The Jewish Press: The subtitle of your new book is “How enemies within and without threaten the Jewish nation’s survival.” Judging from the number of times that you criticize the Israeli government in this book, is it fair to say you consider the Israeli government an “enemy within”?

Klein: Yes, at least in the sense that Israeli government policies and follies have been actively harming the Jewish nation’s own interests. For example, it was Israel that led the charge in legitimizing arch-terrorist Yasir Arafat, bringing him out from exile in Tunis and providing him and his murderous Fatah gang with a fiefdom in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from which to wage jihad against the Jews. 

Current Israeli policy is enhancing the same deadly Fatah movement while also working to legitimize Hamas terrorists by, among other things, negotiating with the Islamist group and failing to defeat Hamas militarily. This sends a clear signal to the international community that if Israel is talking with Hamas, it’s okay for the rest of the world to do the same.

It was also the Israeli government that recently helped legitimize the tyranny in Syria, with then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announcing talks with Damascus while the Bush administration supported the latter’s deserved isolation. Israel was willing to deal with the Bashar Assad regime even while Damascus, in full partnership with Iran, continued to welcome terrorist leaders and furiously acquire thousands of advanced missiles.

In the book, I document one Israeli government folly after another. I show how Israel is ruled by a gang of internationalist politicians, most of whom are hell-bent on pursuing the same failed policies that have resulted time and again in large numbers of Jewish deaths and the handover of strategic land to terrorists, fueling a worldwide perception of Jewish weakness. I also expose some of the seemingly anti-Jewish policies carried out by the Israeli government.

This war has resulted in the harassment of the national religious population in certain parts of the country and was one of the driving forces behind the expulsion of Jews from Gaza and the policy of evacuating still more Jews from strategic, biblical territory. It’s a war being waged in the education system, the army, and at times on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Iran is the central threat to Israel. I am not just referring to Tehran’s drive to obtain nuclear weapons, which it says it may use to destroy the Jewish state. I’m referring to the way Iran has strategically positioned its proxies around Israel and throughout the greater Middle East such that Tehran now possesses the capability to wreak havoc on Israel – and on U.S. interests in the region – by remote control.

A significant portion of the book reveals just how Iran has accomplished this and what we can expect in any future U.S. or Israeli conflict with Iran. 

Of course, Iran is now more emboldened than ever, following Israel’s failure to defeat the Iranian-backed Hamas group in the Gaza Strip and Israel’s 2006 military loss to the Iranian-funded Hizbullah militia in Lebanon.

I conducted an investigation that found that key sections in Jerusalem are essentially controlled by the Palestinian Authority while the U.S. has been aiding the Palestinians in developing infrastructure in eastern Jerusalem.

I found that, scandalously, the Israeli government has allowed hundreds of thousands of Arabs to live illegally on Jewish-owned land in Jerusalem that may, as a result, shift parts of Israel’s capital to future Palestinian control. Everyone who cares about the future of Jerusalem must read this chapter to understand how the city is already divided.

I also detail how the Jewish state has already essentially forfeited the holy Temple Mount, Judaism’s most venerated site, and has put up little protest as Islamic authorities physically erase Jewish history and archaeology from the site.

A good chunk of the book shows how Obama’s overall policies – such as dialogue with Iran and Syria, resetting America’s relationship with Russia and its allies, taking a soft approach toward North Korea – are working to harm Israel’s strategic interests. More specifically, I delve into the implications of Obama’s drive to establish a Palestinian state and strong indications he is willing to deal with the Hamas terrorist organization.

The greatest threat facing the Jewish state, the one that magnifies all others exponentially, is that only a few in Israel or abroad are aware of the real extent of the dangers facing the Jewish country – both from within and without.

This is due in large part to an international and Israeli news media so entrenched in their accepted narratives that, as I document, they will completely invert the truth or blindly repeat proven falsehoods, even when this requires covering for the terrorists.

At times, the Israeli and U.S. governments are just as guilty of distorting the truth, suppressing the disastrous results of their failed policies and actions, and masking the murderous ways of their Palestinian or Arab state “partners.” 

How the U.S. knowingly funds Palestinian terrorism; how the UN is maintaining and festering a Palestinian “refugee” crisis that directly threatens the existence of Israel; the threat from Syria; and Israel’s abandonment of its third holiest site, Joseph’s tomb.

Also, most people don’t know how Hamas actually blasted its way to control over the Gaza Strip and how the pre-takeover stage of that same process is being played out now in the West Bank – territory slated for evacuation despite its proximity to Israel’s population centers and the country’s international airport. I discuss that as well.