Norman Finkelstein - What Lies Beyond Chutzpah?

By Jacob Laksin - FrontPageMagazine.com October 4, 2005

The name Norman Finkelstein is not exactly synonymous with serious scholarship. A professor of political science at Chicago’s DePaul University, Finkelstein has been widely denounced as a flamboyantly anti-Semitic crank for writing books like The Holocaust Industry, his 2000 jeremiad alleging that Holocaust survivors were “cheats” who had fictionalized their past out of a “greedy” desire to collect reparations. When not calumniating against Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein actively promulgates his theory about a global Jewish conspiracy, its alleged initiates running from the late Leon Uris to Stephen Spielberg. He counts neo-Nazis among his staunchest defenders. Even a passing familiarity with Finkelstein’s resume suggests that no publisher of any repute would publish his books.

There are, as it turns out, exceptions. The largest academic publisher on the West Coast, The University of California Press, has not only signed off on the publication of Finkelstein’s latest effort, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, but it has been unstinting in its defense of the book, hailing the virulent broadside against defenders of Israel and Jews generally and the liberal Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz specifically as a model of scholarly achievement.

The book, released in August, is typical of Finkelstein’s oeuvre. Bristling with invocations of the supposedly nefarious influence of “Jewish elites,” the book contains passages like the following:

Jewish elites in the United States have enjoyed enormous prosperity. From this combination of economic and political power has sprung, unsurprisingly, a mindset of Jewish superiority. Wrapping themselves in the mantle of The Holocaust, these Jewish elites pretend—and, in their own solipsistic universe, perhaps imagine themselves—to be victims, dismissing any and all criticism as manifestations of “anti-Semitism.” And, from this lethal brew of formidable power, chauvinistic arrogance, feigned (or imagined) victimhood, and Holocaust-immunity to criticism has sprung a terrifying recklessness and ruthlessness on the part of American Jewish elites. Alongside Israel, they are the main formentors of anti-Semitism in the world today. Coddling them is not the answer. They need to be stopped.

Finkelstein also revisits some of the themes of The Holocaust Industry, claiming that

Like the Holocaust, “anti-Semitism” is an ideological weapon to deflect justified criticism of Israel and, concomitantly, powerful Jewish interests. In its current usage, “anti-Semitism,” alongside the “war against terrorism,” serves as a cloak for a massive assault on international law and human rights.

Jewish leaders like Abraham Foxman, Edgar Bronfman drive Finkelstein’s into paroxysms of anti-Semitic rancor. At one point in Beyond Chutzpah, he claims that these Jewish leaders “resemble stereotypes straight out of [the Nazi newspaper] Der Stürmer.”

Finkelstein knows whereof he speaks: Rehashing a classic bit of anti-Semitic propaganda, Finkelstein’s asserts that Jewish leaders are “de facto agents of a foreign government,” namely Israel, and are “in service to their Holy State.” But Finkelstein’s reserves his most strident contempt for Alan Dershowitz, who has authored several books supportive of Israel’s right to exist—an unpardonable sin in Finkelstein’s view.

True to form, Finkelstein pointedly declines to engage Dershowtiz’s arguments. Instead, he opts for a relentless barrage of slander and outright distortion; analogies to Nazis abound. “It is hard to make out any difference between the policy [of collective punishment that] Dershowitz advocates and the Nazi destruction of [the Czech village of] Lidice, for which he expresses abhorrence—except that Jews, not Germans, would be implementing it,” Finkelstein writes. Apart from its grotesque reference to the Nazi extermination of civilians, the claim is in violent conflict with the facts: Dershowitz has never supported collective punishment. What he has done is proposed the destroying houses used by Palestinian terrorists to stage attacks on Israel, and then only so long as residents are first given sufficient warning and accommodated with alternative housing. “To equate the destruction of an empty house with mass murder is obscene,” Dershowitz tells Frontpagemag.

Especially on the subject of Israel, Finkelstein does not even attempt to do his due diligence to Dershowitz’s contentions. He insists, for instance, that Dershowitz provides “no evidence or argument for” his view that the International Court of Justice has an animus against Israel. A more fair-minded observer—or at least one unmotivated, as Finkelstein seems to be, by unalloyed malice—would at least have acknowledged that Dershowitz has provided ample justification for his claim. For instance, Dershowitz points to the fact that Israeli judges are debarred from serving as permanent members of the court, even as the heads of nations expressly committed to Israel’s destruction—and ungoverned by the rule of law—are unquestioningly accorded the distinction.

Tellingly, Finkelstein devotes much of Beyond Chutzpah to countering Dershowitz’s indictment of Palestinian terrorism. Of the Israeli security fence, Finkelstein insists, in all apparent seriousness, that is not “designed to fight terrorism.” Similarly, he takes indignant issue with Dershowitz’s statement that that Palestinian terrorists have exploded “an antipersonnel bomb made of nails soaked in rat poison.” According to Finkelstein, Dershowitz has never provided any evidence for the claim. In fact, as Dershowitz notes, just prior to publishing his book The Case for Israel, he had sent a research assistant to corroborate it. Emergency room doctors had confirmed that Palestinian suicide bombers had indeed availed themselves of rat poison, which prevents blood from coagulating.

Unable to disprove Dershowitz’s arguments, Finkelstein resorts in Beyond Chutzpah to impugning his integrity. He suggests, for instance, that Dershowitz plagiarized his book The Case for Israel. To be sure, Finkelstein doesn’t use those exact words. There’s a reason for that: After learning of Finkelstein’s spurious charge that he had “no idea what was in the book,” Dershowitz, who writes his books freehand, sent the press handwritten pages of the book. Along with his lawyers from the New York firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, Dershowitz also wrote letters to the press’s board of directors as well as the University of California administrators, threatening to sue for libel and calling on the press to rethink its publication of Beyond Chutzpah. In a December 2004 letter to the press, Dershowitz wrote:

“I have no interest in censoring or suppressing Finkelstein’s freedom of _expression, but merely in assuring that maliciously false statements about me, about other Jews, and about some supposed international Jewish conspiracy, are not published by a responsible press, especially at a time of spreading anti-Semitism around the world.”

The University of California Press, for its part, preferred to paper over these specific objections, as well as Dershowitz’s stipulation that he would have no problem with the book’s being published by a less august press. Instead, it dishonestly denounced Dershowitz’s “letter-writing campaign” as “an attack on academic freedom” and forged ahead with the publication. Significantly, however, the press asked Finkelstein to exorcise the plagiarism accusation.

Not that the press has been entirely candid about the redaction. This past June, Lynne Withey, director of the University of California Press, disingenuously told Inside Higher Education that “It was unclear the point [Finkelstein] was trying to make and he couldn’t document that, so we asked him to take it out.” In the final edition of Beyond Chutzpah, the word “plagiarizes” has been removed in favor of the milder “appropriates from without attribution,” an accusation that, as Dershowitz proves in a forthcoming article, is equally groundless. Indeed, the only “expert” willing to vouch for Finkelstein’s allegation is Alexander Cockburn, editor of the far left journal Counterpunch, who entertains his own perfervid notions of an all-powerful “Jewish lobby.”

In view of the numerous distortions and flagrant falsehoods collected in Beyond Chutzpah, to say nothing of its extended flirtation with sundry anti-Semitic tropes, it might be asked why the University of California Press, heretofore a distinguished publisher, assented to lend its seal of approval to Finkelstein’s book.

For one thing, the press feels that the book passes the test of meticulous scholarship. “We do believe that Beyond Chutzpah is historically and factually accurate and we did employ a very thorough fact-checker,” Niels Hooper, Finkelstein’s editor at the University of California press, told Frontpagemag. (Dershowitz rejects the charge that the press employed a fact-checker for the book; despite being the main target of the book, he recalls receiving only one call from the press, during which he was asked about an issue unrelated to Beyond Chutzpah.) Hooper is similarly dismissive of charges of anti-Semitism, explaining, “[W]e would never publish something that we felt was anti-Semitic and we actually feel that it is disingenuous for Alan Dershowitz to try to discredit a book that attacks his scholarship, not his ethnicity or religion, as such.”

Dershowitz begs to differ. By way of example, he points to Finkelstein’s likening of his views on the destruction of evacuated terrorist residences to the Nazi slaughter of civilians in the village of Lidice. Hooper stands by the press’s decision to publish such claims. It is “noteworthy,’” he contends, that Dershowitz “does not disavow the main charge of that chapter, that he supports collective punishment in the form of house and village destruction that violates international law. I might add that those laws were established precisely because of what happened in World War II.” Dershowitz calls the comparison “obscene and mendacious” for its equation of Israeli self-defense policies with Nazi genocide. Beyond that, he stresses that it is inaccurate: he supports the destruction only of those houses that serve as terrorist bases of operation, and only after the residents have been relocated. Related examples abound in the book. Notwithstanding the abundance of evidence to the contrary, the press vigorously rejects charges of anti-Semitism. Director Lynne Withey, who declined to be interviewed for this story, said in June that it was “outrageous” to accuse Beyond Chutzpah of being anti-Semitic, adding that, “To say that the book is anti-Semitic is to say that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.”

That suggests another reason that the press decided to publish Beyond Chutzpah: its political composition. As John Braeman recently pointed out in Frontpagemag, the press publishes a number of books distinguished less by their scholarship than their adherence to left-wing politics. (It bears noting in this context that Niels Hooper, who played an instrumental role in getting the University of California press to publish Beyond Chutzpah, is an alumnus of the leftist publishing imprint Verso, where he collaborated with Finkelstein.) Indeed, Lynne Withey routinely justifies the press’s publication of these transparently polemical works by citing its right to publish “controversial books.”

Nothing fits the mold better than the anti-Israel prejudices of the hard left. On the press’s website, the endorsements for the book read like a who’s who of the Israel-bashing far left. There’s a glowing tribute from the dean of academic radicalism, Noam Chomsky, who calls Beyond Chutzpah a “very solid, important and highly informative book,” filled with “considerable historical depth and expert research.” Meanwhile, the far-left academic Avi Shlaim, who has likened Sharon to a terrorist and lauded Yasir Arafat for fighting Islamic extremists, hails Finkelstein’s book for its meticulous attention to detail. That both are Jewish has not escaped the press’s attention. In an interview with Frontpagemag, Hooper hastened to note “that in fact we have only received high praise so far from very many distinguished Jewish scholars.”

Dershowitz is impatient with that line of defense. “One of the most offensive things they are saying in their defense is that they have the support of Jews. Our staff is Jewish, the people who endorsed the book are Jewish, some of our best friends are Jewish. Well, Norman Finkelstein proves that a Jew can be an anti-Semite,” he says. In the end, Dershowitz has little doubt about why the press published Beyond Chutzpah. “I think they have a double standard for judging the hard anti-Zionist right than they would for David Duke and the far right. But David Duke and Norman Finkelstein are the same,” he says. “Except that Duke is slightly brighter.”



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Deborah Passner - October 10, 2005

Campus anti-Israel activists copy many of their arguments from two main sources – MIT professor Noam Chomsky, and his acolyte Norman Finkelstein, a DePaul University political science professor who never misses an opportunity to inform readers that his parents were Holocaust survivors. For example, following the Palestine Solidarity Movement’s conference in October 2004 at Duke University, the student paper published a column that included anti-Semitic slurs such as “Jews must own up to their privilege in America, and use it more wisely” and “ ‘the Holocaust Industry’ uses its influence to stifle...the Israeli-Palestinian debate.” The student supported these canards by citing Finkelstein's book The Holocaust Industry.

Anti-Zionists and anti-Semites often reference Finkelstein’s books despite the fact that they are marred by factual inaccuracies, omissions and selective mention of fact. Much of his work is seemingly shaped by his antagonism toward the Jewish establishment and his avowed anti-Zionism. Thus, he routinely accuses pro-Israel writers of being “frauds” and “plagiarists,” and labels their work “hoaxes.”

In his controversial book The Holocaust Industry, Finkelstein argues that “Jewish elites” have created an “industry” to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust as a ploy to extort money and to gain influence, as well a tactic “to crush any dissent, any criticism, of the State of Israel.” The New York Times’ review of the book described its premise as a “novel variation” of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fraudulent essay concocted in the late nineteenth century by the Czarist secret police which purports to uncover a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Accordingly, the Times’ reviewer described Finkelstein as “juvenile,” “arrogant,” and “stupid” (Aug. 6, 2000).

In Finkelstein's portrayal no one “unerringly articulates” the Holocaust “dogma” more than Nobel Laureate and human rights activist Elie Wiesel, who is himself a Holocaust survivor. Finkelstein mockingly describes Wiesel as the “resident clown,” and charges he is responsible for creating a “meaningless version of the Nazi Holocaust” and for only exposing “genocides that serve the interest of the US and Israel” (Salon.com, Aug. 30, 2000). While Wiesel’s work on behalf of those suffering around the world is generally well-respected, Finkelstein denounces his lack of “humanitarian commitments,” and his “shameful record of apologetics on behalf of Israel.” A more mainstream view was expressed by Ted Koppel of ABC’s Nightline, who called Wiesel “one of the most compassionate human beings alive.” Koppel specifically praises Wiesel for showing as much compassion for other people as he does the Jews (April18, 2002).

Other Jewish leaders are similarly slandered by Finkelstein. For example, he calls Abraham Foxman, who heads the Anti-Defamation League, “the Grand Wizard,” a term typically reserved for a leader in the racist Ku Klux Klan.

Finkelstein on Israel

Finkelstein tries to convince readers that the “Holocaust Industry” exists as an ideological weapon to gain unqualified support for Israel against the Palestinians. He unconvincingly argues that both the Holocaust and Israel became important to American Jews only in 1967 because:

Israel now becomes the United States' strategic asset in the Middle East. It's safe to be pro-Israel. And suddenly American Jewry, Jewish intellectuals and so forth, become fanatical towards the State of Israel. It's one of the enduring ironies of the whole conflict. That of all the Jewish intellectuals who are now fanatical stalwarts of the State of Israel, until 1967 there were only two public Jewish intellectuals who are publicly identified as supporting Israel. There are only two. And they were Hannah Arendt ... the second one was Noam Chomsky.

Finkelstein's assertions are simply bizarre. In fact, many Jewish intellectuals supported the Jewish state before 1967.

Thus, Albert Einstein, perhaps the preeminent intellectual of the 20th century, co-wrote an article in the 1944 Princeton Herald strongly supporting a Jewish state:

In speaking up for a Jewish Palestine, we want to promote the establishment of a place of refuge where persecuted human beings may find security and peace and the undisputed right to live under a law and order of their making. The experiences of many centuries have taught us that this can be provided only by home rule and not by a foreign administration. This is why we stand for a Jewish-controlled Palestine, be it ever so modest and small. (Jews Among the Nations, pg. 137)

Several American-Jewish intellectuals were deeply involved in the Zionist movement even before the Holocaust. In 1915, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote about the importance of a Jewish state for the Jewish people:

The glorious past [of the Jews] can really live only if it becomes part of a glorious future; and to this end the Jewish home in Palestine is essential. We Jews of prosperous America above all need its inspiration. (Menorah Journal, January 1915)

Even before Brandeis became chairman of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs, he proclaimed in a 1913 speech that “we should aid in the efforts of the Jews in Palestine. We should all support the Zionist movement.” In many of his speeches in that period he stated “to be good Americans we must be better Jews and to better Jews we must become Zionists.”

Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter also actively promoted the establishment of a Jewish homeland. In an article for the April 1931 Foreign Affairs magazine, he wrote that he supports a Jewish state:

not only as a Jew. But as one who believes in the wisdom of the policy embodied in the Palestine Mandate for the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine.

Finkelstein in particular singled out Norman Podhoretz, the former editor-in-chief of Commentary, as a Jewish intellectual who did not support Israel before 1967:

What is very striking is everyone says, everyone says Israel played no role in my life up until '67. . . . Take the editor of Commentary Norman Podhoretz. . . . He writes a famous memoir called Making It. I reread Making It. Israel gets exactly four words in the whole book, it's nothing.

Finkelstein is once again sloppy in his research. A full 10 years before the Six Day War, Podhoretz wrote a well-known article for the Zionist magazine Midstream about the importance of American Jews making the case for Israel. He wrote:

Failing active restraint by America, the Arabs will continue to provoke, and Israel, under the inalienable right of self-preservation, will be forced to move. It is in the interest of the United States to insure that justice is to be done to Israel, and American Jews, who should be alerted by their interest as Jews to the special danger of the situation in the Middle East. . . are the ones to make that point clear to their fellow Americans.

Support for Zionism by such luminaries as Brandeis, Franfurter, Einstein, and Podhoretz, all apparently missed by Finkelstein, exposes his shoddy research and proves just how unreliable he is when it comes to Zionism and its history.

Flawed Book

Just as inaccurate as the Holocaust Industry is Finkelstein’s book Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. Dedicated to the proposition that Israel and Zionism are illegitimate, the book relies largely on anti-Israeli secondary sources and virtually ignores contrary evidence.

For example, Finkelstein’s chapter “Born of War, Not by Design,” about the 1948 Palestinian refugees, relies almost exclusively on Benny Morris’s book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, which has been seriously challenged by mainstream historians for selectively using Israeli archival material. Finkelstein relies on information found in The Birth, but often distorts already questionable material. For example, Morris claims in one of his endnotes that Ben-Gurion said:

[a return] is out of the question until we sit together beside a [peace conference] table...and they will respect us to the degree that we respect them and I doubt whether they deserve respect as we do. Because, nonetheless, we did not flee en masse. [And] so far no Arab Einstein has arisen and [they] have not created what we have built in this country and [they] have not fought as we are fighting...We are dealing with a collective murderer.

Rather than checking the original source, Finkelstein distorts the secondary source. In order to demonstrate Ben-Gurion’s “extreme” “racis[ism],” he shortens Morris’s citation to read, “Arabs were not entitled to the same respect accorded to Jews because ‘so far no Arab Einstein has arisen...We are dealing with a collective murderer.’ ”

Benny Morris himself has long been critical of Finkelstein’s scholarly research as it relates to his [Morris’s] work. He criticizes Finkelstein for “selectively quot[ing]” from his book and for not knowing “anything ...beyond what is found” in his books. His sources, according to Morris, are “dubious,” and he adds that Finkelstein fails to marshal “sources or materials from elsewhere that could serve to contradict my findings” (Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 1991). According to Morris, “for Finkelstein the only good Israeli is an evil Israeli.”

Finkelstein routinely compares Israelis with Nazis and told the Jeruslem Post that he “can’t imagine why Israel’s apologists would be offended by the comparison” (Aug 28, 2000).

While Finkelstein expresses nothing but contempt for Israel, he lavishes praise on the terrorist group Hezbollah. In a letter posted on his Web site he states, “I did make a point of publicly honoring the heroic resistance of Hezbollah to foreign occupation ...Their historic contributions are...undeniable.” He appeared on the official Hezbollah television network al-Manar, because, he said, “If I’m willing to appear on CNN – the main propaganda organ for America’s terrorist wars–why shouldn’t I appear on al-Manar?”

Al Manar’s expressed mission is to wage “psychological warfare against the Zionist enemy.” Al Manar producers boast of creating programming to recruit Palestinian suicide bombers. In addition, Ibrahim Mussawi, director of English-language news for al Manar, in an interview with the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg, labeled Jews “a lesion on the forehead of history.” Al Manar TV was banned by European Union satellites for airing racist programming such as the series “The Diaspora” based on The Protocols.

Attacks on Pro-Israel Writers

Finkelstein routinely calls those he disagrees with “frauds” labeling their work “hoaxes.” Alan Dershowitz, a renowned Harvard lawyer and author of the best selling book The Case for Israel, is his latest target. Finkelstein claims Dershowitz’s book is “sheer, unadulterated, complete, total, comprehensive, from beginning to end, from the first uppercase letter to the last period, a complete fraud” (March 8, 2005, lecture at the University of Illinois Law School). He accuses Dershowitz of plagiarism and has said that Dershowitz “almost certainly didn’t write the book and perhaps didn’t even read it prior to publication.” The allegations were investigated and rejected by former Harvard President Derek Bok. In an upcoming book on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Finkelstein was going to accuse Dershowitz of plagiarism, but, under threat of lawsuit, he was forced to omit the allegation from his book.

In March, CAMERA asked Dershowitz why he thought professors are reluctant to publicly defend Israel. He said they fear:

Finkelstein going all over campuses of the world making up stories about them. The whole Finkelstein-Noam Chomsky-Alex Cockburn attack team has succeeded in intimidating many young professors around the country and around the world. Because if you write a pro-Israel article or book, they will call you a plagiarist...They will make up quotes about you...The hit team claims that they already prevented and destroyed the reputations of two pro-Israel writers.

It’s hardly surprising that Finkelstein’s fabrications and attack strategy intimidate. All the more reason that the facts about his reckless charges be widely disseminated. Finally, the grossly flawed writings of the DePaul “professor” point to yet another example of the failure of the academic world to uphold genuine standards of scholarship–such as accuracy, truthfulness and rigorous sourcing.



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http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=8&x_nameinnews=169&x_article=985

Norman Finkelstein Biography

Finkelstein, Norman G. Holocaust denier and author of "The Holocaust Industry," who once famously asked, "If all these people survived the Holocaust, who actually died?"

He has also referred to Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel as the "clown in the Holocaust circus." [So, besides being a Holocaust denier, he's also a heartless bastard!] Further, he claimed that the Holocaust is being used by racist Jews to justify their presence in Palestine and to oppress Arabs. He agrees that the use of the Holocaust as "extortion" to extract money from Germans and others is a crime and, according to Finkelstein, just more proof of the fact that Jews care for nothing but money. Israel is not immune from his castigation either. In a December 200l speech in Beirut, Lebanon, Finkelstein compared Israeli behavior to "Nazi practices" during World War II. Finkelstein refers to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis as the "Six Million" in quotation marks, and says that nearly every Holocaust survivor is a fraud, a thief and a liar. (Finkelstein's own parents are Holocaust survivors and Finkelstein has long tried to capitalize on this as a way to legitimize his own anti-Semitism.)

It’s inconceivable to me that Finkelstein might achieve tenure at De Paul University in Chicago, where he presently teaches his bizarre theories. That he is an assistant professor there is, in my view, a badge of shame for De Paul.

His true occupation is as a member of a traveling circus, a freak show of anti-Semites who promote anti-Israel propaganda from campus to campus. He openly admits to having high regard for Hezbollah on his Web site, and he promotes the false notion that "scholars widely agree that Israel ethnically cleansed the Palestinian people in 1948."

Finkelstein is almost universally regarded as a Jewish traitor and anti-Semite, and at the very least a fraud and pseudo-scholar. Commentary Magazine's Gabriel Schoenfeld has labeled Finkelstein's views as crackpot ideas, some of them mirrored almost verbatim in the propaganda put out by neo-Nazis around the world.. "Fink's" books do not sell in America, but they are best-sellers among the growing number of neo-Nazis in Germany. Finkelstein has been endorsed by anti-Semites of all stripes, including Israeli Jewish anti-Semites like Neve Gordon from Ben Gurion University.

Finkelstein's hatred of Jews runs so deep that he has actually implied that his own mother, who survived the Nazi Holocaust, may have collaborated with the Nazis. If so collaboration with evil seems to run in the family, because Finkelstein has clearly become a collaborator with Hezbollah anti-Semitism and Nazism. Finkelstein's website is filled with Hezbollah promotion, including breathless reprints of Nasrallah speeches. Following the one month 2006 summer war between Israel and Hizbollah,he wrote, "I truly honor [Hizbollah] for having inflicted an exceptional and deserving defeat on their foreign occupiers. It's another wonderful chapter in the long and painful struggle for human emancipation and even liberty and certainly one that every human being can take inspiration from." When American and Jewish soldiers die, Finkelstein rejoices!

Has this capo EVER said a kind word about the Israel or the Jewish people? Sadly, we know of none. Even if Norman Finkelstein did not really exist, we'd have to invent him as a Poster Yehudon [Jew Boy] caricature of the Self-Hating Israel-Threatening Jew.

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Masada 2000

More About Ilan Pappe

Ilan Pappé: When Ideology Trumps Scholarship
by Ricki Hollander - October 20, 2005

The inspiration and driving force behind the proposed academic boycott of Israeli institutions is a tenured professor at the University of Haifa who is anything but scholarly. Ilan Pappé is the Israeli-born political science professor and historian who has been at center stage in the attempt by Great Britain's 40,000–member Association of University Teachers' (AUT) to blacklist Israeli universities. An activist in Israel's fringe Communist party, he is among the most extreme of a group of radical Israeli historians who have sought to rewrite Israel's history to suggest the country was born in original sin.

Pappé has long acknowledged that he is not objective and cares little about factual accuracy. He readily admits that ideology drives his historical writings and statements. And his ideology can be simply summed up: Israel is illegitimate and should be the target of international sanctions until it is dismantled as a Jewish state.

Pappé freely expresses his attitude toward historical investigation and academic objectivity:

There is no historian in the world who is objective. I am not as interested in what happened as in how people see what's happened. ("An Interview of Ilan Pappé," Baudouin Loos, Le Soir [Bruxelles],Nov. 29, 1999)

I admit that my ideology influences my historical writings, but so what? (Ibid)

Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers. (Ibid)

The debate between us is on one level between historians who believe they are purely objective reconstructers of the past, like [Benny] Morris, and those who claim that they are subjective human beings striving to tell their own version of the past, like myself. (“Benny Morris’s Lies About My Book,” Ilan Pappé, Response to Morris’ critique of Pappé’s book, “A History of Palestine” published in the New Republic, March 22, 2004, History News Network, April 5, 2004)

[Historical] Narratives... when written by historians involved deeply in the subject matter they write about, such as in the case of Israeli historians who write about the Palestine conflict, is motivated also... by a deep involvement and a wish to make a point. This point is called ideology or politics. (Ibid)

Yes, I use Palestinian sources for the Intifada: they seem to me to be more reliable, I admit. (Ibid)

Pappé bases his accusations against Israel not on substantiated facts, but on Palestinian narrative. He freely distorts the truth to conform with his ideology. Thus he attests to Israeli army-perpetrated massacres that never occurred. He promotes the myth of a 1948 massacre of the villagers of Tantura, claiming that the Israeli academic establishment is conspiring to repress the information, and he continues to propagate the lie that Israeli committed a massacre in Jenin in 2002 despite copious refutation (including United Nations reports) of the bogus claim. As in the Tantura case, he suggests there is a conspiracy to cover-up the Jenin "massacre":

Over a year has passed now, since the Israeli army invaded the refugee camp in Jenin, destroyed its houses, killed many of its inhabitants and committed one of the worst war crimes in this present Intifada, Intifada al-Aqsa. With a successful campaign of distortion and manipulation of evidence, the Israeli foreign ministry, with the help of the United States, succeeded in hiding from the world the horrors of Jenin, and even worse, in intimidating anyone daring to tell the truth about what had happened there . . . As comes out vividly from this book (of Palestinian testimony), Jenin was not just a massacre, it was an inhuman act of unimaginable barbarism. ("Searching Jenin: The Most Authoritative Report on the War Crimes We Will Ever Get," Book Review by Ilan Pappé, Counterpunch, May 3, 2003)

Pappé particularly seeks to spread his distorted message in the international community, producing books, articles, speeches, interviews and letters. So outrageous and unscholarly are his deceptions that even Benny Morris, himself a "new historian" who has been accused of twisting the truth to fit his own hypothesis of Israel's birth, has set himself apart from Pappé. Morris critiqued Pappé's 2004 book, "A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples" in the New Republic. Entitled "Ilan Pappé's New Book is Appalling," Morris' review spells out the problem:

Pappe is a proud postmodernist. He believes that there is no such thing as historical truth, only a collection of narratives as numerous as the participants in any given event or process; and each narrative, each perspective, is as valid and legitimate, as true, as the next...

About the book, Morris writes:

...Unfortunately, much of what Pappé tries to sell his readers is complete fabrication...

...In Pappé's account, there is no faulting the Palestinians for regularly assaulting the Zionist enterprise...The Palestinians are forever victims, the Zionists are forever "brutal colonizers"...

...The multiplicity of mistakes on each page is a product of both Pappé's historical methodology and his political proclivities...

...For those enamored with subjectivity and in thrall to historical relativism, a fact is not a fact and accuracy is unattainable. Why grope for the truth? Narrativity is all. So no reader should be surprised to discover that, according to Pappé. . .[Here Morris provides a partial list of Pappé's numerous falsehoods]

Anyone interested in the real history of Palestine/Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would do well to run vigorously in the opposite direction.

That some around the world eagerly embrace Pappé and his claims even as he himself admits that facts are irrelevant is evidence that truth will not deter the Jewish state's detractors.

More disturbing is that the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, favored by the Israeli cultural and political elite as well as the Western press corps, ran a lengthy puff-piece on Pappé, giving him a forum to present his distorted claims about the boycott. The May 6, 2005 article, entitled "Alone on the Barricades," by Meron Rapoport establishes Pappé as a victim:

On his answering machine, he found at least a dozen death threats...Pappé wasn't very popular among the Haifa University faculty before the AUT decision, and now that's all the more true. The university's president, Prof. Aharon Ben–Ze'ev, has called on him to leave the university and "to implement the boycott" that he supports himself. Members of the faculty are organizing to boycott him in the hallways and not to speak to him...Outside the university walls, some have even called Pappé a real traitor, a public enemy...

The story of the boycott, the controversy over the claims of a massacre at Tantura, and the consequences are presented primarily from Pappé's perspective. While his detractor's claims are mentioned, the article is based on a personal interview with Pappé, allowing him to articulate his position. The reporter asks softball questions, and Pappé is hardly challenged. (For example, he's asked: What is the essence [of the controversy] as you see it? Is the situation really that extreme? So you're deeply disappointed with Israeli academia?) The result is a legitimization of the man, his methods, and even his claims.

No wonder the article is reproduced on dozens of pro-Palestinian and pro-boycott Web sites, which like Pappé, advocate the end of the Jewish state.



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Ilam Pappe: Advocate of Israel's destruction.

Ilan Pappe - Advocate of Israel's destruction

Advocate of Israel's destruction.
This Israeli traitor is the darling of the campus groups that rally against Israel

By Janet Levy and Dr. Roberta Seid
FrontPageMagazine.com - November 24, 2004

"The most hated Israeli in Israel" - an ignoble moniker to be sure - has not eroded Ilan Pappe's star power on U.S. college campuses, where he is more often than not warmly greeted. The usual contingent of Said acolytes, Chomsky groupies and a panoply of pro-Palestinian student organizations are invariably well-represented in his audiences. The prominence of resolutely anti-Israel partisans is unsurprising, given Pappe's role as one of Israel's most prominent die-hard Marxists. Pappe was invited to UCLA by history professor and fellow Edward Said disciple, Gabriel Piterberg. A call to the university revealed that history department professors may invite speakers at their own discretion using departmental funding to cover expenses for colloquia without any oversight. This practice enables faculty to freely promulgate their political agendas and control the degree to which students are presented with alternative views and critiques. Piterberg has been labeled "an avant-garde radical who harangues campus demonstrations, endorses petitions and teaches a course in post-and anti-Zionism. "

Last spring, as Operation Desert Storm began, he cancelled class to attend an anti-war demonstration. Pappe doesn't seem like someone who would be hated. He comes across as soft-spoken and personable and gives the impression of being an earnest humanist dedicated to a noble cause. Piterberg introduced Pappe with warm praise for his scholarship. But Pappe is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Once he began speaking, it was clear why he's so hated at home. Pappe credits Edward Said with disabusing him of the "addictive" Zionistic leanings of his youth, and for initiating "a painful awakening to the essence of Zionism." Absent from Pappe's discourse is the recognition of Zionism as an authentic movement of national liberation. Pappe refuses to acknowledge the meaning and purposes the modern political phenomenon of Zionism was created to address. These included support for the right of all Jews to live in their ancient homeland; and the Jewish people's national right to self-determination and freedom from oppression.

To this incorrigible anti-Zionist, Palestinian Arabs have been the helpless victims not only of Israel's atrocities but of Israel's very existence as a Jewish state. He asserts that Israel silences those who attack the Zionist mythic narrative, notwithstanding his own somewhat ironic status as a tenured professor at an Israeli university. Not only is Pappe far from silent, he exists in an academic milieu as uninhibited and protective of academic freedom as any in the world. In contrast, the Palestinian Authority imposes strict censorship and ideological conformity on its subservient intellectuals, virtually none of whom support Israel's legitimacy.

For Pappe, Zionism is indistinguishable in practice from "ethnic cleansing." This blanket assertion applies to all aspects of the movement's history, from perfectly legal, mutually agreed upon transfers of land title from Arabs to Jews, to a purportedly long-term Israeli strategy, from the moment the State was born, to expel Palestinian Arabs from Israel.

Pappe fails to note that between 1948 and 1967, no Palestinian national movement wished to establish a state in Judea, Samaria, or Gaza. This fact alone belies the notion that "occupation" is responsible for stimulating Palestinian terror. Arab refusal to accept the Jewish State's right to exist is given no significance in Pappe's selective conclusions.

Pappe re-circulates the ludicrous postulate that Israel's offer at Camp David constituted an effort to ethnically cleanse the so-called Occupied Territories by creating "two Bantustans" or "prison camps." In fact, as confirmed as recently as a few weeks ago by Ambassador Dennis Ross, the proposed Palestinian state was to include nearly the entire West Bank, all of Gaza, and portions of East Jerusalem, which was to have become the Palestinian Arab capital. The consistent testimony of all parties privy to the Camp David negotiations, is that this Palestinian Arab state would have enjoyed territorial contiguity, and would have had a viable and substantial land mass in which to achieve the _expression of its sovereignty. Yet Pappe continues to cast darkness on what is an un-shadowed field of clarity and light.

Such baseless charges are Pappe's stock in trade. Before the Coalition imposed regime change in Iraq, Pappe circulated a tendentious, inflammatory petition, warning that Israel intended to use the "fog of war" to commit further atrocities against Palestinian Arabs in the disputed territories. Following the advent of the second Intifada, Pappe refused to condemn terrorism and explained it as a legitimate response to "occupation." "Terrorism is not the essential question," Pappe said. "Israel expelled the Palestinians and colonized the area," acts "far worse than suicide bombing and armed struggle."

It bears repeating in this context that the Palestinian Liberation Movement was founded in 1964, years before the "occupation." The following year, an Egyptian, Yassir Arafat, launched al-Fatah, which soon became the leading operational and controlling faction of the PLO. The goal of this organization, as of the entire Palestinian national movement, was never the establishment of a new Arab state, but the destruction of the established Jewish state.

Pappe's scholarship is questionable and subject to much criticism by respected historians. He dismisses the legitimacy of historical facts and rewrites history to support his ideologically determined agenda. He has admitted to the predominance of the Marxist worldview in defining conclusions and outcomes, by asserting that "we do [historiography] because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth seekers."

Pappe routinely and purposefully discredits or ignores sources that contradict his anti-Zionist views, and when challenged by students who cite accepted historical narratives, criticizes them for reading "the wrong books." When confronted by the actual, benign text of an Israeli military doctrine, which contradicted Pappe's thesis that such documents called for the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs, he admitted that no such doctrinal statement actually existed, but was implied simply by the existence and concomitant predispositions of Zionism.

Notwithstanding a negative court finding, and a scholarly review debunking the veracity of a master's thesis of one of Pappe's students, claiming an IDF massacre at Tantura, Pappe continued to support the claim. Upon reviewing Pappe's latest book, historian Benny Morris warned: "Anyone interested in the real history of Palestine/Israel and the Palestinian/Israel conflict would do well to run vigorously in the opposite direction!" This book is awash with errors of quantity and quality that are not found in serious historiography." Pappe admits that most historians share Morris' views and again freely admits that his "ideology influences his historical writing."

As part of his UCLA presentation, Pappe purported to expose an ideological paradox between the external presentation of Israeli society and what he perceives to be its reality. Pappe maintains that Israel is inaccurately viewed as a country torn between "peace camp" and "settler camp" ideologies. He sternly cautions against such an interpretation of the current discourse within Israel. Pappe instead advances the view that there is no authentic or meaningful debate, crisis or strife within Israeli society today. "This is the most consensual phase in Israeli history," he states.

Pappe blames this development on the rise to power of Classical Zionists, including Prime Minister Sharon, who believe in responsibly balancing the imperatives of democracy with the survival and security requirements of a Jewish state. Pappe bemoans the decline of the post-Zionists, and the diminishing resonance within Israel of their critique of Zionism. He claims that the newly invigorated national pride of Israel is wrongly "dictating the peace agenda to the world."

Pappe concluded his UCLA lecture by calling for a "political and geographical structure to contain Israel" and the imposition of economic sanctions on Israel, in the spirit of the boycott against apartheid South Africa. He called for activists to pressure the international community to pressure Israel in turn. He also advocated the imposition of an international force in the West Bank to protect Palestinians.

Pappe emphasized the need to convince others to abandon the idea of a two-state solution which he deems not viable. He called instead for the creation of one political structure to best serve the interests of Palestinians and Israelis. This recipe for a "multinational democratic state" conforms precisely to the formula long held by the PLO, and of course would result in the immediate and complete destruction of the Jewish State of Israel.

Pappe excoriated the American media for its ostensibly pro-Israel bias, and observed, no doubt correctly, that "Palestinians get a better hearing in Europe." He memorialized Edward Said by recommending acceptance of Said's Principle of the Three "A's: Acknowledgment by Israel of the ethnic cleansing of 1948; Accountability by Israel, to include repatriation or compensation to the Palestinian Arabs; and Acceptance by the Palestinians of a "Jewish element" in their midst.

It is noteworthy that, during the question and answer period following his lecture, Pappe entertained queries mostly from students of Arab appearance. Participants with dissenting opinions were cut off and subjected to terse answers. Those who agreed with Pappe's views were afforded ample time to complete their comments, and were granted gracious, respectful, and lengthy responses.

Clearly, so long as Pappe is supported by an American professoriate that shares his views, he will continue to propagate those views on American campuses. Students should take the advice of Benny Morris, and run the other way. His lectures serve only as object-lessons of the degree to which facts can be distorted to support an ideology. Any serious examination of the true history of the Middle East, or consideration of how desperately Israelis want peace and have repeatedly offered concessions toward that elusive goal, will always be absent from Pappe's discourse. Little else but distortion and falsehoods should be expected from an advocate of Israel's destruction.



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More About Ilan Pappe

Norman Finkelstein's Lies

For those you not familiar with the activities of Norman Finkelstein, he is one of the darlings of JVP and other anti-Israel "Jewish" groups. A (non-tenured) political science professor at DePaul University, he has made a name for himself by going on the anti-Israel lecture circuit with supposed credibility added by being the child of Holocaust survivors. An extensive summary of Finkelstein, his shoddy scholarship, and his slurs not only of Jewish leaders but of respected world figures like Elie Wiesel.

This is an abridged transcript of a talk given by the anti-Zionist activist Norman Finkelstein at Stanford University on January 25, 2007, entitled “Reflections on the misuse of anti-Semitism and the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.” Why do we present the words of this extremist?

We want to expose the misuse of history, the sloppy “research”, and the outright lies that go into talks by the likes of Finkelstein. It should come as no surprise that Finkelstein is one of the intellectual heroes of Jewish Voice for Peace and similar anti-Israel groups. His brochure for this talk stated “Finkelstein will discuss how the concept of anti-Semitism has been distorted to include any criticism of the state of Israel and silence all legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy.”

Once again he follows a theme we hear ONLY (and constantly) from anti-Israel activists: that “any” criticism of Israel is considered anti-Semitic. Of course, one can also ask whether criticism of Israel from those who don’t recognize its legitimacy and seek to destroy it can be considered “legitimate”. (We ask that one all the time, since too many people have never even thought about it!). One can also ask why someone who is so “silenced” can be given at platform at an elite university like Stanford.

My comments are underlined. Please feel free to use this information if you get the opportunity to challenge Finkelstein.

(Finkelstein) …How do you account for the fact that so much controversy swirls around this conflict when if you look at the documentary record, the factual record, it really isn’t very controversial or complicated…. And the thesis I’m going to argue this evening is that most of the controversy, the preponderance of the controversy that swirls around the Palestine Israel conflict is contrived. It’s fabricated. It’s concocted. And the purpose of this artificial controversy is to divert attention from the documentary record and to sow confusion about what that record actually shows.

…It’s (the ICJ) findings were as follows…It’s clear under international law that it’s inadmissible to acquire territory by war. That principal is anchored in Article 2 of the United Nations charter. And therefore, Israel has no title to any of the territory it conquered in the West Bank or Gaza during the June 1967 war. That is to say, to use the language of the World Court, those are occupied Palestinian territories… For our purposes that means, contrary to what you routinely read or hear in the United States – those are NOT disputed territories. Those are occupied Palestinian territories, full stop.

For your reference, here is Article 2 of the UN Charter:

Article 2
The Organization and its Members, in pursuit of the Purposes stated in Article 1, shall act in accordance with the following Principles.
The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.
All Members, in order to ensure to all of them the rights and benefits resulting from membership, shall fulfill in good faith the obligations assumed by them in accordance with the present Charter.
All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

All Members shall give the United Nations every assistance in any action it takes in accordance with the present Charter, and shall refrain from giving assistance to any state against which the United Nations is taking preventive or enforcement action.

The Organization shall ensure that states which are not Members of the United Nations act in accordance with these Principles so far as may be necessary for the maintenance of international peace and security.

Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter Vll.

Nothing in there about the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by force. Interesting that there IS a requirement to refrain “from the threat or use of force” against other countries. Not that Arab-launched wars in 1948, 1956 or 1973 have any relevance to Finkelstein.

In fact it illustrates, this is from another direction, how uncontroversial the supposedly controversial conclusions of Jimmy Carter’s recent book, “Palestine, Peace not Apartheid” how uncontroversial his conclusions are. His main conclusions are 1) Israel must withdraw to the June 1967 borders and 2) that the main obstacle to peace in the Middle East is Israel’s unwillingness to comply with international law. As you’ll see in a moment, that’s absolutely uncontroversial, even though his book is called very controversial.

….the factual controversy has always been the one of how did the Palestinians become refugees in 1948… The standard response… was that in 1948 the Arab armies poised to attack the newly born state of Israel, transmitted orders to the Arabs of Palestine to flee from their homes and after the victories of the armies they would win. It would clear the fields for the Arab armies. And most mainstream scholarship of that interpretation, it was the standard one. There was a group on the periphery who said it wasn’t true but they had relatively little influence in academic, let alone, media life. Come the late 1980’s, Israeli scholars pre-eminently, but others as well, go through the Israeli archives and they reached the conclusion to quote the most pre-eminent of those scholars, a fellow named Benny Morris, he says that all the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948… There is debate. But the debate is very narrow.

“All the Palestinians”, that is, except for the 160,000 that remained and became citizens of the state of Israel.

Was this ethnic cleansing pre-meditated or was it born of the war?
In Benny Morris’s famous phrase, the Palestinians became refugees ‘it was born of war, not of desire.’ Others say ‘not true’. It was pre-meditated.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, the former Prime Minister, he says it’s true. For sure, Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948. But he says, “I disagree with Benny Morris. I think it was pre-meditated. I think it was anchored in Zionist ideology… ”

Now of course any student of the history of the area knows that Shlomo Ben-Ami was never Prime Minister of Israel. He is, however, an Israeli diplomat who was involved at the Camp David and Taba talks in 2000 and 2001 (the latter while serving as Foreign Minister in the waning days of the Barak government). Here’s a very revealing quote from Mr. Ben-Ami who appeared on a radio show with Finkelstein (italics mine):

“My view is that, but for Jesus Christ, everybody was born in sin, including nations. And the moral perspective of it is there, but at the same time it does not undermine, in my view, in my very modest view, the justification for the creation of a Jewish state, however tough the conditions and however immoral the consequences were for the Palestinians. You see, it is there that I tend to differ from the interpretation of the new historians. They have made an incredible contribution, a very, very important contribution to our understanding of the origins of the state of Israel, but at the same time, my view is that this is how — unfortunately, tragically, sadly — nations were born throughout history.

And our role, the role of this generation — this is why I came into politics and why I try to make my very modest contribution to the peace process — is that we need to bring an end to this injustice that has been done to the Palestinians. We need to draw a line between an Israeli state, a sovereign Palestinian state, and solve the best way we can the problem, by giving the necessary compensation to the refugees, by bringing back the refugees to the Palestinian state, no way to the state of Israel, not because it is immoral, but because it is not feasible, it is not possible. We need to act in a realistic way and see what are the conditions for a final peace deal. I believe that we came very, very close to that final peace deal. Unfortunately, we didn't make it. But we came very close in the year 2001.”

Of course, to make it clear that the “blame Israel” crowd is completely wrong as to why Israel couldn’t make peace with Arafat, Ben Ami also adds: “international law was the last — or the least of Arafat's concern. He didn't give a damn about international law. It was not whether or not the agreement was based on international law or not that concerned Arafat. In my view, this is my interpretation of a man I met many, many times. I might be wrong, obviously, but this is my firsthand interpretation of this man. He was morally, psychologically, physically incapable of accepting the moral legitimacy of a Jewish state, regardless of its borders or whatever. Arafat was incapable of closing or locking the door of his endless conflict between us and the Palestinians. And this is the bottom line.”

So, let’s see what those human rights organizations have to say on this question. If you look at the statistics of the numbers killed during the second intifada. I checked last night and the latest figures are 4,446 Palestinians killed, 1,017 Israelis killed. A ratio of almost exactly 4-1. In fact, more Palestinian children have been killed – then the total number of Israeli civilians killed – …Now most people won’t dispute these numbers – not very controversial – there’s a range for sure. I’m using the B’tselem figures. But the argument is usually made that there is a difference between Palestinian killings which target Israeli civilians and Israeli killings, although 4 times as many but which don’t target Palestinians. They are as it were collateral damage. What do the human rights organizations say? They all agree Israel’s use of live ammunition is excessive, indiscriminate and on many occasions deliberately targeting civilians…. According to human rights law – there is a basic legal principal that the doer of any act must be taken to have intended its natural and foreseeable consequence. So, if you indiscriminately fire into a crowd then it’s taken that you intentionally killed those who died in the course of the indiscriminate firing…

This argument resorts to the “body count” method of determining who is right and who is wrong. If you have fewer casualties, then you are (by this equation) obviously in the wrong. Of course, this ignores the fact that most of the Arab “children” are teenage boys—sometimes armed, sometimes sent to try to infiltrate across the border with Gaza, sometimes in the front lines of a crowd while gunmen shoot from the back. There’s also the issue that Israel tries to shield its civilian population from terrorism, while the Palestinians use their children as human shields.

Let’s turn to the 3rd aspect. …As Mr. Barhoum mentioned in the introductory remarks, for the past 30 years, there has been international consensus for resolving the conflict…. It’s called the 2 state settlement. A full Israeli withdrawal from the territories it occupied in June 1967… a full Israeli withdrawal on the one side and recognition of Israel’s right to live in peace with its neighbors on the other side. Again, it’s remarkable how uncontroversial it is…. 1989, when the General Assembly voted on a 2 state settlement, the vote was 151 to 3 with 1 abstention. The negative votes – United States, Israel and the island state of Dominica.

What Finkelstein conveniently leaves out is that this resolution (General Assembly resolution 44/42) also included a call for an international conference including the PLO, which at that time had continued to publicly call for the eradication of the state of Israel. Therefore it was not acceptable to either the US or Israel.

The first condition put on Hamas that was the elected Palestinian government in January 2006…. They had to renounce terrorism. And the second condition was - they must recognize the state of Israel. To my thinking - perfectly legitimate and not very controversial. Israel is a member state of the United Nations and like every other member state would like to live in peace with its neighbors. The problem is… if you make the demand on every party in the conflict, it’s a moral, ethical principal. If you make it on one side its hypocrisy. No Israeli government, no Israeli political party, no Israeli public official has every recognized the Palestinian state within the borders affirmed by countless UN resolutions and the World Court decisions….

This is a deliberate attempt at avoiding the issue. Israel has endorsed the idea that a Palestinian state should exist. Hamas rejects the idea that a Jewish state should exist anywhere within the Middle East.

As the world demands that Hamas recognize Israel, the current Israeli government is building a wall that annexes about 10% of the West Bank, illegally and East Jerusalem, illegally; effectively tri-sects the West Bank into 3 parts. In addition, Israel is separating the West Bank from Gaza, ethnically cleansing the Jordan Valley, and has defacto annexed the Jordan Valley.

Of course, the fence can be moved once the Palestinians dismantle the terror infrastructure. Israel has not annexed any additional land to build the fence. The West Bank has always been separate from Gaza. Jericho seems to be doing just fine—no mass exodus of citizens from the heart of the Jordan Valley.

What are the Palestinians being offered? Palestinians are being asked to choose between a Swiss cheese state comprised of most of the West Bank but riddled with settlements and Israel pulling out from about 40-50% of the West Bank unilaterally while keeping most of its settlements. But no demand is put on Israel – only on Hamas.

The differences between Israel and Hamas are first although Hamas has been ambiguous on its willingness to recognize Israel on the pre-June 1967 borders, it goes hot and cold…Hamas’s stance has been ambiguous. But Israel’s stance hasn’t been ambiguous at all. It has always opposed a Palestinian state on the June 1967 borders. And secondly, the only other difference as far as I can tell, is that while Hamas sometimes speaks, about destroying the Jewish state, Israel is in practice dismembering the Palestinian state. (Audience applause).

It’s interesting how Finkelstein apparently believes that peace doesn’t require two sides who agree to live together in peace. As the Hamas charter says (unambiguously): "The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. "

"There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."

That is as far as I can tell, I’m always happy to be corrected, the documentary record. Pretty straight forward, uncomplicated and doesn’t cast Israel in the best of lights. And it’s because it doesn’t cast Israel in the best of lights, that so much controversy is fabricated in order to distract attention from and sow confusion about that uncomplicated documentary record.

He keeps repeating his mantra about how straightforward it is, hoping that will make it so.

Take the case of that historian I mentioned earlier, Benny Morris. He acknowledges that Israel made an ethnic cleansing in 1948. But he said, I think that ethnic cleansings can be good things. I don’t think they’re always bad things. He said take North America, now I’m using his words, had it not been for the annihilation of the native population, you couldn’t have had that great American republic. So, the annihilation was a good thing. In the case of the Israel Palestine conflict, he says that Ben Gurion’s main error in 1948, the Israeli Prime Minister… was that he didn’t cleanse Palestine of every last Arab….

Let’s look at what Benny Morris actually says; decontextualizing his statements can be very misleading, which of course is Finkelstein’s modus operandi. Morris takes a forthright and brave position: “yes, bad things happened to the Palestinians in 1948, but this was because the alternative was another genocide against the Jews, deal with it.”

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Morris:

Morris takes Ben-Gurion to task for not doing the job more thoroughly:
I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948. Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered. If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job. [...] my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all. If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country -- the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. If he had carried out a full expulsion -- rather than a partial one -- he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations."

There is no question in his mind of the legitimacy of the Zionist project:
The desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. [...] Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

You have to put things in proportion. These are small war crimes. All told, if we take all the massacres and all the executions of 1948, we come to about 800 who were killed. In comparison to the massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia, that’s peanuts. In comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against the Germans at Stalingrad, that’s chicken feed. When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost an entire 1 percent of the population, you find that we behaved very well.

Regarding the suffering and condition of the Palestinians, he writes:
I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. From the moment the Yishuv [pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine] was attacked by the Palestinians and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war.

Remember another thing: the Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them.

Let’s see those refugees again. You can agree that factually they were ethnically cleansed in 1948. You can agree that morally it’s an abomination. You can agree that legally they have the right of return. But, you can say politically as Professor Chomsky does, I don’t think its going to happen. And he says, it’s not a realistic possibility then to give people hope when there’s no ground for hope is itself immoral…And I think honest people can agree to disagree on that question… If on the other hand you think it is feasible then of course you should fight for it…There is no disagreement on the legal question, that is to say, there is simply no dispute that under international law, Palestinians have the right of return. The vote in the General Assembly in 2002 on the right of return 158-1. The vote in 2003 on the right of return 167-1. Human rights organizations, let’s take mainstream ones – not controversial ones. Human Rights Watch – 2000 it urges Israel to recognize the right of return. I’m quoting them. Amnesty International – 2001 it calls the Palestinians to be able, I’m quoting them, to exercise the right of return. It’s not controversial at all. Nonetheless, I do think, as I said, there are areas on the question of its practical implementation where honest people can disagree.

Once again, he resorts to “it’s not controversial at all”… of course it’s also not controversial that the only Palestinian refugees to which a right of return could conceivably apply are the individuals displaced in 1948, NOT their 4th and 5th generation descendants. Also the original UN resolution (GA 194) referring to return of refugees specifies a right for those refugees “wishing to live in peace with their neighbors”; was there any willingness ever expressed in the 1940’s, 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s or 1980’s for Palestinian Arabs to “live in peace” within a Jewish state? Is there now? Finkelstein’s reliance on the UN General Assembly as the arbiter of international law is laughable; this was, of course, the same body that declared in 1975 that Zionism was a form of racism.
Could there be some mechanism to compensate families who were displaced in 1948? Sure, why not—as long as we include the 950,000 Jews who were forcibly expelled and/or fled from Arab countries in the wake of the 1948 war.

What I want to turn to now is that much larger area on the Israel Palestine conflict where I don’t think the differences of the controversies are legitimate at all. They’re simply fabricated and concocted. They have no bearing on the real world. They’re fabricated and concocted in order to divert attention and sow confusion.

First, is this attempt to mystify the conflict. To claim that it is so complicated, so intricate, that it requires the equivalent of science to penetrate its mysteries. Its about primordial irreconcilable wars, its about the cosmic clash of religions and civilizations…The first purpose of it is to convince the observer that he or she should suspend his or her ordinary ethical, legal judgments. Because the conflict is too complicated. A typical example. There’s a fellow, Robert Malley – a very decent guy who was one of the American negotiators at Camp David, no it wasn’t at Taba, it was Camp David, in 2000, and in a public forum about a year ago he was asked, ‘Why is it that U.S. aid into Israel continues to flow despite Israel’s egregious human rights record.” And he said, ‘Well, this is a really and truly unique conflict. And the fact that it’s really and truly unique somehow means we apply a different moral standard to it.”…We’re always told, don’t compare because this conflict is so different, so much more complicated…The reason is obvious because whenever you compare the Israel Palestine conflict with other obvious cases, Israel always comes out on the wrong side. So don’t compare.

