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DePaul University professor Norman Finkelstein looks over a fence outside his home in Chicago, Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2007. (AP
Photo/M. Spencer Green) | ASSOCIATED PRESS
Object 1
Norman
Finkelstein is an outspoken and controversial scholar
of the Israel/Palestine conflict and one of Israel's
most consistent and trenchant critics. Along with prominent Israeli historian Benny
NM: You say in your article that "Amnesty is reverting to former apologetics" but have
also argued that public opinion in the rest of the world is turning against Israel. How
do you account for this paradox?
NGF: Amazingly, despite media whitewashing and the formidable power of the Israel
lobby, popular opposition to Israeli policy continues to grow. More and more people
have penetrated the cloud of lies and are able to see the truth. Once Israel's supporters
realized they had lost the battle for public opinion in liberal sectors such as college
campuses and human rights organizations, they took off their kid gloves. They started
accusing everyone remotely critical of Israeli policy as being anti-Semitic and exerting
all sorts of pressures behind closed doors. In the case of college campuses, where
articulate opinion overwhelmingly opposes Israeli policy, Jewish alumni have been
mobilized to threaten a withholding of contributions.
Or, consider Amnesty's advisory council in the United Kingdom, which
recentlysupported this new anti-anti-Semitism campaign. They capitulated to an
absurd campaign. Have you looked at the statistics on this? According to all reliable
polls such as Pew, anti-Semitism in the U.K. falls below 10 percent. On the other hand,
60 percent of the U.K. population harbors a negative opinion of Roma/Gypsies and 40
percent of Muslims. There was a big to-do the other day about Nazis demonstrating in
the U.K. Do you know how many Nazis actually showed up? Twenty. But The
Guardian still ran a big headline about a stupid British poll reporting alarming rates of
anti-Semitism in the U.K. There's more prejudice against fat, short, and ugly people. I
can assure you, if you ask any U.K. man whether he'd rather be Jewish or bald, he'll
take Jewish.
NM: Have you ever personally experienced anti-Semitism?
NGF: I grew up in a Jewish environment, from grade school through college. It was
near-homogeneously Jewish. The non-Jews in the school didn't exist because the top
classes were, from first seat to last, filled by Jews. I knew a few non-Jews in passing,
but we didn't mingle. My generation didn't fuss about anti-Semitism, we calculated
how to conquer the world. In fact, many of them did. A large number ended up in the
top tier of their respective fields, departmental chairs at Ivy League universities,
professors at Harvard Medical School, heads of large corporations, top hedge fund
managers, senators. They were very smart, for sure; you can't get that far in the world,
starting from the bottom, unless you've got smarts. But they were also very ambitious,
probably to a fault. They weren't then, and I doubt they are now, very nice people.
They wouldn't allow anything, neither sentimentality nor principles, to stand in their
way as they ascended the ladder of success. Anti-Semitism wasn't even on our radar,
because we believed -- rightly, as it turned out -- that, if we worked hard enough, all
the doors to power and privilege would be open to us.
NM: In the past you have been very critical of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
movement, referring to them as a "cult" and "historically criminal." What are your
major differences with them?
NGF: Ninety-five percent of BDS in action, as opposed to the formal BDS platform, I
agree with. The tactic of using various nonviolent instruments such as boycotts,
divestment and sanctions is, of course, correct. It is pointless trying to convince
Israelis through rational and moral arguments. You can no more convince them of the
justice of the Palestinian struggle than you could have convinced whites in the
American South of the justice of the Civil Rights Movement. Any critical commentary
on BDS must begin by acknowledging the tenacity, ingenuity and intelligence of
grassroots BDS activists, who have scored an impressive number of victories.
My difference with BDS is that you can't win over a broad public without taking a clear
stance on Israel's right as a state to exist within its internationally recognized borders.
BDS formally refuses to take such a position; it claims to be agnostic on Israel's
existence. That's a nonstarter if you want to reach a broad public.
BDS says it's anchored in international law, but under international law Israel is a
state. That's why it is a member state of the United Nations. You can't both claim rights
for Palestinians under international law, yet deny the rights of others. You can't pick
and choose with the law. You have to take as a package what international law
stipulates regarding both parties to the conflict, not just attend to your own side. If you
demand that your rights be respected, then you have a reciprocal obligation to respect
the rights of others. Virtually every BDS victory has been achieved despite the BDS
platform.
