Cataloguing the current political situation in Israel, Blumenthal's Goliath is an important and damning work. Unlike most books on Israel-Palestine affairs, Blumenthal is less concerned with proving which ideology is right or wrong (or whether the definition of “apartheid” matches the situation), and more aimed at using the brute facts of the situation to illustrate the incredible devastation wrought by the Israeli right-wing. I regard myself as a pretty news-conscious guy of the Left, but so much of the book's events came as a shock to me; you do hear some about the plight of the Palestinians in publications such as the NY Times, but even then it's typically couched in what it means for US-Israeli relations. (The most famous book about Israel of the last two decades is specifically about the Israel lobby in US politics, side-stepping any discussion of the occupation itself.)

While Blumenthal isn't concerned with laying out a discrete comparison to apartheid, as mentioned earlier, the stories he tells makes it hard to not think of the parallels to a part of America's history that we're more familiar with: the Jim Crow-era South. Like then, Palestinians and Israeli Arabs face a mixture of both de jure and de facto structural racism, discrimination that not only depresses their economic futures but also exacts a deep personal cost such as police harassment, jail time, separation of families, and violent eviction from their homes.

Some of the stories are so stunning as to make me think of the Indonesian public in The Act of Killing: a sort of blasé indifference that's just as morally damning as if they were directly responsible. And in many cases, they are directly responsible through the universal conscription that makes many execute the practical roles of the occupation. Blumenthal especially indicts the Zionist Left in this aspect; they often willingly enter service as “change from within”, but whatever change they enact is impossible to see, and they often disengage afterwards from any sort of moral responsibility for their actions.

If the book has any flaws, it's in a messy structure. The book is a series of short chapters or episodes that illustrate aspects of the day-to-day reality in Israel and Palestine, sort of like The Forever War by Dexter Filkins. Unlike Filkins, though, Blumenthal isn't evocative enough (and succinct enough) to keep this technique from grinding the reader down. I had to take several breaks of a few days, since the book is so unremittently bleak. (It didn't help that I was concurrently reading a book on the AIDS crisis!) But under full consideration, the book is Important in a way that excuses the flaws, determined to thoroughly catalogue the current Israeli state of affairs, and warn of how it's spiraling out of control.