This is an unflinching, unprecedented work of journalism which depicts a startling portrait of Israeli society under the siege of increasingly conservative authoritarian politics. Jim Miles, in his review in Foreign Policy, described it as "a powerful and distressing book for a view on what life in modern Israel is like. Blumenthal gives a convoluted answer that comes down to this: “There should be a choice placed to the settler-colonial population” (meaning the entire Jewish population of Israel): “Become indigenized,” that is, “you have to be part of the Arab world. They deem it a threat to the principles of justice, equality and human rights and – by default – an obstacle to peace. Goliath lifts the carefully maintained veil concealing the reality of Israel as it actually is today, a reality that is elided in most reportage from the region.

When you fly there you fly to Tel Aviv, it says “TLV” when you fly in, but you are not actually flying into Tel Aviv. From a letter from Chaim Weizmann to Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, High Commissioner for Palestine, while the Peel Commission was convening in 1937: "We shall spread in the whole country in the course of time .

Petra Marquardt-Bigman (February 17, 2014) Free speech and antisemitism: Max Blumenthal's Goliath The Jerusalem Post; accessed February 14, 2016. One of the primary factors paving the way for ‘Greater Israel’ is the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

As for the book’s supposedly unusual interviewees, they appear regularly, everywhere from Charlie Rose to The New York Times, Haaretz and the Forward. And just by allowing one Arab family to purchase property inside one of these towns, inside of Israel, who are citizens of Israel, necessitated this law. Even those generally well-informed about Israel and its occupation of the Palestinian territories will have their views challenged by Blumenthal's sharp eye and deadpan factual presentations. Israeli officials have not only completely dismissed all UN resolutions pertaining to the end of illegal settlement activity and the withdrawal from occupied territories, but have actively sought to encourage the construction and legitimisation of more and more Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday reiterated his position that the vision of Israel holding onto the West Bank and Gaza Strip as part of its sovereign territory was finished.There’s an unpleasant little debate sloshing around the Web lately that tells you all you need to know — and perhaps more than you want to hear — about the current state of relations between Israel and the left. Among other things, he’s interviewed “all sorts of people who are not the usual sources cited by much of the US media, including Israeli dissidents, Palestinian citizens of Israel, Bedouin villagers, Palestinian popular protest leaders, members of the Knesset from across the spectrum, and a host of right-wing Israeli officials, especially from the younger generation. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Goliath is worthy of consideration as a serious work of journalism, and, to a lesser degree, historiography. Alterman, he wrote, is just the latest in a long line of “self-appointed enforcers” who have been trying—“especially since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin” — to “suppress an honest, free and full debate.

Palestinians will live in walled-off settlements with as little contact as possible with the outside world and, if they disturb the Israeli ‘quiet’, as they did in Gaza an excuse will be found to go in to ‘mow the grass’ (kill as many as possible; destroy as much as possible).My book, I think, will have a long shelf life, it might be an evergreen book hopefully, even if it doesn’t get the attention it deserves. He describes Israel’s assault on Gaza without telling of the thousands of rockets bombarding Negev towns for years beforehand.