 Welcome to the New America Foundation. It's our pleasure to welcome Max Blumenthal to discuss his new book, Goliath, Life and Loving in Greater Israel. Max is a journalist who's written for a variety of publications, The New York Times, The LA Times, Daily Beast, The Guardian, and so on. Also the author of the 2009 book, Republican Gamora, Inside the Movement, The Shadow of the Party, which was a New York Times bestseller. And Max is going to talk about the big themes and stories in his book, and then I'll engage him in a bit of Q&A and then throw it open to your questions. Thank you, Max. Thanks. Is this? That's all. Yeah. Do you guys hear me okay? Yeah, I'll stand and deliver like Edward James Olmos. Thanks a lot, Peter, and thanks to the New America Foundation and to Anne-Marie Slaughter. I know she can't be here now, but I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this book and have this discussion here. And I think I forgot to bring my coffee, which I need. I need this desperately. I was actually kind of hoping if the event wasn't gonna be canceled that it could at least be pushed forward because I'm kind of a night owl and I wanted a few extra hours of sleep, but that was a joke. I want to start the talk actually by discussing the issue of speech suppression around this issue just really briefly. I understand there was no effort to... There has been some kind of effort or complaints about my presence here and throughout my book tour. There have been attempts to shut down various events that I appeared at, all of which were rejected and rebuked. Someone named Naftali Bennett just spoke at the Brookings Institute and there was no effort to prevent him from speaking at the premier think tank in Washington. And I don't really know if there necessarily should be, even though Naftali Bennett recently endorsed a decision by the National Civil Service Administration of Israel to bar religious Jewish women from volunteering in hospitals after 9 p.m. for fear that they would date Arab doctors. This was a decision made under pressure from the anti-miscegenation group Le Havah. And Bennett, who is the economics minister of Israel and the head of the pro-settler Jewish Home Party, which advocates annexing 60% of the West Bank and depriving Palestinians, occupied Palestinians of citizenship, consigning them to Jordanian residency and permanent fifth-class status, was welcomed at the premier think tank with very little outcry in Washington, D.C. So there's definitely a double standard and a disturbing wind of repression. We also saw it recently when Harvard's Hillel House banned the former speaker of the Knesset and the former head of the Jewish agency, Avram Berg, barred him from speaking for their audience. Apparently, Avram Berg was too controversial to hear from. A student at SUNY Binghamton, who was a member of the Hillel House at his university, was ousted from Hillel for attempting to host Iad Bernat, the Palestinian filmmaker, the Oscar-nominated Palestinian filmmaker, for attempting to host a Palestinian at this discussion. A children's art exhibition of children's art from the Gaza Strip was shut down in San Francisco after a campaign of suppression from the local Jewish federations. And these enforcers actually celebrated shutting down an exhibition of children's art as if they had achieved something, some kind of pro-Israel victory. Ancheh Hesed, which is a synagogue in New York recently, shut down a panel on Israeli democracy that was to have included J.J. Goldberg of the Jewish Daily Forward, who has attempted and completely failed to savage my book, who is a former Israeli member of the Israeli border police, not exactly someone you would describe as a delegitimizer. But even this discussion was too much to host at a premier conservative synagogue in New York. Tribe Fest, the annual gathering of the Jewish federations, ousted a group of young Jews who attempted to discuss human rights violations in the occupied territories called Young Jewish and Proud, barred them from appearing at its annual conference. And then there is the situation inside Israel where journalists like Uri Blau of Haaretz have been prosecuted for revealing illegal assassinations carried out by the Israeli army. There was this week a request by the Israeli police for all Israeli media to provide all photographs of the protests, which I'm going to discuss later on, against the proverb plan, the plan to remove 40,000 indigenous Bedouins from their homes. There have been attacks on NGOs in Israel, human rights NGOs, including mainstream human rights NGOs like Peace Now. There have been attacks on the new Israel Foundation, attempts to paint them as anti-Semitic. These attacks have been carried out from the heart of the Knesset. And for Palestinian journalists, the fate has been much worse. Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip were assassinated in a car marked with the letters TV on top of the car during the November 2012 escalation, because they were affiliated with a Hamas-run TV channel. They had no operational involvement in terrorism. And when the museum in Washington attempted to recognize them, along with all of the journalists around the world killed in a line of duty, including journalists who worked for Syrian state TV, advancing propaganda for Bashar al-Assad, pro-Israel groups, discourse suppressors moved in to scrub their name from the ceremony. And Richard Engel, NBC bureau chief, when he spoke at the ceremony, would not condemn that. He would not condemn that in any explicit terms. Al-Wa-Tan, the Palestinian channel in Ramallah, has had its offices rated and is unable to get its equipment back from the Israeli army, and therefore is unable to broadcast outside Ramallah. So I understand this kind of repression on a very intimate level through my reporting. And I'm not surprised by it based on what I saw in Israel-Palestine. But I am impressed whenever anyone stands up to this suppression, as the New America Foundation has done, and as many other groups that have hosted me on my tour have done and have given people the opportunity to hear my reporting and hear my ideas and to engage with me and to criticize me. And so I want to talk about that reporting. I want to talk about this book, which I wrote, which I started writing in 2009 after Israel elected the most right-wing government in its history. And this book is the portrayal of Israel-Palestine during the culmination of a transitional phase, which began at the end of the Second Intifada, with the rise of a regime of HaFradah, or separation, unilateral separation imposed on the West Bank and Gaza, which drove bellicose and even anti-democratic attitudes in Israeli society as Palestinians essentially disappeared from Israeli life. And there was a parallel trend of radicalization in Palestinian society as a result of this unilateral separation. The book begins with Operation Cast Lead, the three-week assault on the Gaza Strip in late 2008 and 2009. And right as we speak, the Gaza Strip is plunged into darkness. The situation has not really changed. They've had blackouts for a month. Their main power generator, which was destroyed during this assault, along with 80 percent of all arable land in the Gaza Strip, along with the American University, along with the Islamic University, along with the Sawari chicken farms was destroyed. During this destruction, Israel was carrying out national elections. And the war drove the elections and helped drive the right-wing trend, as 95 percent of Israelis supported the war during its first week, including the Meretz Party, the most left-wing party on the Zionist spectrum. Daniel Bartal, who is a political psychologist who I interview in my book, he's a world renowned figure because of his work on trauma studies and specifically on how prolonged conflict has impacted the Israeli psyche and who did the most extensive survey on Israeli attitudes after and during Operation Cast Lead. And Akiva Elder, the Israeli journalist, summarized his findings. Israeli Jews' consciousness is characterized by a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians, and insensitivity to their suffering. The fighting in Gaza dashed a little hope Bartal had left that this public would exchange the drums of war for the cooing of doves. The peace process had long been extinguished by this point, along with the Oslo era. And politicians had arisen, like Avigdor Lieberman, who was campaigning under the banner of the Yisro Bethenu Party, a mostly Russian party with a promise, a simple promise, no loyalty, no citizenship. In other words, if Palestinian citizens of Israel failed to declare their loyalty to the Jewish state, they would be rapidly stripped of their citizenship and removed through various sundry means. There was also Sipi Livni, who was the current peace negotiator, and at the time was the foreign minister and was running for office, running for the prime minister's office, who declared our troops behaved like hooligans in the Gaza Strip, which I demanded of them. This was an appeal to votes. While Ehud Barak, then the