Pappe Reviews Finkelstein on Israel

Pappe reviews Finkelstein [an excerpt]

Why is the history of modern Palestine such a matter of debate? Why is it still regarded as a complex, indeed obscure, chapter in contemporary history that cannot be easily deciphered? Any abecedarian student of its past who comes to it with clean hands would immediately recognize that in fact its story is very simple. .... The naked truth about how outsiders coveted someone else's country is not sui generis, and the means they used to obtain their newfound land have been successfully employed in other cases of colonization and dispossession throughout history.
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When official America endorsed this Israeli position, it became the so-called Middle Eastern peace process, one that was too sophisticated to be managed by the Palestinians and hence had to be worked out between Washington, DC, and Jerusalem and then dictated to the Palestinians. The last time this approach was attempted, in the summer of 2000 at Camp David, the results were disastrous. The second intifada broke out, and it rages on as this article goes to press.

The Zionist narrative is as simple a story as the history of the conflict itself. The Jews redeemed their lost and ancient homeland after two thousand years of exile, and when they "returned" they found it derelict, arid, and practically uninhabited....

In academia, the Israeli claim of complexity and the Zionist time line as a whole have been exposed as propaganda at best. Similarly, the pendulum has swung in favor of many principal chapters in the Palestinian narrative, regarded hitherto as an Oriental fable. The emergence of critical and post-Zionist scholarship in Israel helped this process along by providing internal deconstruction of the Zionist metanarrative and accepting many historical claims made by the Palestinians, especially with regard to the events of 1948. The group of "new Israeli historians" who have focused on 1948 have endorsed the basic Palestinian argument that the native people were forcefully dispossessed in what today would be called an ethnic-cleansing operation.

But outside the universities, particularly in the United States, public figures continue to be embarrassingly and unapologetically pro-Israeli. Few have dared to challenge these self-appointed ambassadors because many of them are quite often influential journalists, highly placed lawyers, or former politicians, ex-hostages of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in its most active years. Norman G. Finkelstein is one of the few who has. In 1984 he confronted head-on Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, which claimed that most of the Palestinians made their way into the territory only in the 1920s and '30s—an assertion so ridiculous it made Peters's book easy prey. Finkelstein tore her argument to shreds.

Now, in Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, Finkelstein goes after bigger targets and challenges some of the most sacred taboos in the American public arena regarding Zionism and Israel. One such exposure involves the misuse, indeed abuse, of Holocaust memory in defense of Zionism. Any substantial criticism of Israel is immediately branded by apologists for the state as a new wave of anti-Semitism. The Anti-Defamation League's grotesque manipulation of the message of Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ and its purported association with the Palestinian struggle against occupation makes one wonder how intelligent people—even basically moral people—could spin such idiotic tales and arouse unwarranted, hysterical reactions with the effect of papering over Israeli atrocities on the ground. The puzzlement grows when one reads Finkelstein's industrious, at times sarcastic book, which shows how easy it is to distinguish what happened in fact from what Israeli sources (and their American defenders) say happened. Scholarly work by historians Finkelstein does not particularly care for because of their political positions (such as Benny Morris) and self-inhibited Israeli human rights organizations such as B'Tselem show that even within their apologetic and cautious representations there are few doubts remaining on two issues: that Israel forcibly ejected the Palestinians in 1948 and that it has abused, oppressed, and humiliated those that remained ever since 1967.

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And to his further credit, he does not dismiss the possibility that anti-Jewishness has in fact risen as a result of Israeli brutality in the occupied territories. But the cry of anti-Semitism is not a response to this development; it is rather, in his words, "an ideological weapon to deflect justified criticism of Israel and, concomitantly, powerful Jewish interests."

No one co-opts intelligence in defense of a fable better than Alan Dershowitz. Finkelstein observes that, unlike Elie Wiesel, a troubled Jew who cannot apply his universal moral standards to the state of Israel and thus legitimizes all its misdeeds and crimes by default, Dershowitz comes from the realm of criminal law and has himself stated that "the criminal lawyer's job, for the most part, is to represent the guilty, and—if possible—to get them off." Israel must be guilty in Dershowitz's mind, as becomes apparent in The Case for Israel, which defends his client's most obvious crime—its human rights record. It would have been a more "complex" case had he chosen to stand for Israel's right to exist or its wish to represent world Jewry, but no: He opted to cleanse the most glaringly unpleasant feature of the Jewish state since its inception—its treatment of the Palestinians. In so doing, Dershowitz attacks everyone from Amnesty International and the United Nations to Israeli human rights organizations and Jewish peace activists, on top of course of condemning anyone who is Palestinian or pro-Palestinian. They are all part of the new anti-Semitism.

The most original aspect of Finkelstein's book is his deconstruction of Dershowitz's praise for the Israeli Supreme Court and his own examination of the court's record. Finkelstein's book is full of evidence of Israeli oppression that in itself is essential reading for those who wish to judge Dershowitz's propagandist claims. .... Finkelstein systematically shows how the most callous aspects of the occupation—torture centers, demolition of houses, targeted killings, and denial of medical care—were in fact legitimized a priori by the Israeli Supreme Court....

... This book cracks the wall of deception and hypocrisy that enables the daily violation of human and civil rights in Palestine. As such, it has the potential to contribute to the removal of the real wall that shuts out those in the occupied territories.

Ilan Pappe is the author, most recently, of The Modern Middle East (Routledge, 2005).

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[Fern Sidman]

ANTI-SEMITIC JEW SPEAKS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

BY: FERN SIDMAN

Columbia University students including the College Conservatives and campus Democrats plan to protest a speech Wednesday by a professor who has written that Jewish organizations exploit the Holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel and to extort European banks and governments for compensation.

