telltale signs of Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME), an experimental munition that generates high intensity explosions in a concentrated area. Since 2006, doctors in Gaza have documented unusual injuries suggesting the weapon's use by the Israeli military against civilians.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Another Brick in the Wall Part 2” was banned by the apartheid government of South Africa, Waters wrote, “Artists were right to refuse to play in South Africa’s Sun City resort until apartheid fell and white people and black people enjoyed equal rights. And we are right to refuse to play in Israel until the day comes—and it surely will come—when the wall of occupation falls and Palestinians live alongside Israelis in the peace, freedom, justice, and dignity that they all deserve.”
― Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel