Max Blumenthal, editor-in-chief  and founder of The Grayzone and author of The Management of Savagery (Verso, 2019), discusses the shift in coverage of the Middle East within mainstream media over the past two decades and the need for journalism to pay attention to the voices of the people. Drawing from his work in the West Bank and Gaza, Blumenthal scrutinises the disproportionate attacks by Israel on Gaza which in turn hits back demonstrating the “futility of Israel’s military strategy.” Analysing how Israel is engineering an “artificial Jewish majority” demographically manipulating the population in order for Israel to declare itself a “Jewish state,” Blumenthal notes how Gaza is a “human warehouse for a population that the Zionist ideology has mandated as surplus humans.” Blumenthal carefully runs through the history of the region that physically and ontologically has ensured the separation of Palestinians within Gaza likening this to a mass imprisonment that is “ethno-supremacist” at its root. Critiquing American unilateralism and its allegiance to a “rules-based order” designed to undermine the United Nations and circumvent international law, Blumenthal denounces these “rules” as mafia rule of law which wish to exist in a “state of legal exception outside of international law.”

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