Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Max Blumenthal, he's the author of the book Republican Gomorrah, he's an investigative journalist, columnist, documentary filmmaker, and blogger, he's written for The Nation, The American Prospect, Washington Monthly, Al Jazeera English, Alternet, The Huffington Post, Salon Magazine, and has been cited by every newspaper in the world.
He's the son of Sidney Blumenthal, one of Bill Clinton's advisors, if you remember back to the 1990s, and his website is maxblumenthal.com, welcome to the show Max, how are you?
Great to be on with you.
Really appreciate you having me here, or appreciate you joining us today, and boy I was, you've done a lot of really great work about the right wing side of Israeli policy and American policy toward Israel, and I kind of wanted to ask you more generally about that, but I think we should start with this most recent article, it's quite shocking, How to Kill Goyim and Influence People, Leading Israeli Rabbis Defend Manual for Killing Non-Jews.
Max, what's this about?
Yeah, and I should tell you that I'm in Haifa, Israel right now, and the chief rabbi of Haifa was one of the rabbis at this congress I went to at the Ramada Hotel in Jerusalem, of leading fundamentalist rabbis in Israel, defending a book called Torah HaMelech, which is basically a manual for killing non-Jews.
It claims to bring rabbinical sources, and this is of course completely bogus, because the Torah has a lot of sources that justify peace, but it claims to bring rabbinical sources to justify the killing of non-Jews in warfare, including innocent civilians, children, and families, and it says that children should be killed if they are judged to be likely to grow up to threaten Jews.
This book was written by Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira of the settlement Yitzhar, which is one of the most violent and terrorist settlements in the West Bank.
Actually, Shapira was arrested by the Israeli police recently because he's accused of helping orchestrate a rocket attack against a Palestinian village.
I mean, you hear about the Palestinians in Gaza firing rockets at Israel, but actually this lunatic rabbi and his followers are firing rockets at nearby villages from their settlement.
His yeshiva has been funded by the Israeli government and by a group in the U.S., the Central Fund of Israel, which is based on 6th Avenue in New York, to the tune of several hundred thousand shekels each year.
These are tax-deductible in the U.S., by the way, so this is a huge scandal, and...
Well, I wonder how big of a scandal it is in Israel.
I mean, it sounds like the people you're talking about have got to be such kooks that they're the most marginal force in Israeli politics, right?
And it's a major national controversy.
You heard about the rabbi Ovadia Yosef calling for the death of all Palestinians on the eve of direct negotiations between Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.
Yosef is the most powerful rabbi in Israel, I would argue.
He's the former chief rabbi of Israel, actually, and he's the spiritual leader of the Shas Party, which is a key member of Netanyahu's coalition, and his son, Yaakov Yosef, endorsed this book that I mentioned, the Manual for Killing Non-Jews.
So Netanyahu was confronted with a decision on the eve of peace talks.
Will he condemn this rabbi who's calling for the killing of the people he's supposed to negotiate with, or not?
He chose not to condemn him, and just to say, this isn't my position.
He's also refused to condemn this book, Torah HaMelech, which has gotten reams and reams of media attention in Israel.
He hasn't confronted the rabbis who've written it, and the two rabbis who endorsed the book were summoned to be interviewed by Israel's General Security Service.
One of them is the son of Ovadia Yosef, who I mentioned, and the other one is Dov Lior, who has close connections with the Israeli Defense Forces, actually.
The military intelligence members have been brought to meet with this character, who's also a pro-terrorist fanatic.
I could spend another ten minutes talking about him.
Instead of coming to their interrogations from this fearsome security service that Israel maintains, they basically thumbed their nose and said, we don't accept the authority of the state, the Torah is above the state, Jewish law is above the state, so we're not going to go.
And what happened to them?
Nothing.
Did Netanyahu say anything?
No.
And this is the first time, I think, in history that people have refused to show up for interrogations when summoned.
So this shows a really disturbing trend in Israel, of the extreme right declaring themselves a state, not only within a state, but above the state, and getting away with it completely.
And a lot of this has to do with Netanyahu's political calculation, that if he can maintain their support in his coalition, if he can keep them as part of his constituency and as his allies, he doesn't have to negotiate land for peace.
If he gets rid of these characters, like the Shas party, then he has to move into a coalition with Kadima and centrist parties that are more likely to negotiate with the PA.
So instead of negotiating land for peace, he's ceding ground that not just him, but the state of Israel will never, ever recover again to people who believe that it's a divine commandment to kill non-Jews.
So that's really where Israel's heading right now.
Well, I'm really interested in what's the public opinion over there?
I mean, you know, the Israel lobby in the United States, notwithstanding, the vast majority of American Jews are liberal, if not, you know, secular and liberal.
And I just wonder how it is in Israel.
I mean, how much influence do these kooks have, not necessarily just over the Netanyahu government, but over the society in general, Max?
They don't have, they have, well, there's a significant part of the society that opposes them.
The middle class in Tel Aviv despises them.
But this is an extremely politically active group, and they're a key component of Netanyahu's governing coalition.
And as I explained, he needs to govern to the right in order to avoid having to make concessions to the Palestinians.
As public opinion in Israel is, you know, trending towards the right, it doesn't seem like Netanyahu has any real pressing reason to get rid of these characters.
And what's happening in the Knesset?
I've been interviewing lots of members of the Knesset, especially members who are introducing anti-democratic bills, to try to understand their reasoning.
A lot of these bills are being introduced by the opposition party, Kadima, which has replaced the traditional opposition party, Labor, which under Ehud Barak, who's the defense minister, has basically disappeared, because they're the party of war.
So their constituents have either gone to Kadima, or they've gone to left-wing, more anti-war parties.
Kadima puts up very little opposition to Netanyahu's pro-settlement line, to Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, his racism towards Palestinian citizens of Israel.
And they're actually actively assisting the anti-democratic trend in Israel, which favors, if not transferring the Palestinian citizens of Israel out, severely limiting their rights.
So when I interviewed one of the top deputies for Avigdor Lieberman, who's the head of a fascist party, Yisrael Bteinu, it's a classically fascist party, with a mainly Russian constituency.
This member of Knesset is named David Rotem, and he's the sponsor of most of these bills, including bills limiting, that would punish people for failing to swear loyalty to the Jewish state.
It would send them to prison.
He told me, I asked him, why isn't there more significant opposition in the Knesset to what you're doing?
You know, why isn't there opposition from Kadima?
And he told me, well, we're all Zionists, and we all want to advance the Zionist vision.
So that's really a grave problem.
Just kind of in closing, the rabbis who I've discussed, and a lot of the fascist elements in Israel, what they're seeking is literally a fascist state of Judea, the vision of Meir Kahani, the original rabbi of Hattin, who is like their patron saint, their hidden imam.
These are people who are sort of anti-Zionist.
They oppose Theodore Herzl's secular Zionist vision, but they see that within Zionism, there are the seeds for building a sort of fascist state of Judea, based on theocratic rule, because it provides for Jewish exclusivity and the privileging of Jews.
Where they break rank is just on the definition of what a Jew is, and they believe that a Jew is someone who follows Jewish law to a T, so that those secular Jews in Tel Aviv could also be killed under Torah HaMelech, the book that's a manual for killing non-Jews.
And they've said as much.
I've quoted them in my article, which you can find at my blog, maxblumenthal.com.
So there's a troubling scenario in Israel, which is going beyond all of the ravages that Zionism has caused, secular Zionism has caused, trying to take over the institutions of the state and bring it into a second phase, where greater Israel and the theocratic dream of the settlers will be consolidated, and then the state will turn in on itself and start forcing out those elements, the secular elements that oppose it.
Well, now, I have to say, Max, I know I know you're real short on time, so I'll just try like one minute.
Yeah.
OK, I'll just try to get real quick your take on the paranoia.
I mean, the parallels with America here are pretty inescapable.
And I remember from your video after the flotilla massacre, your interviews of the people in the town square where they really kind of believe in general over there in Israeli society that the whole world really is out to get them and destroy them at any moment.
And if that's really true, then I guess it's understandable why these right wing parties have more and more power.
Well, this is just that classic Zionist reasoning.
I mean, there is actually one of the most popular songs in Israel in the 70s was called The Whole World is Against Us, and it was performed on Israeli national TV.
It's much easier for mainstream Israelis to believe that the world's efforts to condemn Israel for its occupation and to stop settlement activity, to bring aid to Gaza are related to anti-Semitism.
And to see that in light of the Holocaust is just another effort to kill Jews and wipe the Jews off the face of the earth and to see it as actual legitimate indignation against crimes against humanity and violations of human rights.
And that's the rhetoric you hear from Benjamin Netanyahu on a weekly basis.
You hear it in the media here, and it's taught in the school system from as soon as children enter school, they're taught about the Holocaust in an ahistorical way, and they're taught that the state is the response to the Holocaust.
So everyone here is heavily indoctrinated, and it's very hard to break out of that, which is why you see opinion polls of Jewish Israeli youth constantly favoring apartheid.
These factors, none of this factors into direct negotiations, and so I think ultimately there's going to have to be some kind of, I would just say in closing, that's why the situation is moving more away from two states and towards one state, because this state, the state of Israel, which has all of the power in negotiations, has no capacity to deal with its own internal problems.
And the United States is not putting any pressure on it.
In fact, as we see outside the Cordova House, the United States is beginning to look more and more like the worst incarnations of Israel.
All right, well, listen, I know you got to go, but I really appreciate your time.
I hope we can do this again soon and explore some of these subjects in more detail, Max.
Yeah, let's do it for longer next time.
I'm just running around here, but thanks for having me.
I understand.
Okay, well, great.
Thanks a lot for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Bye.
All right, everybody, that's Max Blumenthal.
The website is maxblumenthal.com.
His book is called Republican Gomorrah, Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party.