defense minister and the head of the labor party, boasted before a Russian audience that he would whack a terrorist on the toilet, which was a direct quote from Vladimir Putin, what Putin said about his campaign in Chechnya. And this was Barak's attempt to outflank Lieberman, who many feared would actually be elected prime minister, especially after Lieberman swept high school elections, high school mock elections. Lieberman was the voice of the Israeli youth, according to the Center for the Struggle Against Racism, which is an Israeli NGO. 68 percent of Israeli Jews by 2006 said they wouldn't refuse to live in the same building as an Arab. Nearly half said they wouldn't allow an Arab into their home, and 63 percent agreed with the statement Arabs are a security and demographic threat to the state. The subsequent polls by Camille Fuchs of the Israeli Democracy Institute show that those trends have held every subsequent in every year afterwards. So Lieberman comes into power as the most bellicose of those campaigning. As foreign minister, the third most popular party was Yisro Bateno. Netanyahu emerges as the winner. And I enter. I kind of enter the scene. I decided to take my first extended reporting trip in May 2009 after completing Republican Gomorrah, my first book. And I used the same methodology as I did in Republican Gomorrah to report on this book. Of course, I had to clear a few more hurdles. I sought to immerse myself in the key institutions of Israeli society and at the flash points of conflict and crisis on the ground. In one of the hurdles I had to clear was to get through Ben-Gurion International Airport. This is a lot easier for me than it might be for many of you. It's certainly more easier for me than it was for Anna Lekas Miller, who is a journalistic colleague of mine who has written for the Daily Beasts Open Zion and was recently deported and sent away for at least 10 years without explanation, ostensibly because she's half Lebanese, she's of the wrong ethnicity. Nor Judah, who is a Palestinian American teacher who was working at the Quaker School in Ramallah, was also deported for 10 years without explanation, presumably because she was of the wrong ethnicity. Ali Garib, who's here now in George Hale, who is an American journalist working for Man News, recently reported that over 100 Arab-Americans a year are deported by the State of Israel. Someone who was hassled and humiliated at Ben-Gurion International Airport was Dana Shalala, the former Secretary of Health and Human Services, under Bill Clinton, ostensibly because she was of the wrong ethnicity. She is Lebanese. Ironically, she was on her way to a conference of college presidents in Israel on how to fight Palestine Solidarity organizing on campus, so her detention for two to five hours at Ben-Gurion was sort of poetic justice. I have a much easier time entering. I'm asked, am I Jewish or my parents Jewish or my grandparents Jewish? What Hebrew school did I go to? What two holidays do I celebrate? I say, you know, do I celebrate any holidays? I say, yes. They say, which ones? And I say, I'm in the Secret Service, not the Army of God. So, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. And then sometimes I'll contrive an Israeli girlfriend, which really makes the security officers happy because we may help offset the demographic threat together. So, I'll declare that we're going to get married and have lots of Jewish babies. Actually, when I did this once, I was waved through an additional security check. It didn't have to have my bags hand checked. I understand this Jewish privilege that I gain as soon as I enter the Israeli controlled frontiers of the Holy Land to be an essential ingredient in this book, that this book, that I don't think a Palestinian journalist, a Palestinian American journalist who may have been more talented than me could have done this book because they could not have gained access to as many places as me. Many places are simply off limits to you. And when my palace, when I hang out with my Palestinian American friends in Ramallah, who I, whose friendship I gained here in the U.S., they often ask me to, if I can get them through Calandia, basically sneak them through this checkpoint so they can go to the beach. They're basically stuck in this occupied Bantu stand while I am free to go wherever I want. And I have far less connection to the Holy Land than they and their families do. That is something that I don't take lightly. It's part of the burden of my reporting. So, one of the institutions that I sought to insinuate myself into was the Knesset, which was the base of Lieberman's plan and the Wright's plan to strip Palestinian citizens, the 20 percent minority of their citizenship rights, or to further consolidate institutional discrimination. I witnessed a hearing of the Constitution Committee in which leaders of mainstream human rights NGOs were basically brought before the Knesset to declare their patriotism and to beg the government not to investigate their funding and to accuse them of being funded by Europe and to accuse them of anti-Semitism and to incite against them through billboard campaigns, accusing them of taking money from secret European funders. Part of this campaign was carried out by the right-wing student group, Imtier Tsu, which was ironically being funded by Pastor John Hage, the leading Christian Zionist pastor in the United States, a foreign funder who has said on camera before his congregation that when the Antichrist returns he will be homosexual and half-Jewish as Hitler was with fierce features. A very wonderful individual. They had no problem taking money from him. The Constitution Committee was headed by David Rotem, who is advancing laws to strip human rights NGOs of their funding. Again, more speech suppression. And to Rotem's left sat Mikhail Ben-Ari, who is a member of the Kach Party, which has been outlawed and is identified by the FBI as a terrorist group. He was elected under the National Union Party. He was a former deputy of Mayer Kahana, who was banned from the Knesset in 1988 for racist incitement, but mainly because he threatened to deprive Yitzhak Shamir of another Likud Party of votes or split the Likud Party's base. And I interviewed first Ben-Ari in his office with my colleague David Sheen. And Ben-Ari told us and made some interesting points to us, because this was someone who had been covered so intensely by the Israeli media. He was always on camera, his histrionics in the West Bank attempting to prevent outposts from being evacuated, his rampaging with his followers through Jaffa, the Palestinian ghetto of Tel Aviv, chanting Jaffa for Jews, Arabs out. This was, you know, he was always on the news, but he had not been able to successfully pass one law. And I said, why? Why? He said, because Likud is doing it for me. Kahana has won. The governing parties are doing what Kahana wanted to do and are advancing his vision. And he almost admitted that he had become superfluous. And so, through becoming superfluous, he had to continue to try to outflank Yisro Bethenu and Likud, moving further to the right, to the point where he told me that I will never say that Palestine is, that Jordan is Palestine, which is kind of what you always often hear settlers saying, Jordan is Israel. It's ours and it belongs to the Jewish people. That's how far he was willing to go. So you have wrote him then at the head of the Constitution Committee, which is an important committee because Israel has no Constitution. Israel has no national identity. The Supreme Court has ruled that identity can only be afforded according to ethnic identity, Jewish or Arab, not Israeli. And so the Constitution Committee and the Supreme Court are kind of making it up as they go along. And I interviewed Rotem at his home in Efrat, which is a mega settlement in the West Bank. And Rotem told me that, you know, what he was doing was to advance the will of the Israeli public, what the majority really wanted. And I said, well, this is the tyranny of the majority. I mean, you've introduced a bill, for example, that will authorize the acceptance to communities law, which will authorize communities of under 500 to be able to discriminate on the basis of race or religion. And this bill, by the way, has passed. And he said, he looked me in the eye and he said, the tyranny of the majority is the heart of democracy. And it's not tyranny if the majority wants to strip the minority of its rights. I'm slightly paraphrasing, but not much. I mean, this is the straightforward style that I got from right wingers. It was also figures like Ehud Barak, who was then the leader of the Labor Party, who supported a bill to force all new citizens of Israel to take loyalty oaths to the Jewish and democratic state. This was, of course, first introduced by Meir Kahana and how arts, when Barak supported this bill, how arts declared that Kahana was the real leader of the Knesset that his legacy had triumphed. There is a new law being debated in the Knesset. It was being debated this morning and advanced. It's one of the many laws which