Historically, you can make a reasonable analogy between the fate of native Americans in North America and the fate of Palestinians in the course of the Zionist conquest of Palestine. In fact as I mentioned ago it wasn’t a coincidence that was the exact group that Benny Morris immediately led up to. There’s an obvious analogy there. Not perfect but still obvious. The problem is Israel comes out on the wrong side of the analogy. So don’t compare. The Israel Palestine conflict is unique.

Of course, Finkelstein acts as if there was no historical presence of Jews in Palestine and Arabs had been there from time immemorial; of course, Arabs came from the Arabian peninsula in the 8th century while Jews had already been there for 1800 years and continued to be there since. And the Native Americans would have probably been delighted (compared to what they ended up with!) to get an independent state on half the American West.

Or take, not historically, but currently the obvious analogy is this one. The one with Apartheid in South Africa. Now no aspect of Carter’s book… has invoked more outrage then its identification of Israeli policy in the occupied territories with Apartheid. The Washington Post called it, the Apartheid analogy ‘foolish and unfair’. The Boston Globe called it ‘irresponsibly provocative’. The New York Times said it was ‘dangerous and ant-Semitic’. (audience laughter) But in the real world it’s not even controversial. B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization – in 2002 it produces a major study on Israeli settlement practices in the occupied territories. This is how it was ? – quote “Israel has created in the occupied territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applies two different systems of law in the same area, and bases the rights of individuals on their nationality. This regime is the only one of its kind in the world and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past such as the Apartheid regime in South Africa.”

(Audience applause) 2005- B’Tselem produces another hefty report called ‘Forbidden Roads’. In Israel they call it Israel’s road regime in the occupied territories… what does it conclude? It bares striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime and even entails a greater degree of arbitrariness then was the case with the regime that existed in South Africa. It’s worse. Ok. B’Tselem – those are lefties also. So, let’s take Ha’aretz. They had an editorial in September of 2006 and it says just in a passing comment, “the Apartheid regime in the territories remains intact. Millions of Palestinians are living without rights, freedom of movement or a livelihood under the yoke of ongoing Israeli oppression”…They didn’t have to defend the claim. It’s perfectly obvious.

Apparently, Finkelstein’s “real world” ignores the fact that the Palestinians are not citizens of Israel, nor do they want to be. They are indeed a population under occupation. Even the road system is not based, as apartheid was, on ethnicity, but on citizenship. For safety, certain roads in the West Bank are for Israeli citizens—including Israeli Arabs. Have you noticed thus far that there’s virtually no mention of Arab terrorism that made these roads necessary? Or of the genocidal Jew-hatred taught in Palestinian schools? Finkelstein’s worldview can be so simple when he simply ignores inconvenient facts.

Shulamit Aloni – she wrote a couple of weeks ago “The U.S. Jewish establishment’s onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth which everyone knows. Through its army the government of Israel practices a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Everyone knows it. But in the United States, it’s very controversial. It’s even dangerous and anti-Semitic, irresponsibly provocative, foolish and unfair. In the real world, it’s a cliché. In fact the list of those who hold to the Apartheid analogy apparently includes former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who reportedly said that the Bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict. So, it seems that he is also dangerously anti-Semitic. (laughter and applause)

Again, not apartheid based on ethnicity (or, as in every Arab country, religious affiliation) but Israel’s attempt to deal with a hostile population that is unwilling to accept living in peace alongside it.

When you look at the actual documentary record on the history of the Israel Palestine conflict is how uncontroversial it was seen to be at the time….

…during the British Mandate period…roughly between 1920-1948, there were many clashes, many conflicts, between the indigenous population and the Zionist settlers. And every time there was a major clash the British would send a parliamentary team…to figure out why are the natives so restless. And, they put together beautiful reports written in the most eloquent English, replete with solid factual information… They keep saying in the reports, obviously, obviously, obviously, obviously… all the other states in the region either have or are on their way to independence. The only ones that are being denied that are the Palestinians since they called them the Arabs of Palestine. And two, it said, the Arabs of Palestine are worried because they’re afraid that when the Jews become the majority and declare a state, they’re worried about what they’re fate is going to be in that state. So, the British conclude, it’s obvious… the solution is complicated…

Which is why the British proposed partition as early as the Peel Commission in the 1930’s, which would have given the Jews of Palestine about 15% of the land and created an Arab state in most of the rest of the Mandate. The Arabs rejected the plan.

Take the case of North America. Now, the Native American resistance to Euro-American encroachment was very bloody. It was not for no reason at all that the Native Americans were called savages. It was a brutal resistance. They killed men, they killed women, they killed children. Not to say the settlers didn’t do the same. They did….They were yesterday’s terrorists and suicide bombers. What would any rational person say if looking at that resistance and asked to explain it, were told, you see, the Native Americans they were resisting because of Anti-Europeanism, (Hearty audience laughter) or Anti-Christianism, or Anti-Whiteism. (laughter) Just like you’re laughing. But the same exotic explanation about the Muslim incapacity to tolerate a successful minority amidst them….It happens to be the simple explanation, is also quite a sufficient one. You don’t need to conjure up a complicated explanation.

Finkelstein ignores the long history of minorities within Muslim countries and their status as “dhimmis”: tolerated at best, but the victims of periodic pogroms at worst. If you want to use the analogy of the Native Americans, ask what happened to the native cultures and indigenous peoples of the areas that were the subject of the great Arab conquests of the Middle East.

A second kind of illegitimate controversy is the plague of the Holocaust card – the dragging in of the Nazi Holocaust in order to justify Israel’s violations of international law in the occupied territories…. The Holocaust industry emerges after the June 1967 war. Its main purpose was to immunize Israel from criticism. Its main contribution, familiar to everyone in this room, is the claim of the Holocausts’ uniqueness. No people in the history of humanity, has ever suffered like the Jews suffered. In fact, the doctrine of uniqueness is vacuous and morally, this ranking of human suffering is an abomination. But, its purpose is pretty straight forward, namely, that if you can claim that Jews uniquely suffered during the Nazi Holocaust, then you can claim that they shouldn’t be held to ordinary notions of right and justice. You shouldn’t apply to Israel the status you’d apply to any one else because the suffering of the Jews was unique.

The way this played out historically is… that Palestinians and Arabs generally have been held directly culpable, responsible for the Nazi Holocaust or seen as lineal descendants of its perpetrators. So, at the time of the 1948 war, David Ben-Gurion called the Palestinian Arabs disciples and even teachers of Hitler. During the Eichmann trial, in 1961, the Arabs were labeled… as among the biggest Nazi war criminals and it was said the Mufti even masterminded the final solution. Ben-Gurion said the Mufti was “one of Hitler’s closest associates in this genocide.” Without going into it, this was sheer fantasy.

Of course Finkelstein doesn’t want to go into it! The Mufti, al-Hajj Amin Husseini, the uncle of Yasser Arafat, organized the “Nazi Scouts” among Arab youth, was visited in Palestine by Eichmann before the outbreak of the war, received funding from Himmler (and later toured Auschwitz with him), and spent the war years in Berlin. He wrote in his memoirs “I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews.”

In 1967 during Israel’s attack on Egypt, Israel said that Abdul Nasser represented the new Hitler. And more recently, as most of you know, Israel’s apologists equated Saddam Hussein with Hitler, equating all opposition with Israel’s illegal war against Iraq with appeasement of Hitler and now it’s the turn, if you look at the current journals and magazines, now it’s the turn of Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran, all of them being called newer reincarnations of Hitler and the Nazis…. It’s hard to know what’s more laughable – the extraordinary coincidence that each new Arab leader allegedly threatened Israel is Hitler incarnate or that the threat posed to Israel is routinely compared to the Holocaust. While we are told simultaneously that the Holocaust was unique and any comparison between it and other crimes is a form of Holocaust denial. (Audience applause)

Yet Nasser himself said in 1967, “The objective will be Israel’s destruction.” Hafez al-Assad of Syria said it would be “a battle of annihilation”. Unfortunately, the Jewish people have learned to take threats of annihilation seriously.

The most recent form of this playing the Holocaust card is what’s called the new Anti-Semitism. And there are two things to be said about the new Anti-Semitism – number 1 it’s not new (laughter) and number two it has nothing to do with Anti-Semitism. Every time Israel faces a public relations debacle or international pressure is put on Israel to resolve the conflict diplomatically, in accordance with international law, Israel’s apologists orchestrate this new Anti-Semitism extravaganza. This is a good school with an excellent library… go look for your self.

Let’s take the case of Europe. We’re told that Europe is rife with Anti-Semitism. Not on the fringes – but we’re told in the heart of Europe. BBC, The Independent, The Guardian, somewhere down the line – they’re all Anti-Semitic…. How true is that? I recently picked up a decent book called “Great Shakes” by Walter L’Coure (?)… who can hardly be described as Anti-Israel, he’s one of its chief apologists. Walter L’Coure puts out a book entitled “The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism”. What does he say? “The Anti-Semitism in Europe is predominantly Muslim character”. The popular attitudes towards Jews, he says, were better in 2002 than they were in 1991….there is less Anti-Semitism than ever before…. If you listen to Abraham Foxman, he says “The condition of Jews now, is worse than at any time since the late 30’s in Nazi Germany.”

What does Walter L’Coure say?..... “It goes without saying that Anti-Semitism today is in no way comparable to the persecution of Jews of the 1930’s and 1940’s.”…. It goes without saying among the rational people, but not among those who orchestrate hysterias about the new Anti-Semitism, to shield Israel from criticism…. A few years ago, if you said that the main animus towards Jews and hostility to Jews was due to Israel’s ruthless policies in the occupied territories and the best remedy was for Israel to end the occupation, it was said that you were an Anti-Semite. You were blaming the Jews for Anti-Semitism…. You are claiming it’s the policies of the Jewish State which are creating Anti-Semitism. Now if you open up Ha’aretz, they’re marking the 58th anniversary of Israel’s founding, they invite Tony Judt, the American professor at NYU, to write about Israel’s founding on its 58th anniversary. And what does Tony Judt write?

He says, “Israel’s reckless behavior and insistent identification of all criticism with Anti-Semitism is now the leading source of Anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia. One way to take the sting out of rising Anti-Semitism would be for Israel to give the Palestinians back their land.” (applause and whistles) A perfectly sensible, rational statement, in the pages of Israel’s most influential newspaper, published on Israel’s most important day, its 58th anniversary. But in the United States, that’s called Anti-Semitism. Blaming the Jews, blaming the victims for the hostility directed against them. The purpose of this capricious, promiscuous use of the label Anti-Semitism, it’s pretty straight forward to turn the perpetrator, Israel’s apologists, into the victim – focusing on the immense suffering of Jews rather than the very real suffering of Palestinians. And secondly, to discredit all criticism of Israel as being motivated by Anti-Semitism.

One might add, it’s an important point and an important topic …that, that era of hurling these filthy epithets at anybody who dares to criticize Israel. I think that that era is coming to an end (applause). In the last couple of years, Israel has now suffered from the disaffection, of no longer just marginal Jews, but Jews at the center of intellectual and political (?) life in the United States. And when that label was used against them, they have power, and it didn’t work. They used it against Tony Judt, then non-Jews – they tried to use it against Steve Walt and John Meirsheimer and then they tried to use it against Jimmy Carter. And I think it’s fair to say it fell flat….

Here’s the core mantra of Finkelstein and the other apologists for hatred such as “Jewish Voice for Peace”: anytime they are challenged on all the lies and distortions they purvey, they resort to the charge that they’re just being called “anti-Semitic” to distract from the substance of the challenge. Get it straight, Norman: not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. But criticism that is one-sided, full of lies, and has at its core the goal of the destruction of the state of Israel IS anti-Semitic.

…the last topic – namely, the last kind of contrived controversy which has sowed confusion about the Israel Palestine conflict and in many ways, the most dispiriting. When I listened to Professor Barhoum’s introduction and he quoted me as saying, I loathe lies, and it’s true that lies do energize me. I feel sometimes like I am academia’s garbage man…First I have to identify the garbage and then I have to pick it up and throw it away. And in the case of the Israel Palestine conflict it has to be said that there are large amounts of garbage, littering not the periphery and the crackpot ends of the spectrum but regrettably at the heart of academic life in the United States…. But it’s very different on the Israel Palestine conflict because the lunacy is right at the heart of our academic life and it’s validated by our mainstream media and our public?... As everyone here knows, academia has methods of quality control….

Is that why Finkelstein has been denied tenure at 4 different universities so far?

(Some Q&A did follow the speech)

How do both Fatah and Hamas carry out terrorist acts? Why favor Fatah to divide the Palestinian people at this point?

…I don’t favor any side in this particular conflict. I devoted the evening to try to convey what the documentary record says on these questions. And I said that the documentary record show that there is a broad consensus including virtually every country in the world apart from Palou, and Tuvalu…supporting the two state settlement. So, I don’t think it’s a question of favoring one of the factions of Palestine over another…It’s none of my business. They vote for who they vote for. That’s their right not mine. I’m not choosing. All I’m saying is two things. Every side to the conflict should be held to the same principals of international law. And you can’t demand of Hamas to renounce what’s properly called terrorism but not make the same demand of Israel. And you certainly can’t demand of Hamas, that it recognize Israel unless you also demand of Israel they recognize a Palestinian state within the June 1967 borders. (Applause). …. Hamas is the legally elected government of the Palestinians and that’s their right.

Finkelstein obviously thinks of himself as an expert in international law. He should know, therefore, that the June 4 1967 lines were never internationally recognized “borders”; they were armistice lines from 1949. Certainly those countries bordering Israel (Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria) never recognized their legitimacy at the time. Again he dodges the core issue—that Hamas refuses to accept the existence of Israel within ANY borders whatsoever.

What “crime” is there that protects Israel’s existence as a “Jewish State”?

I don’t think there is any right that protects any state’s existence and any particular form. Those are separate issue. I think before 1965, the United States, had, to use the current language, the right to live in peace with its neighbors. That does not mean I support the right of the United States to be a slave state. I think those are separate issues. Israel, as a member state of the United Nations, has a right to live in peace with its neighbors… but I don’t think the right exceeds that. Nobody has an obligation to recognize Israel’s right to be a Jewish state anymore than anyone has the obligation to recognize South Africa’s right to be a white state and I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to claim United States has a right to be a Christian state. But that’s separate from the question about whether it has the right to exist in peace with its neighbors. Incidentally, this whole phrase ‘right to exist’ is a bastardization of what it originally meant. If you go back and look at the record, and I’ve examined it, it was a short form for ‘right to exist in peace with its neighbors. There’s no right to exist. And nobody’s obliged to acknowledge a right to exist, let alone a right to exist as a Jewish state. I think those are separate issues.

Yet of course 57 or so countries insist on THEIR right to exist as Islamic states.

Given that Arab terrorism, against the state of Israel began as soon as the 1948 war ended, what evidence do you have that Palestinian Arab terrorism will stop if Israel ends their “occupation” and withdraws back to the pre-1967 war (border)? (slight applause from the good guys)

…. That argument can be used with equally compelling force against first, the Zionists and then against the state of Israel. Let me explain. We’re often told… that the PLO had a stages strategy for conquering Palestine. That is to say, in 1974, they were beginning to talk about a state in the occupied territories and that was going to be a stage towards the eventual conquest of all of Palestine and the elimination of Israel. And the argument was that we can’t recognize the right of the Palestinians to a state in the West Bank and Gaza because they harbor a secret aim or desire, aspiration to the whole of Palestine. Ok, for argument’s sake, let’s say that’s true. That the secret ambition delegitimizes the Palestinian right to the West Bank and Gaza. But where did this strategy of stages come from?....

You go back to 1937 -1938 at the time that was called the Peel Commission offered the Zionist movement a tiny state in about 10% of Palestine. And David Ben-Gurion and others including Chaim Weitzmann said, ‘Let’s take it. It’ll be a stage towards the conquest of all of Palestine. In 1946-47, when the partition idea was being brooded about, Mr. Ben-Gurion and others said the same thing, ‘We’ll take what they give us and it will be a stage towards the conquest of all of Palestine.’ They said it over and over again. In fact, they harbored those same desires…. through the 1956 invasion of Sinai.

In 1967, that stages approach was realized. So if we used the argument that was just told that would mean that the UN in 1947 should not have proposed the partition resolution, because the Jews were going to use it towards a staged conquest of all of Palestine. Well, that then deligitimizes Israel’s right to be a state. If that’s the argument you want to use then that deligitimizes Israel’s right because it not only too had a stages program, it acted on it. That’s why it controls all of the West Bank and Gaza - all of Palestine. So, if that’s the argument that you’re going to use, I think you’ve undermine your own case. (Applause from the idiots who failed to notice he didn’t answer the question)

(from the questioner) Well, that wasn’t my question.

No surprise here. Finkelstein ignores the fact that Israel did not attack the West Bank in 1956, despite Jordan’s illegal acts in preventing Jewish access to the Western Wall and in demolishing centuries-old synagogues. Nor was the PLO “stages” plan a secret—it was openly trumpeted by Arafat in speeches to Arab audiences.

As a non-Mexican American or Native American am I morally obliged to leave Californian? After all, wasn’t this land acquired by force of arms?

That’s a fair question and I can only tell you what I said earlier – namely, international law has evolved. That’s why slavery is now illegal; that’s why women have equal rights, legally to men. Law changes. By that kind of argument you want to say it was admissible back then to conquer territory by war. Why isn’t it admissible now?

By that kind of logic, you should also be able to say it was admissible to enslave black people in 1865, why can’t I enslave my maid now? That’s the same kind of logic. The law changed. What was legally permissible no longer is….. And I put this in the same category. The Palestinian people live in Palestine. They have the same right to self determination and sovereignty as any other people born on their land. I just don’t think it’s complicated. (Applause and whistles) When my late mother was still alive, we used to occasionally lecture together.

She spoke on her experiences under the Nazi regime and I spoke on the Israel Palestine conflict. And we spoke before mostly Jewish audiences, in Brooklyn area, in New York City area – and as you can imagine, people were enraptured by my late mother and absolutely appalled by me. It was good cop, bad cop, with a vengeance. Once, a member of the audience summoned up the courage… to challenge the Jewish mother about her son. And he raised his hand and he said, ‘What do you think of what your son is saying?’ And she thought for a few moments and she said, ‘To my mind, the only crime the Palestinian people committed was to be born in Palestine. And I don’t think that’s a crime.”

So to close it out, he ignores all the history of Arab pogroms, Nazi sympathies, terrorism, and refusal to accept living in peace alongside Israel. At least he’s consistent.

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