Agip.
You always have to ask for it, don't you.
By the way, you can believe me or not. Makes no difference to my net worth.
Here it is:
Goliath proves that liberal democracy is now, for all intents and purpose, defunct: indeed, it may have never existed in the first place. The book demonstrates this on every page with brutal real-life firsthand reporting. Starting off slowly, Blumenthal paints a portrait of a society living in a bubble, with the Israeli Ashkenazi aristocracy on top, the Mizrahi drone-workers charged with police work and other non-elite tasks near the bottom, and the Palestinian helots on the lowest rung, eking out a problematic existence with all the legal and economic factors pointing to their eventual expulsion from Israeli society. As the rightist wave engulfs what had been the dream of socialist Zi%nists to build an egalitarian society, and turns it into a bastion of religious nationalism and outright racism, Blumenthal moves through this society-in-transition with the unforgiving eye of a born documentarian, mercilessly exposing the hypocrisy, mendacity, and criminality of a country that is coming unhinged.
How else are we to explain the fact that, during the attack on Gaza, IDF soldiers killed an eight-year-old child, one Ibrahim Awajah, and used his corpse for target practice? This was no isolated incident: one by one we read the stories of disgusting atrocities carried out by the IDF – how they lobbed a shell into the living room of Izeldeen Abuelaish, a Harvard-trained fertility doctor and medical researcher who had helped many Israelis have children. The shell decapitated two of his daughters and "shredded" his other children "to pieces." As this was going on, Israelis sat on Parash Hill, near Sderot, which offers a clear view of the Gaza Strip, watching the slaughter and cheering as if it were the latest hit movie – spectators to their own moral degeneration.
As if they were quite well aware of what they were becoming – indeed, had become – ordinary Israelis reacted with hatred against anyone in their midst who held up an unflattering mirror to their war hysteria. Right-wing demagogues like Avigdor Lieberman, now Foreign Minister, demanded that antiwar protesters be jailed. At Tel Aviv University, the youth organizer of the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu said antiwar protesters should be deprived of their citizenship, to raucous cheers: the university’s reputation as a bastion of liberalism to the contrary notwithstanding.
As Operation Cast Lead came to a horrific and bloody close, a poll taken by Daniel Bar-Tal, an eminent political psychologist, found that more than half of Israelis wouldn’t allow an Arab into their homes. A full 68 percent wouldn’t live in the same building as an Arab, while 63 percent said Arabs represented a dire security threat to the state of Israel. Forty percent said the government should deport them all or "encourage" them to leave. The backdrop to this was a rising tide within the political and clerical class of brazen racism. Israel’s Chief Rabbi, Ovadiah Yosef, screeched "It is forbidden to be merciful to the Arabs. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable!"