is being advanced to basically overrule a Supreme Court ruling. And there are also many other laws that are being advanced to strip the Supreme Court of its power or to stack the Supreme Court with right wingers. One of those bills will require all Supreme Court justices to perform military service, which would prevent an Arab from serving on the Supreme Court. And this new law being debated relates to the 60,000 non-Jewish African refugees who are living inside Israel right now. These are people who have fled Janjewid and Darfur. They've fled repression in Eritrea. They've fled poverty and genocide across Africa. And they've come to Israel partly because it's the only industrialized country with a land bridge connected by land to Africa. They're harrowing treks through the Sinai desert, but also partly because they've heard that this place might be a sanctuary because it claims to embody the lessons of the Holocaust never again. And what happened to them when they entered Israel is that they were stripped of their right to work or prevented from working and basically concentrated in South Tel Aviv and places like Ashkelon among the poorest and neediest of Jewish Israeli society, creating kind of a new crisis. On May 23, 2012, there was a full-scale race riot in Tel Aviv, barely covered in U.S. media with hundreds of thugs rampaging through African areas in Tel Aviv, smashing the storefronts of African businesses, attacking any African they could find. It was preceded and followed by days of firebomb attacks on African schools and African homes across Israel. Before the race riot, a group of top Israeli legislators appeared and cabinet ministers appeared before a crowd of 1,000 in South Tel Aviv. Miri Regev, who was the chairman of the Interior Committee in the Knesset, declared that the Africans are a cancer in the body of Israel. This was a sentiment that most Jewish Israelis agreed with according to the times of Israel, according to a poll by this newspaper. And that incitement, that kind of racist incitement which is doubled in 2012 according to the Israeli Committee Against Racism, has led to these attacks on Africans and spurred this crisis. To respond to the crisis, the Knesset first passed an amendment to the Anti-Infiltration Act, which would allow the police to arrest any African on the street and detain them without charges for as long as three years. It also established funding for the Saharanim internment facility in the Negev Desert, where currently thousands of non-Jewish Africans are sleeping and shipping containers, entire families. The government calls it an internment center. Former speaker of the Knesset, Ruben Rivlin, called it a concentration camp. I don't know what to call it, but I would volunteer my opinion that it reminds me of Manzanar, which was the camp that held Japanese Americans during World War II after they were deemed to possess enemy race blood. And Benjamin Netanyahu has explained explicitly, under pressure from figures like Ben Ari and Rotem, why these Africans have to be held in this camp and ultimately deported, 100% have to be deported, because they threaten the Jewish character of the state. In other words, they threaten the Jewish demographic majority. There is no path to citizenship for these non-Jewish Africans, and even when they attempted to convert en masse to Judaism, they were denied that opportunity. There is no path to asylum for them. Over 99.7% have been denied asylum, because they are of the wrong ethnic group and threaten to upend the ethnocratic structure of the Jewish state. And Netanyahu makes no secret of this. I want to, and so the new law I mentioned will propose an alternative solution. It's being, I think it's been passed in the Knesset. It's been authorized. Under the alternative solution, because the Supreme Court struck down the amendment to the Anti-Infiltration Act, Africans will be able to leave a new detention or internment facility during the day. They'll have to check in three times a day. They will not be allowed to work, and at night they have to report back and sleep in this facility, because they cannot sleep among the Israeli public. They can't be allowed that opportunity. It reminds me of what James Lowen called Sundown Towns during the Jim Crow era in the U.S. when African Americans were barred through various ordinances from being in U.S. cities and towns, including Chevy Chase, Maryland, after dark. So through this new alternative solution, Israel could become the world's largest sundown town. This is part of a process which began in 1948. Non-Jewish Africans are experiencing it, but Palestinians were the original victims, and the original Anti-Infiltration Act was passed in 1954 to uproot tens of thousands of Palestinians who had attempted to reunite with their families, with their farmland after 1948. So it's important to see this as a continuous process, not as Ari Shavit, the Israeli author, portrays it as something terrible that happened but needed to happen for him to be born. This is the argument he advanced in the New Yorker, but something that we just have to get over and let bygones be bygones. It has to be seen as something that's happening every day to Palestinians on both sides of the green line. And Lieberman and the right wing, the religious nationalist camp, Lieberman as a secularist, they understand it that way. They do understand it as a continuous process, but they understand it as a continuous process that needs to be finished because there is this ethnic minority inside Israel, which they consider a Trojan horse or a fifth column. Their number one enemy is Hanim Zawabi and the Balad Party. Zawabi is a Palestinian Israeli legislator. I spent a lot of a decent amount of time with. I interviewed her in my book. I profiled her and her mentor, Azmi Bishara, who has been exiled after being accused of spying for Hezbollah. And Zawabi, after sailing on the Free Gaza Flotilla and being almost physically attacked in the Knesset upon her return for denouncing the bloody raid on the top deck of the ship, has become the most hated woman in Israel. The real reason that she's hated and the Balad Party's hated and Bishara is hated is because of the Haifa Declaration, because of what they have called for, the kind of transformations that they have called for. They have demanded that Israel become a state of all its citizens without religious or ethnic preferences. And for that reason, and that reason alone, they have been declared traitorous and a threat actually in a letter issued by the Shin Bet in 2007 by then Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin. He singled them out and declared that if they threatened in any way the Jewish or democratic state they would be prosecuted. Many have been since prosecuted. And he declared the right to, insisted on the right to surveil any of their activists. A Balad leader from Jaffa, Sami Shahada, told me that he doesn't tell their party membership this, but the entire party leadership is currently under surveillance. And that also goes for my left-wing Jewish dissident friends in Israel who participate in anti-occupation protests. Many of them have been called in for Shin Bet interrogations. But the issue is that they have challenged the ethnocratic character of the state and Lieberman and the right see them as traitors and want to remove them. And this is partly why Lieberman and the right have the hearts and minds of Jewish-Israeli youth, the majority of Jewish-Israeli youth who declare year after year that they'll refuse to sit in a classroom with a fellow Arab, whose psyche has been impacted by the policy of HaFaradar separation, who have grown up in the post-Aslo era and see the peace process as one big joke, who admire Naftali Bennett, who just spoke at Brookings. And so the cry of this generation is to finish 48. 48 is not finished. We hear this cry in the letter of state-funded rabbis, hundreds of religious authorities who are state appointed, declaring that it is against Jewish law to rent apartments to non-Jews. And we hear it in the letter issued by their wives, declaring that it is against Jewish law for Jewish women to date Arab men, for Jews and Arabs to have relationships. And we see it in the burgeoning anti-miscegenation movement that they inspired through groups like Le Havah, which have issued kosher certificates to businesses that refuse to employ Arabs and other non-Jews, which have pressured landlords to stop renting to non-Jews, including Palestinian college students in Sfatt. We see it in the youth who they have inspired, the youth who attacked Jamal Joulani, the 19-year-old Palestinian in Zion Square in the center of Jerusalem, right near where I lived for several months, chanting death to Arabs and a Jew as a soul and Arab as a son of a bitch, which happens to be a favorite chant of the fans of the Baytar Jerusalem football club. And they beat him into a coma because a 15-year-old girl, friend of theirs, had complained that he had made a pass at her. She admitted to lying later on. But this carries echoes of the submerged past of the United States and of the lynching of Emmett Till. At the courthouse, one of the perpetrators boasted that his only regret was that he didn't kill Joulani. Well, Benzi Gopstein, the head of the anti-miscegenation group Lahavah, whose sister group Hemla has received state funding, declared that these youth lifted Israel's national pride off the floor. We see the calls to finish 1948 in the recent initiative of the World Zionist Organization and executive arm of the Israeli government to move 100,000 Jewish settlers into the Galilee, which is inside the green line, in order to balance the Arab demographic threat. This idea of demographic balancing is anachronistic and peculiar in this era. But it is also essential to maintaining the Jewish character of the state of Israel. And we see the calls to finish 1948 in the Praver Plan, which was introduced by Benjamin Netanyahu's policy and planning chief, Ehud Praver, to remove most of the indigenous Bedouin population living in unrecognized villages in the Negev Desert. I did a lot of reporting in the Negev Desert, which you'll find on the pages of Goliath. I reported on the destruction of Al-Araqib, which is one of the first unrecognized villages to be targeted under this plan, which had not been announced at the time. And I wrote about arriving to the village at night, being hosted by the villagers and waking up to the sound of bulldozers and watching homes be tossed away like empty crates, watching their residents, including a young girl, sit out on her bed in the middle of the desert and basically watch her future destroyed. I wrote about how that village has been destroyed 51 times, 51 times since I witnessed its destruction. And I wrote about how the Jewish National Fund, a 501 C3 nonprofit in the United States, which is funding the destruction of Al-Araqib and supporting the Praver plan, plans to build a forest in collaboration with God TV, an evangelical Christian Zionist TV network in the UK, which has declared its intention to beautify the land of Israel for the return of the Messiah. And they will build a pine forest in the heart of the Negev desert on top of the ruins of Al-Araqib. This was one of many of the villages that have been targeted under the Praver plan. There are 80,000 Bedouins living in unrecognized villages. An unrecognized village means that you're unable to hook up to the public water supply. You can't connect to the public electricity grid, even though if you see these villages as you're driving through the Negev most lay under electricity wires, they're unable to have public health clinics, public schools, and all of their construction is declared illegal. Illegal simply because they are of the wrong ethnic group. There are Jewish settlements that are small Jewish towns placed right near these unrecognized villages, which are free to hook up to public services and get massive state subsidies. So there's clearly a sense of inequality. And under the Praver plan, 40,000 to 70,000 indigenous Bedouins will be forced from their homes, their villages will be generally bulldozed, and they'll be moved to undisclosed locations. There's no map right now, so we don't know where they'll be moved, or to places like Rahat and Hurrah, which are the two of the only towns that the state of Israel has built for its Arab population, and which are, in effect, Indian reservations that exist at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. According to the Orr movement, which is a paraggovernmental group, an arm of the Jewish National Fund, Rahat and Hurrah were built to quote-unquote concentrate the Bedouin population. This really eerie rhetoric of concentration is present. Again, I visited this September along with my colleague from Mandoais, Alison Degger, and a few other colleagues, a village called Umal Hiran, which was the next village on the chopping block, and we met with its residents, and they told us of an unending stream of dispossession and removals until they finally wound up in this village, which has now been authorized for destruction by the Israeli government. They have already had to repeatedly bail out their sheep, which are impounded by the Israeli green patrol to deprive them of sustenance, and they actually have to pay bail on their sheep, and they told us about a group of settlers. This is inside the green line, but they called them settlers, and they called them the Jews in the woods. And I said, what are the Jews in the woods? Is this like a Mel Brooks movie, like Robin Hood Men in Tights or something? Like, this sounds unusual. And we drove through the Yatir Forest at night. It was kind of like a scene from a horror movie where the teenagers hear a sound in the basement, and so they go into the dark basement, and we're going through this dark forest built by the Jewish National Fund right next to Umal Hiran. And we finally arrive at the base of the forest, and we come to this compound surrounded by barbed wire and fences. And our colleague Phil Weiss gets out and starts shaking the fence and says shalom, shalom. And suddenly the gate opens, and we're inside talking to one of the village leaders who is one of the heads of the town council of Hiran. And he tells us that the Bedouins are the real occupiers, that the Bedouins are building illegally and trying to take over Israel. And it's his job to help remove them and replace them with legal construction. The night before, he and the fellow residents of Hiran had gone into Umal Hiran to stake out lots, which they would take over after the residents of Umal Hiran were forced into the Indian Reservation of Hurra. All of Hiran was built by the Jewish National Fund, and all of the new village will be supported by the Jewish National Fund, which was just feted and celebrated by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Canada in Toronto. So the residents of Umal Hiran have started connecting with the other residents of unrecognized villages and staging, getting ready for the November 30th day of rage against the proverb plan. This took place recently. It required the New York Times to finally report on the proverb plan. And they called it a resettlement plan. They didn't call it what it was, which is an expulsion plan. It was another whitewash by the New York Times and something that I think validates the value of the reporting in my book. And Avigdor Lieberman responded to these protests, which were very, very vehement. People were fighting for their very lives. They're fighting for their ancestral land. And they were fighting for their very future. Lieberman declared, nothing has changed since the tower in Stockade days. We are fighting for the lands of the Jewish people. And there are those who intentionally try to rob and seize them. He said that about the Bedouins. This is inside the green line. Again, I haven't left the green line in this entire discussion. I will do so during Q&A. And I've done extensive reporting on the West Bank and on what's happening inside the Gaza Strip. But this is happening inside the area of Israel that will be legitimized under a two-state solution, what some call democratic Israel. And it is happening before our very eyes, unlike what happened in 1948. It's happening. And it's being filmed on cell phone cameras. It's being filmed by news crews. It's being reported in our media. And we're all well aware of it. And our government has said nothing about it. State Department has said nothing to condemn it. The Obama administration has said nothing to condemn it. There's no initiative in Washington to stop it. And there may not be. And there's very little effort to stop, from my vantage point, the trends that I described that are corroding Jewish-Israeli society that are bringing to power figures like Lieberman, who is engaged in a pact with Netanyahu that will allow Netanyahu, that will merge his party with the ruling Likud party, allowing Netanyahu to stay in power until 2017 and making Lieberman his natural successor. There is nothing being done, very little external pressure, to stop figures like Shimon Gopso from emerging as mayors and local leaders of places like Nazareth elite. Gopso has said that he will fight tooth and nail to prevent any non-Jewish symbols from being displayed in his town, including Christmas trees on Christmas, and that he's merely carrying out the legacy of Herzl and Ben-Gurion. There's nothing being done to prevent figures like Ari King, who fundraisers in the U.S., from being elected to the Jerusalem Municipal Council. This is someone who recruits what he calls strong men to physically remove Palestinians from their homes in the East Bank, in the West, in East Jerusalem, and replace them with Jewish settlers and has done so repeatedly. All of the trends in my book will intensify under the current status quo encouraged right here in Washington. And so I come to a lot of conclusions in my book, and I'll come to further conclusions in my talk with Peter. I'm not going to pull any punches, and I'm sure there will be people in this audience who will disagree with my conclusions. But what I think can't be denied is that the facts on the ground are troubling and unsustainable, and that they will not change. The trends that I describe in my book will only intensify as long as the current status quo is maintained. Thank you. Well, Max, thank you for much to think about. You know, the critiques of your book seem to be not so much about the facts, many of which, you know, you've obviously done an amazing reporting job. It's more about the tone in the book, and specifically, you know, words like pogrom or in the chapter headings, concentration camp and night of broken glass, which of course is an echo of crystal marks. So tell me about your decisions to name these chapters, and did you do it? I mean, was there any intent to... Well, what was your intent? Thanks for that question, which I haven't had much of a chance to answer, but definitely, the content of those chapters inspires the titles. And I quoted Ruben Rivlin, who was the grand old man of the Likud Party, who was an eighth generation Israeli Sabra, whose father translated the Quran into Arabic, who tried to give Hanin Zawabi the chance to talk after the Mavi Marmara, expressing his disgust with the Saharanim Desert Facility and the whole plan to basically put non-Jewish Africans in an internment center, and he simply said, it's un-Jewish to have a concentration camp in our country. Basically, I'm somewhat paraphrasing. He explicitly used the term concentration camp in an interview with Haaretz. So did the Israeli architectural NGO, Bikrom, so do many of my, many Israelis who were campaigning against the Saharanim Facility. And I think what they're doing is they're taking the lessons of the Holocaust and looking at it from a universalist perspective, and simply saying never again to anyone, and that the Holocaust as horrible as it was, and though it can't be compared to anything in terms of scale, should inspire us today to combat against human rights abuses and to combat against racist incitement and anti-democratic laws. It all began with anti-democratic laws and with racist incitement as Martin Luther King said, the ultimate conclusion of racism is genocide. So the critics of these chapters apparently hate the universalist perspective on the Holocaust and the idea of never again to anyone, and they simply want to enforce a segregationist perspective on the Holocaust, where you can't see the events of Kristallnacht and think about that, even though you've been raised to see the Holocaust and Nazi Germany as the ultimate evil, you can't think of that when you see right-wing thugs singling out people in South Tel Aviv for their ethnicity and smashing their storefronts and firebombing their homes because they are of the wrong ethnicity and have been declared a threat to the state. So it simply stems from that and I did want to invoke these lessons with those chapter titles and the universalist perspective of this history as so many Jewish Israelis in this book from across the political spectrum do. I mean, and judging by what you've just said, I mean, the peace process is sort of a mirage. I mean, John Kerry's efforts will yield nothing. And if that's the case, what is, what, I mean, what are your, and you don't have to answer if you haven't, if this is sort of outside your lane, but I mean, what are realistic ideas about the future accommodations that are necessary? I mean, I've always seen it as my role as a journalist to offer a critique, but not necessarily to offer a solution. I mean, my first book I offered a pretty slashing critique of the Republican Party. I think the book has been vindicated by the path the Republican Party has taken under the control of the Christian right and the Tea Party. And I didn't really offer the Republican Party a solution for resolving its crisis. And in this case, in my book, I mean, if you just read my book, whatever perspective you come from, you're not gonna find me preaching to you about a solution, although my analysis and my framing has offended some people. I do think that the two-state solution, first of all, has never been earnestly, seriously proposed. The Palestinians have always been offered a kind of Bantu stand state and have always been offered sort of a recipe for political fragmentation between Gaza and the West Bank. They've never been afforded the opportunity to elect their own leadership. They've never been offered control of their own borders. The borders have never really been set. They've never been offered control of their own airspace, of their own water, which mostly sits beneath the mega-settlement of Ariel. And details were just leaked of what the Israelis want, which the U.S. will probably support over Palestinian demands, given the composition of the U.S. negotiating team, former APAC staffer, Martin Indyk and Winnep analyst, David Makovsky figures like that. And they want, the Israelis want the Jordan Valley and they want early warning stations across the West Bank. They want to still have a security presence in the West Bank, which means that the West Bank will remain occupied. Meanwhile, there's no discussion about the Gaza Strip, which the United Nations has warned will become uninhabitable by 2020. So, even in the proposal- Uninhabitable because? Because of lack of, because of food insecurity, because of lack of ability to get clean water. And the anemia rate for children is close to 50%. Child deformities are, I think, one out of four. They're like birth complications because of the fact that got fishermen from Gaza have been driven into poverty because they can't move beyond the three kilometer perimeter. They are now trying to import fish through the tunnels, the illegal tunnels through Rafa, which is insane for a territory that's on the Mediterranean coast. And 80% of those tunnels have now been filled with sewage by the coup-volutionary regime of Egypt, the military coup regime of General Abdel Fattal, Sisi, who is the former liaison to Ehud Barak on collaborating in the Sinai. So the Gaza Strip is in this very unusual situation where you have 1.7 people who are not really allowed to export goods. I report at the beginning of my book that Israeli administrators who administer the siege are actually counting the calories that each resident of the Gaza Strip is entitled to because they're able to control the lives of Gazans to that degree, to the degree of how many calories they eat in the words of Dov Weissglass, the former aide to Ehud Olmer and longtime peace negotiator. The residents of Gaza should be put on a diet but not allowed to starve. So that's the situation they're in. It's not addressed by the peace process. And so you asked about looking beyond it. Yes, we have to look beyond this failed idea of two states and look at some of the ideas that might have been proposed by Ian Lustig, the University of Pennsylvania political scientist who talked about the possibility of a binational state. In other words, looking beyond the idea of Palestinian sovereignty or a Palestinian state towards the idea of equality for all people, equal rights for all people between the river and the sea, freedom of movement, a possibility for Aliyah Bonemah has written a really interesting proposal for a single state which and the Israeli human rights NGO, Zilchrot has actually put forward a blueprint for the resettlement of Palestinian refugees inside Israel-Palestine, actual physical blueprint where their communities can go without uprooting Israeli Jews. So there are all these interesting proposals out there. There's the Haifa Declaration that I mentioned from the Balad Party which is very similar to the kind of situation that allowed for a treaty between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and it offers that kind of scenario. But as long as we continue on the path that we're on, as I said, the trends will continue and the possibility for reconciliation between Israeli Jews and Palestinians is just we'll get further and further away. I've seen it on both sides of the wall, just radicalizing attitudes. Which years were you living and reporting when you were doing it? 2009 till this September. I didn't get to report on my trip in August and September in this book. So I spent about a total of one year on the ground and for maybe four and a half years doing writing and research. What do you think the overall impact of the Arab Spring for want of a better term or Arab Awakening perhaps a better term has been on the Israeli sort of political consciousness? I mean. Yeah, the immediate impact has been very positive for Benjamin Netanyahu, who's pointed to Syria and pointed to the chaos in Egypt and said this is what will come to our shores and what will occur in the West Bank if we give up one inch. And he's also used it to kind of highlight Israel as a Houd Barak portrayed it as a villa in the jungle. Kind of invoking the famous phrase that Theodore Herzl used, the rampart of civilization against barbarism. Look at the barbaric Arabs killing each other and how dare you ask us to change? He said, you know, we are an island of stability and a sea of tumult. So it sort of benefited Netanyahu and his political