Blood and Religion: Unmasking the Jewish and Democratic State
BLOOD AND RELIGION: 
The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State
by Jonathan Cook
Pluto Press, London/University of Michigan Press,
Ann Arbor, 2006 - ISBN 0-7453-2555-6
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What is Israel hoping to achieve with its recent pullout from Gaza? Journalist Jonathan Cook, who has been reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the Second Intifada, presents a lucid account of the motivations and implications behind the Gaza disengagement and Israel's building of a 700km fence-cum-wall around the West Bank.
At the heart of the issue, he argues, is demography. The Jewish state fears the impending moment when the region's Palestinian population inside Israel and in the Occupied Territories becomes a majority and Israeli rule inevitably draws comparisons with apartheid in South Africa.
The book charts Israel's increasingly desperate recent responses to its predicament:
At the heart of the issue, he argues, is demography. The Jewish state fears the impending moment when the region's Palestinian population inside Israel and in the Occupied Territories becomes a majority and Israeli rule inevitably draws comparisons with apartheid in South Africa.
The book charts Israel's increasingly desperate recent responses to its predicament:
- lethal military repression of Palestinian dissent on both sides of the Green Line;
- accusations that the country's Palestinian citizens and the Palestinian Authority are secretly conspiring to subvert the Jewish state from within;
- a ban on marriages between Israel's Palestinian citizens and Palestinians living under occupation to prevent a right of return "through the back door;"
- the redrawing of the Green Line to create an expanded Jewish state.
The path of unilateral separation will lead to ever greater abuses of Palestinian rights and ultimately, concludes the author, it will lead to a third, far deadlier, intifada.
Jonathan Cook, a former staff journalist of the Guardian newspaper, has also written for the Observer, the Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, al-Ahram Weekly, and Aljazeera.net. He is based in Nazareth.
Jonathan Cook, a former staff journalist of the Guardian newspaper, has also written for the Observer, the Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, al-Ahram Weekly, and Aljazeera.net. He is based in Nazareth.