Norman Finkelstein, an assistant professor of political science at DePaul University in Chicago, wrote in his 2000 book "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering" that some Jews have used the Holocaust as an "extortion racket" to get compensation payments, and he has referred to Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel as the "resident clown" of the "Holocaust circus."

His most recent book, "Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History," is largely an attack on lawyer Alan Dershowitz's "The Case for Israel." In it he argues that Israel uses the outcry over perceived anti-Semitism as a bully weapon to stifle criticism.

In an editorial in Columbia University's student newspaper, The Columbia Spectator, Columbia sophomores, Chris Kulawik and Josh Lipsky write the following: "Those who assume that Finkelstein is just another "controversial" speaker, one of many in Columbia's recent past, fail to grasp the absurdity that is Finkelstein. Taking a job at DePaul University after being fired by New York University for his ludicrous and factually inaccurate book, The Holocaust Industry, this "scholar" makes his living off of absurd statements that garner comfortable speaking engagements. At a recent speech delivered at Yale University, Finkelstein equated the Jewish concern over Holocaust denial with a "level of mental hysteria." Clearly, we must first question his very "professorship." Anyone who so blatantly disregards facts and vehemently supports the murder of innocent children is worthy neither of academia nor of the title of professor.

Well, what precisely is Mr. Finkelstein's crime? It is not that he is a Holocaust revisionist. It is not that he denies the right of the Jewish state to exist. It is not that he cheapened the lives of the millions of innocents lost to the concentration camps by equating their systematic murder to any other large disaster. No, his crime both includes and transcends these radical, depraved stances. Only months after Sept. 11, 2001, Finkelstein asserted his support of terrorism. In that 2001 interview, Finkelstein exclaimed, "Frankly, part of me says—even though everything since Sept. 11 has been a nightmare—'You know what, we deserve the problem on our hands because some things [Osama] bin Laden says are true.'"

It is this sentiment that forces students to take a stand against Finkelstein's unique blend of pure idiocy and potent evil. Columbia attempts to teach its students to respect all opinions, listen to all viewpoints, and embrace the free exchange of ideas. We will listen, but we will not let a petty ploy to incite tension and turmoil go unnoticed."

In defense of Professor Finkelstein, the Columbia Spectator also published the views of Arab students. Maryum Saifee and Athar Abdul-Quader who write, "Finkelstein's critics, most notably Alan Dershowitz, charge Finkelstein with anti-Semitism precisely because of his criticism of Zionism, i.e. criticism of the Israeli occupation and Israeli state-sponsored human rights abuses committed against Palestinians. This isn't the first time that a reputable scholar has been typecast as anti-Semitic for critical views against Israeli policies (see David Horowitz's The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America). Undoubtedly, anti-Semitism is an ugly, appalling form of bigotry that deserves universal condemnation. However, Zionism is a political ideology and must never be confused with the Jewish religion, culture, or population. Contrary to the anti-American label commonly placed on Finkelstein, his critique of political Zionism is precisely the type of controversial political discourse that is characteristically American and is analogous to the College Democrats' stimulating debate on the Bush administration.

Finkelstein is often met with accusations of Holocaust revisionism, generally associated with Holocaust denial. Finkelstein's book The Holocaust Industry is actually a critique of Holocaust revisionist arguments that privilege the Holocaust as exceptional in the historiography of genocide. Far from the Anti-Defamation League's claims that Finkelstein is a Holocaust denier, his proof is an unambiguous affirmation that the Holocaust did occur -- his parents are living proof of its horrors! -- noting that the tragedy of the Holocaust has since been ruthlessly exploited and commercialized into what Finkelstein outlines as an industry to promote Zionist interests."

In Norman Finkelstein's own words, he states, "The problem is when you get to the United States. In the United States among those people who call themselves supporters of Israel, we enter the area of unreason. We enter a twilight zone. American Jewish organizations, they’re not only not up to speed yet with Steven Spielberg, they're still in the Leon Uris exodus version of history: the “this land is mine, God gave this land to me," and anybody who dissents from this, you can call it, lunatic version of history is then immediately branded an anti-Semite, and whenever Israel comes under international pressure to settle the conflict diplomatically, or when it is subjected to a public relations debacle, such as it was with the Second Intifada, a campaign is launched claiming there is a new anti-Semitism afoot in the world."

There is no question that Professor Norman G. Finkelstein is a self hating, viciously anti-Semitic Jew. One of his biggest supporters is David Irving, the Holocaust denier who was recently sentenced to three years in prison by an Austrian court for statements he made denying the veracity of the Holocaust. Despite the fact that Finkelstein in the son of Holocaust survivors, his vituperative and twisted and patently distorted logic is being embraced the world over by legions of devoted Jew haters.

We are told that a person can be honest, decent, moral and ethical without belief in G-d. We know that at the beginning of the 20th century, the false gods of education and culture began to replace the One true G-d of Israel. Jews began to believe that a moral and ethical person was one who was highly educated, one who attended the best of most prestigious universities and institutions of higher learning. We believed that an educated and cultured person was a moral person, who would never even entertain the notion of murder, of dishonesty and engaging in unethical practices.

At the beginning of World War II, that fallacy fell apart at the seams. For it was highly educated and extremely cultured German scientists who invented the gas chambers, who invented techniques to transform Jewish fat into soap and who discovered ways of making Jewish skin into lampshades. It was highly educated and cultured lawyers who devised and created laws that developed a society predicated on racism, fascism and xenophobia.

Let us never be fooled. "Reishis Chochma Yiras AdoShem". The beginning of wisdom is the fear and knowledge of G-d. Without that we have nothing. Without that, even highly educated and cultured people can and do engage in immorality, unethical conduct and become purveyors of lies, hatred, distortions, bigotry and Jew hatred. Professor Finkelstein is the personification of such evil.