imperatives and his effort to carry out a policy of peace without peace, which is essentially occupation maintenance. It's helped him push back against any US pressure, but I don't think that in the end it's going to be very positive for the kind of imperatives that Netanyahu seeks and for the state of Israel as this kind of fortified villa in the jungle, which actually to me resembles more of a Masada type fortress. The people in the Arab masses do not like Israel very much. They have been held at bay by repressive dictators and the more that there will, I mean, there was a rally in Tahir Square possibly of hundreds of thousands of people chanting, you know, one million that we're going to march to Jerusalem. I don't remember the exact chant. So, I mean, they feel this, but they don't understand, I don't know if they really see if these people in Tahir Square see a future for Israeli Jews in the region, which is another reason that there has to be an urgency on looking past the two-state solution and the status quo and finding a way to resolve this through new ideas. I also think that the Syrian situation is benefiting Israel militarily because Bashar al-Assad has been a very good ally, a backdoor ally for Israel. He's held the border with the Golan Heights without challenging Israel's occupation. They've wanted him to stay in power, but he's being weakened and ground down. This is the Levantinization strategy advanced by Bernard Lewis, in which Arab states are fragmented along sectarian lines and weakened so they can't challenge Israel. It's at the base of the Clean Break document that was advanced by neocons during the 90s and influenced the Bush administration. And Hezbollah has pinned down inside Syria and being weakened as well. So, all of this seems to benefit Israel in the near term, but we need to look at the Arab Spring as potentially an Arab century. And there is no end game in the Israeli military intelligence apparatus for controlling it or dealing with its consequence. Well, how much discussion is there of al-Qaeda's sort of de facto control of much of northern Syria? Is that something that has been discussed or thought about? It's discussed more among people I've spoken to in the Palestinian Authority as a reason for them to continue to be funded and to continue to be supported. And they always say, you know, you don't want us? You don't want us? Okay, well then, welcome al-Qaeda to the West Bank. This is an autocratic government that is propped up by US and Gulfie aid and Israeli aid and really has to justify its existence on the basis of, it's increasingly justifying its existence on the basis of that fear. So it has strengthened, the presence of al-Qaeda has strengthened Fatah and Fatah also engaged in a propaganda campaign with the military coup government of Egypt against Palestinian refugees in Egypt who were accused of being Hamas operatives and are now being incited against and even attacked in the streets of Cairo. And Fatah did this in order to help prop up the regime of Sisi who is very much in line with their thinking and their style of government. Great, we'll open it up to questions. If you have a question, can you wait for the microphone and identify yourself and we'll start with this gentleman over here. I'm Blake Salzer with Care International. Thank you, American Foundation for hosting this and Max for your comments. In your preface, you I think pointedly state that while you may not agree with all of my conclusions, hopefully you'll carefully consider the facts on the ground that appear in the pages of this book. My question following up on that is, what is your view of the American publics and even more pointedly, American policymakers' ability to see the facts on the ground and relate to that, who would you like most to read this book? Who would I like the most? Most to read this book of American publics. The American public consistently declares that it supports the state of Israel over the Palestinians, but that support is very thin and it's much lower than ever at the grassroots base of the Democratic Party. It's basically split at the grassroots base of the Democratic Party. And then when you look at the internals, the more educated grassroots Democrats are, the more supportive they are of Palestinians. I don't see why it has to be an either or a question. I think it's an unfortunate way of polling people, but this is the way that they're polled. And so there's a crisis brewing for APAC which has been exposed in the past few weeks because, and then in the past few months, they failed to get, they lost on Syria and they were exposed. It was very unpopular among the American public and they lost on Iran and they were exposed. This was also very, the deal is very popular with the American public. But they haven't lost on Palestine yet. The question is to what extent can the grassroots Democratic base have any influence on the kind of Democrats who are elected who have very little to gain and a lot to lose by embracing even the slightest amount of pressure, the kind of pressure that Bush won and James Baker applied on Israel which allowed for the Madrid talks to actually take place. This is almost off limits now. Thanks to people like Heim Saban who basically funded the construction of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Arlington and who I think was responsible for hosting Naftali Bennett at the Brookings Institute and has been a major funder of the Obamas and the Clintons and Terry McAuliffe, he had a huge fundraiser for him in Virginia. So I think people are recognizing that if they care about this issue and they care about even the kind of two state solution that J Street advances. I'm talking about the kids in J Street U who I meet on my book tour who don't agree with me, that they have no voice in Congress and they have no voice in this administration and in this city and so they're turning increasingly to grassroots activism and there is an opportunity for them to make an impact through the BDS movement, the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction institutions that are involved with the occupation and human rights abuses in Israel, Palestine. And this is gaining mainstream appeal to the point where Catherine Peraltis who is a J Street board member has actually called for Jews to support BDS to fight for a two state solution. I mean, this is something you would have never heard of like five years ago. Gideon Levy has just called for Israel to be sanctioned in order to end the occupation and he said we can't just limit it at the settlements because Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University and the entire, all the institutions of Israeli life are involved in the occupation. This is not some, I mean he's hated in Israel but he is in fact Shimon Peres as former speechwriter. I mean, he's a longtime labor movement function, labor party functionary. So the longer this campaign of suppression and aggressive lobbying in Congress continues, the more the BDS movement gains strength and moves into the mainstream. Is anyone here? Thank you very much. I, after a very dreary portrayal of the situation in Israel, I was a bit encouraged by your somewhat more positive comments regarding things like the BDS movement and grassroots movements. Peter Bergen asked you about the impact of the Arab Spring. And I'd like you to address the impact of a potentially equally important development and that is the opening of a dialogue between the United States and Iran and other Western countries. This already is resulting in the visits of the Iranian foreign ministers in several Gulf states. Hamid Karzai apparently is going to visit Tehran soon. This has a potential for tremendous change, greater cooperation between the Arabs and so on. And it suggests a very important change, shift in US policy. How do you think this will impact the prospects for some solution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? And just before you answer a good question, can you identify yourself? Yes, I'm Benjamin Tua, retired Foreign Service Officer. Thank you. Thanks, and I guess I would open it up to you as well because I'm not, I don't have expertise on Iran. I would just make a few points about how this is impacting the US relationship with Israel, the special relationship, which is that a recent poll, I think taken by the Israeli Democracy Institute, it was reported in the Jerusalem Post two days ago, showed a majority of Israeli Jews in response to this deal declaring that their government should find new allies and turn away from the US during the Obama era. But 70% don't think they will find any new allies. So that's kind of a nihilistic opinion. Speaking of allies, Turkey was obviously a very close ally of Israel and a big scene in your book is the flotilla and what happened. I mean, tell us, give us a sense of what that relationship is now and what it means. Well, David Ben-Gurion, when he was named David Green, studied in Turkey, I think in the days of the Ottoman Empire and he worked much of his adult life to build this relationship with Turkey as