Max Blumenthal: I wrote this book because I wanted to show Americans what they’re paying for. Every American’s relationship to Israel can be summed up as money for nothing and checkpoints for free. We’re giving them $30 billion over the next 10 years to guarantee their qualitative military edge over all other countries. We also have to see Israel’s role in destabilizing the Middle East and in seeking to ensure that U.S. policy guarantees that Israel’s Arab neighbors are weakened and that the people of the Arab world can’t determine their own future. That’s why Israel had such a comfortable relationship with Hosni Mubarak—because he was a Western and Gulf puppet who was helping to participate in the siege of Gaza and why Israel is so excited about the coup that ousted Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood might have ceded to US demands to police the Sinai, but now with Sisi, the crackdown on Gaza is much more extreme. They have filled up possibly 80 percent of the tunnels that bring vital food and medicine and even fish into the Gaza Strip, which is shocking considering that the Gaza Strip is a coastal territory — they must import fish through tunnels because they’re not allowed to fish. And now we’re seeing Egyptian naval forces join the Israeli navy in arresting Gazan fishermen. Now the coup regime in Egypt has committed a series of massacres which were inevitable as soon as they took power on July 3. They massacred non-violent Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators, especially in the Rabba area of Cairo–they killed over 1,000 people. And the U.S. has been threatening to withdraw some military aid to Egypt–of course, they’re not going to fully hold this regime accountable for the massive human rights crimes it’s committing. And Israel all the while has been demanding veto power over the United States’ efforts to hold Egypt accountable. The Israeli government is enthralled with Sisi’s coup regime and the Egyptian military, and it will do all it can to see the US fund it and prevent it from being held accountable. So to see Israel as this normal, European country that exists completely independently of the chaos in the Middle East is completely bogus. And the other reason is much more simple: that we are paying for the only open ethnocracy in the world, and its entire existence and its domination and control over the lives of millions of Palestinians and the exclusion of millions more Palestinians simply because they’re not Jews. The whole fate of all these people who are living between the river and the sea, mired in misery and refugee camps, is in the hands of the American people and Washington. And while Israel plants non-indigenous trees over destroyed Palestinian villages to conceal its own crimes of expulsion and dispossession, the Israel lobby in the United States is attempting to erect a curtain of silence around this conversation we’re having. So what I’ve done with this book is clinically detail the facts on the ground that have been concealed from Americans through intimidation and conspiracy of silence. I don’t want just to pull back the curtain a little bit, I want to tear it down. AK: You go deep into the darkest places of Israeli society. Could you outline your method of reporting and what you think it brings to the table that readers aren’t getting elsewhere? MB: I conceived this book project before I even started my first book, Republican Gomorrah, and when I was beginning to refine the tactics that were working really well in exposing the radical right and the Republican Party. I was simply insinuating myself into the institutions of the GOP base, and into the gatherings this party would hold, getting to know people, trying to understand their mentality, and then following up with them. And making constant calls instead of relying on other people to do the reporting for me. From there, I’d conduct my own research and analysis and immerse myself in the history of the Christian right.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 19:05:10 +0000
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