‘Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.’ It may seem a trifle incongruous to open a review of a book about the modern-day Jewish state with a verse from the New Testament, but the instructions, and predictions, of the apostle Matthew could well serve as a summary for Max Blumenthal’s ferocious assault on modern-day Israel.

Blumenthal came to Israel looking for racists, bigots, Zionist extremists, Arab haters, land stealers, settlers, crazed rabbis, Jewish supremacists, messianists, maniacs and near lunatics and by golly he found them, interviewed them and put them in his book. Goliath contains a rich harvest of low-hanging fruit, rather as if Blumenthal