part of his policy of winning alliances with non-Arab states in the region, like Turkey or Ethiopia. And we saw that kind of relationship collapse at least briefly after the Mavi Marmara, which was heavily supported. Which is the Gaza flotilla. Which was a Turkish boat in the Gaza flotilla, which was heavily supported by Recep Erdogan and his government, which is an Islamist oriented government, sort of a more, an Islamic Republican style government. And I mean, I think they helped put up the money for this boat. This was almost like an official government boat that was being sent as a message to say, we care about people of Gaza and we also want to reorient our relationship in this region because we recognize that we're sort of an indispensable partner of the United States. And this was followed by an effort to recognize the Armenian genocide in the Israeli Knesset, which obviously the Turkish government fervently opposes. I think there was one point when Abe Foxman had attempted to stifle attempts to recognize the Armenian genocide because of the position of the Israeli government and its relationship with Turkey. And so this was just simply done as an effort to punish Turkey. I was at the Turkish embassy right after the Mavi Marmara raid and I witnessed hundreds of, every day Israelis from Tel Aviv who had come out through a call on Facebook to basically shout at this empty office building. They somehow wound up chanting death to Arabs even though Turks are not Arabs, but that was just kind of an impulse. And they burned Turkish flags. There was just mass hatred of Erdogan. He was linked to Iran and Al Qaeda and Hitler in the Israeli media. It always kind of follows from there. But I do see an attempt at a rapprochement since Netanyahu formally apologized for the raid. And I found his apology really interesting since he said that this raid, he initially said that the raid was an effort to attack Israel and it was backed by Al Qaeda and World Jihad. If you're going to apologize for the raid, you kind of are basically negating what you said before and admitting that everything you did was propagandistic in nature. But yeah, I don't really think that in the long run it's impacted the relationship with Israel and that also has to do with US imperatives and US demands. And again, I'm not an expert on Turkey but this is what I observed. What was interesting I guess is that anyone can be designated as an enemy. Any nation can be designated as an enemy and linked to Al Qaeda and Hitler if they are seen as applying external pressure on Israel. And of course, one of the most hated figures in Israel is Barack Hussein Obama. All you need to do is watch some of my videos from Jerusalem the night after Barack Obama's historic speech in Cairo to understand the depth of resentment towards him. Has that changed over time? No, and it's intensified. I mean, Avigdor Lieberman, the top diplomat of Israel, has called for Israel to find new allies. Caroline Glick, who is the, I think, editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post and is a former advisor to Netanyahu, has called for Israel to forge a special relationship with China since China doesn't care about human rights abuses and to move away from the US. I think it's inevitable that we'll see the special relationship cracking not because of any initiatives in Washington but because of the mood of the Israeli public. Gentlemen over here. Thank you, thank you, Peter. Max, thanks for being the voice of the voiceless. Not only for people on the ground, but for a lot of us that have faced lawsuits and threats personal and philosophical for a long time, especially those of us with Jewish names. Can you identify yourself? I'm Tom Gettman. I worked for an NGO in the Middle East for five years. I associate myself with my care colleague and his feelings. And I wanna ask a bit of a personal question. Have you found a growing number of people who have experienced what you've experienced, who are sort of associating into a group of people that will give you support in public so it's not just being assailed constantly and threatened? Because I think there's a growing group of people who are willing to put their heads up above the parapet, particularly since you've verbalized things that the rest of us couldn't get out. Thanks very much. Well, there's more than enough of us to have a minion at this point. I mean, really, really, I mean, it has, I guess, in Jewish life, I've had trouble sometimes going to synagogues and hearing a sermon that was supportive of Israeli repression against Palestinians during the Second Intifada. This was a big problem for me. And now, living in New York, we have pass-overs and all kinds of ceremonies, and it's not exclusive to Jews, but there's just, the room is filled with people who feel like I do, who are passionate about this issue and who refuse to be emotionally blackmailed and are willing to pay the price, are willing to make the sacrifice to speak out. And a lot of this takes place under the banner of Jewish Voice for Peace, which is, I think, one of the most important new organizations in this country on this issue, which is pretty open about campaigning for BDS in the Jewish community, and which now has an email list of over 100,000 members. When I go to Ramallah and stay there, we had a little Yom Kippur dinner when I was just there with my friends there. There is a Jewish community there. They're not, but they don't interact with Palestinians through this kind of colonial relationship. That raises an interesting hypothetical question, which is, if you were not Jewish and wrote this book, what would the reaction be? Well, I wouldn't have been able to write this book if I wasn't Jewish, because I couldn't have gotten into the places I got to. Do the thought experiment where you did. Well, it would be easier to label me an anti-Semite as it was done to Walton Meersheimer. And it would, but there's also a certain sense of rage or betrayal that I've done this, that I've created this black box that you can open. And I just, I feel like something's happening out there. I was attacked by Eric Alterman of The Nation who said that this book is the book of the month for the Hamas Book Club, or Hamas. And mercilessly attacked from right-wingers, neocons. The whole very predictable line of attacks, but the pushback was extreme. I mean, there was so much pushback on social media. There was Chip Manakin, the professor of Jewish studies at the University of Maryland, pushing back. I was attacked in the Jewish Daily Forward English edition. And so the Yiddish edition interviewed me and wrote a very positive review of this book, which I found interesting. And so. Will it be on the paperback? You know, it's kind of a, yeah. I hope that the book will be translated into Yiddish, definitely, and lots of languages. And, you know, the attacks on the book have been fascinating since they've ranged from Alterman at The Nation to literally to commentary. And so it's really the fulfillment of the old Woody Allen joke, commentary and dissent coming together and forming dysentery. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Jenwood in the back. Muhammad al-Sitwahi, Al-Ghada al-Arabi TV. If the Israeli right is not that eager to have a Palestinian state, so what is their answer to the so-called demographic threat? Yeah, so what's the answer to that? That's a great question. And Naftali Bennett, I wish that someone had asked him that question at Brookings where he was allowed to portray himself as some kind of liberal. Because Naftali Bennett has been very explicit about his blueprint for dealing with the demographic threat. And he wants to annex Area C, which is 60% of the West Bank, where most of the settlements are and the settlers are, and the fewest amount of Palestinians are. Just consider, first of all, that Area C was established through the Oslo Accords, which provided a pretext for this annexation. I mean, how did Arafat and his negotiators even allow that to happen? Many of them weren't able to even see the map until there was this signing ceremony. So Bennett is just seizing on what was kind of allowed to happen at Oslo. And he has argued that there are so few Palestinians in Area C that they can be given the opportunity to take Israeli citizenship if they swear loyalty to the Jewish state. Then the Palestinians in Area A, which are the four population clusters, the Bantu stands, will be given Jordanian residency. And Bennett will give them more freedom of movement, but they'll basically be confined to this kind of situation that East Jerusalem Palestinians are. And it has to be understood that East Jerusalem is constantly being cleared of Palestinians because Israel has set a demographic threshold of 72% for the Jewish majority it needs to maintain. So there have been, I think, over 10,000 home demolitions since the beginning of the Oslo Accords as a result of this policy. The left wing of the Zionist spectrum in Israel, the mainstream parties, has argued with Bennett that there are too many Palestinians in Area C. In other words, there's too