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Max Blumenthal

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Famous Max Blumenthal Quotes

“Throughout Palestine, victory was understood not necessarily as a decisive military triumph, but as a forceful demonstration of qualities like sumud (steadfastness), fidaa (sacrifice/ redemption), and ebaa (stubbornness in the face of power) during a prolonged trial. This attitude has, of course, been a feature of anti-colonial struggles throughout history, from Vietnam to Algeria to South Africa, but it was especially pronounced in Gaza, where 1.8 million ghettoized refugees were taking heavy losses against a nuclearized army equipped and financed by the superpowers of the West. I witnessed the clearest distillation of this defiance in Beit Hanoun, the decimated northern border city. There, during the mid-August ceasefire, I met a family gathered above the ruins of their home, a four-story structure that had been transformed into a massive crater by a direct hit from an Israeli fragmentation bomb. On a flat slab of concrete that sat above the gargantuan sinkhole, grafiti read "3 to 0," portraying the Palestinian armed factions as the victors of the last three military conflicts in Gaza.”

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Book:The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza
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“Over the sound of gritty break-beats and stirring string samples, The Shadow and Subliminal defended cops and lonized army service, upending the anti-authority sensibility that defines traditional rap culture. When the two self-styled Zionist rappers performed during the bloodiest days of the in-tifada, their audiences often erupted with chants of "Death to Arabs!" In June, following the abduction of the three Israeli teens, Subliminal took to Facebook to lash out at a Palestinian-Israeli member of the Knesset, Haneen Zoabi, who had objected to her interviewer's characterization of the kidnappers as terrorists. "I'm not ashamed to say that I hope she'll be run down [in an auto accident] and die, or slip in the bath and rip her head off, or eat a rotten egg and die of food poisoning, or anything.”

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Book:The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza
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“Throughout the 51 Day War, The Shadow organized alongside Michael Ben-Ari, a ringleader of some of the settlement movement's most extreme elements. Ben-Ari was a former lieutenant of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the patron saint of Israel's ul-tra-nationalist right who immigrated from Brooklyn to Israel in 1971 to organize militant cells among fanatical Jewish youth. Though he was banned from the Knesset, where he served during the mid-1980s, for his open calls for violence, and his Kach party was outlawed, Kahane's influence has lived on in the discriminatory laws introduced by mainstream parties and through acolytes like Ben-Ari, who held a seat in the Knesset from 2009 to 2013. While in the Knesset, Ben-Ari turned his parliamentary field offices into organizing hubs for the anti-Af-rican movement, which organized vigilante patrols that harassed and incited violence against the sixty thousand non-Jewish African refugees living in Israel. Through Lehava, a radical hate group dedicated to preventing romantic relationships between Jews and Arabs, Ben-Ari and fellow Kahanists held rallies in mixed Jewish-Arab cities across Israel to spread held rallies in mixed Jewish-Arab cities across Israel to spread fear and hatred of supposedly predatory Arab males. In June, Lehava had helped organize the "Death to Arabs" rallies in Jerusalem that inspired the killing of Muhammad Abu Khdeir.”

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Book:The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza
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“A week later, a mob of assorted right-wing nationalists assaulted an anti-war rally in Haifa, bombarding the gathering of Palestinians and leftists with a hailstorm of stones while police stood by and watched. After burning a Palestinian flag while chanting "Death to Arabs," a group of right-wing activists went looking for Arabs to assault. They found Suhail Assad, the deputy mayor of the city, beating him and his son so severely that they had to be hospitalized. When police passed by, the assailants simply walked away, and the police made no arrests.”

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Book:The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza
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“After attacking the anti-war demonstrations, Order 8 followers proceeded to supply the names of so-called traitors to their employers, pressuring companies and government agencies to fire the anti-war elements burrowing within the system. Dozens lost their jobs, most of them Palestinian citizens of Israel who had taken to Facebook to protest the army's actions in Gaza. When a postal employee posted a call for sending leftists to gas chambers, however, her government employer defended the statement on the grounds of free speech.”

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Book:The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza
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