You can't pick and choose with the law.
The various resolutions on U.S. college campuses endorsing divestment
target the occupation and explicitly recognize Israel. If BDS signifies its
official platform (as its leaders proclaim), then it's hard to fathom why these
resolutions should be reckoned BDS victories. They effectively ratify the twostate settlement whereas the BDS platform falls silent on it, and many BDS
leaders and activists strongly oppose it.
In addition, BDS is fostering the unrealistic expectation that, acting alone and
notwithstanding the absence of mass popular resistance in the occupied territories, it
can liberate Palestine. A leader of the BDS movement recently proclaimed, "BDS may
well prove to be the most powerful form of popular Palestinian resistance ever."
Really? Have more Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza actively participated in
BDS than actively participated in the 1936-39 Arab Revolt or during the first intifada?
This leader appears to be confusing foreign-funded NGOs dotting Ramallah's plush
landscape with the Palestinian people. Another BDS leader just declared, "For us in
Gaza, the remaining window of hope is through boycotting Israel and isolating it
completely, until the residents of the refugee camps in Gaza, who compose the
majority of the population here, can return to the towns and villages from which they
were ethnically cleansed in 1948."
It's odd to hear these folks, on the one hand, berate imperialist-colonialist-racistZionist-white-liberal westerners for ignoring Palestinian "agency" yet, on the other
hand, they expect Palestine to be liberated, not in the first place by its own people, but
by pressures exerted from without. These pronouncements, and many others like them
emanating from the BDS leadership, amount to delusion piled on illusion interlarded
with megalomania. The African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral once said, "Tell no lies,
claim no easy victories." In my opinion, this sage counsel is worth heeding.
NM: Many on the student left in the U.K. have overwhelmingly supported the BDS
movement. What is your opinion of students' embrace of this movement?
NGF: I can understand the young people who have embraced the BDS platform and
the one-state option. In my youth I would have done exactly the same thing. Part of it
is the wholesome idealism of young people. One secular state in which everyone enjoys
equal rights under the law sounds much more appealing to an enlightened sensibility
than two ethnically based states. But part of it is also radical posturing; wanting to be
more pure and cutting edge than everyone else, while a "two-state solution" sounds
dull as dishwater. I'm not less radical in my older years, but politics has become less
about me, my ego and trying to strike a radical pose, and more about wanting to get
things done.
I've come to agree with Gandhi's approach to politics. His doctrine was that politics is
not about changing public opinion, it is trying to get people to act on what they already
know to be wrong.
People know there are 10,000 things wrong with the system; the problem is, they
rarely do anything about it. One danger of radical politics is you aspire to go beyond
the popular sensibility; you prioritize your own conception of right and wrong and you
try to separate yourself from the "benighted" public. You'll end up casting an
impressive pose but at the expense of your political efficacy.
NM: Can you tell me a little more about your parents' influence on you?
NGF: This year marks the 20th anniversary of their deaths. My father died in January
1995, my mother in October 1995. It would be neat if I could put up a plaque to
memorialize them at a hospital in Gaza (which is my goal at Byline.com). Of course, I
must contemplate the prospect that Israel, in its infinite lunacy, might target the
hospital to blow up the plaque. It's called, "Learning the lessons of the Holocaust."
she was never able to accept it. In fact, even if she could, she didn't want to let go, she
didn't want to put their deaths behind her. Even at an age where her parents would
have already died a natural death -- she died at 74, my father at 75 -- she carried that
memory with her every minute of every day until she died.
NM: Does it put our other problems in perspective?
NGF: I have my ego, I have my pettiness, I suffer from every human frailty and
narcissistic affliction. I'm often not able to see the bigger picture. Nihil humani a me
alienum puto -- nothing human is alien to me -- was Marx's favorite maxim. That's
how we are constructed; you can't annihilate the ego and just see the bigger picture.
Watch the video below to find out more about Norman Finkelstein's Byline campaign
for the Al-Awda hospital in Gaza:
Posted by Thavam