much of a demographic threat. So there's this argument over the preservation of ethnocracy if the West Bank can be annexed. But this is Bennett's plan. And he thinks that it's sustainable and that if they just take the two-state solution off the table and annex it, that pro-Israel elements in Washington will take care of the rest and they'll basically get away with denying the Palestinians a state or any sense of equality, it will then move to a discussion of apartheid. There would be no controversy over the term apartheid anymore because it will be a single state that has consolidated the institutional discrimination of one group over another on an ethnic basis. And so that's why Netanyahu is trying to forestall Bennett's very popular plan. Netanyahu actually appointed the Levy Commission headed by Edmund Levy who's an Israeli jurist to explore the possibility of annexing the West Bank and bringing into fruition a one-state. And Levy said, we can do this. Let's do it. And so he basically spiked the report and buried the whole thing. And this was a big issue during the elections and Bennett attacked Netanyahu from the right for spiking this report. So I think this is coming. Annexation is coming and already if you go to the West Bank now you'll see in like Sucia and the small Palestinian villages they're under relentless attack and pressure to move. The Israeli government has openly declared that the residents of Sucia which is south of Hebron must move to the city of Yatta and basically vacate that area for settlers. And so the demolitions are already happening and we're witnessing annexation before our eyes under the guise of a peace process and an endless plan for two states. The Akadamid? The Akadamid New America trustee. I don't know whether you've seen the movie The Gatekeepers but it's actually quite fascinating. It's an interview with the last six heads of the Shin Bet and what emerges by the end is sort of a confession by these people who run the Israeli security apparatus that the occupation and the whole security control of the Palestinians is sort of eating away at the moral foundations of the Israeli nation. So my question is if that's being recognized within the security apparatus isn't that reason for hope that the pendulum will start swinging back? I guess I agree with your, I have the same perspective on that film that it was really remarkable to hear these Shin Bet chiefs recognize the corrosive effect of occupation on Israeli society. It's something that they would recognize in the pages of my book including in my sections on the education system and how early children during early education are cultivated to be soldiers and to participate in the domination and control of Palestinians. This is, they're not being really raised as good citizens necessarily or in a democratic culture. They understand that but they come to it too late. All of these figures have participated in massive human rights abuses. And I mentioned Yuval Diskin earlier who issued the letter against Balad warning them that they threatened the Jewish or democratic state with their calls for a state of all its citizens or a real democracy. And Diskin appears in this as this kind of enlightened figure. So we see this constantly in Israeli society and it's a genre, it's a subgenre of Israeli films that I call the shooting and crying genre. Waltz with Bashir is another one where all these soldiers talk about this horrible, all these horrible things they did in Lebanon as if it were some dream. And then they just kind of move on. You see it constantly, constantly. Ehud Olmert is a perfect example of it. He's attempted after just being stained with corruption and then overseeing Operation Cass Lead being explicitly accused of human rights crimes in the Goldstone Report for what happened in the Gaza Strip. Trying to re-emerge is this enlightened figure in attacking Netanyahu for harming Israeli democracy. So all these figures are completely complicit and none of them are challenging the actual imperatives for why the Shin Bet has to exist, why Palestinian citizens of Israel have to be monitored all the time. Why are they looked at as a threat? They're looking more at just the consequences in Israeli society because these figures tend to just simply be more secular, more highly educated and they identify with the enlightened public and therefore identify with the labor party and they see Netanyahu as their opponent. Ma'irda Gan from Mossad is another one of these figures. Another figure is Asaka Sher. Many of you haven't heard of him. He's a professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He's an expert on Kant, Emmanuel Kant. And he filed an appeal against this book that I write about in a chapter in my book called Torat HaMellich, which is basically written by two settler rabbis and it is basically a guide on when it's permissible to kill non-Jews. They understand it that way. That's how Ma'irda the Israeli newspaper characterized it as well. And Khashar filed an appeal with the Supreme Court to basically prosecute the authors or bar the book from publication. But Khashar himself is the in-house philosopher for the Israeli army who created the rules of engagement for Operation Cass Lead. And he has designated all residents of the Gaza Strip as quote, unquote, the terrorist non-dangerous neighbor. In other words, they're not civilians who can be protected under the Geneva Conventions. This is really the basis of asymmetrical warfare that the US is using in tribal regions in Pakistan. So Khashar has attempted to portray himself as this enlightened figure and he's complained about the rise of religious nationalism and the danger they're doing to Israeli society. But in fact, he just sees them as a competitor because they've tried to rewrite the rules of engagement through a kind of bellicose Jewish nationalist framework when he's done it through a kind of philosophical framework based on what he considers European enlightened ideas. The impact on the Palestinians has basically been the same all along. So the issue isn't really these figures or necessarily the occupation. It's the imperative of Israel to control Palestinians, including Palestinians of Israel perpetually. Take one more question, this lady here. I'm Alison Glick, no relation to Caroline, I don't think. It's all right. So you mentioned Eric Alterman. And those of us who have been thinking and writing and reading about this part of the world for years aren't surprised about attacks. Although I think I'm a little bit surprised about the irrationality of some of the attacks, especially from people who would otherwise be seen as progressive. And I wonder what your thoughts are about that the type of attacks from people on the left and if you relate them to the dynamic that you observed in Israel Palestine, if you relate them to what's clearly becoming the victories of the BDS campaign or if you find answers to those questions and another type of analysis. Yeah, thanks for that question. Just before I move to it, I wanted to recommend a really good film which features former Israeli military judges called The Law in These Parts by Ranan Alexandrovitz. And I think you can probably find it online. But this I think is one of the best films about the occupation because it actually goes into the logic of it and explains how it was constructed. I'm on the attacks. I don't really want to get into the pissing match with Alterman or any of these people. I expected the attacks and the fact is that a balloon needs hot air to rise so they have helped sell my book. I mean, that's a fact. I thank them on some level. I mean, I'm a little bit disturbed that Alterman's been able to write nine kind of derogatory attacks on me on the nation website and in the nation and that there hasn't been more internal pushback there. But I expected the attacks. Anyone who writes about this and does a good job of it, I think, should expect the attacks. And you have to be willing to kind of pay the price. What they show is a lack of confidence in the kind of country that Israel has become and a lack of confidence in answering the challenge in my book. Kiva Elder, who has worked for Haaretz as like a chief political correspondent for 35 years and doesn't really necessarily agree with me, saw my book as a challenge that had to be answered. He also saw it as an Israeli who had experienced many of the things that appeared in the pages of my book and he said that these things had kind of faded into a kind of bass relief in his life. He'd forgotten that they were happening. He'd become so immune to them and he basically, in his review of my book, thanked me for reminding him and reminding people that this was happening. So it's a challenge that has to be answered and what the debate should be about is how to answer the challenge. Those who are attacking it and attacking it not on the merits without reading it are trying to simply prevent that debate from happening because they're engaged in a fighting retreat. That's a good place to end it. Thank you very much, Max, and thanks for coming. Thank you.