Norman Finkelstein is not one for mincing words. That doesn’t make him a motor-mouthed rabble rouser. Far from it, and it’s a point I’ll return to in a moment, the research on which his conclusions are based is never less than exhaustive. That’s why he comes across, especially in adversarial exchanges, as so controlled; at times almost robotically so. Years ago I heard him make the point that folk on the right side of history frequently get flustered in the presence of Israel’s apologists. They haven’t done their homework.
That’s relevant when here, in dialogue with Robinson Erhardt, Professor Finkelstein – most of whose family on both sides was wiped out in the Shoah – addresses head on some common tropes of Gaza genocide deniers. Early on Mr Erhardt plays devil’s advocate with an argument Benny Morris and other Zionists use: if Israel wanted to eliminate the entire population of Gaza, it could do so in a heartbeat. Since it hasn’t, the argument goes, it’s nonsense to speak of Gaza genocide.
I’ve edited Norman Finkelstein’s reply solely to strip out redundancies inherent in speech:
… with all due regard for Benny Morris – and he has written serious historical scholarship – it’s a really silly argument. It pretends that countries can do as they wish when they can’t. If we go back to the war in Vietnam the records make clear that Nixon wanted to use atomic bombs but there was the question of an international community and whether it would tolerate resort to such weapons. The answer was no … 1 2
Believe it or not I think long and hard before urging those who’ve done me no wrong to spend two hours and eight of their busy lives on a video. If this were just a handy guide to countering Zionist memes, I’d find something less time consuming.
It isn’t though. It’s a spellbinding dialogue which, while it does indeed deliver what it says on the tin – Zionist Arguments Answered – is replete with deeper and wider considerations.
Take the professor’s approach to research. At one point he describes a method I stumbled on as an undergraduate. With dense or difficult material – in my case a book chapter or paper; in his a weighty tome and its every last footnote – I’d read three times. First to see where the argument is going, second to assess its logical coherence and third to examine the evidence it draws on.
It seems I’m in elevated company.
One more example. Asked about antisemitism, Norman is scathing. The problem is a refusal (and here my former spiritual teacher, also Jewish, would agree) to distinguish between what people think and what they do. We can’t control our thoughts. If we pass someone in the street who is ugly or fat or heaven forbid disabled we have an automatic negative mental response. If he as a Jew meets a German then he too he has an automatic negative response. So what? Such prejudices take generations, once the material conditions in which they arose no longer pertain, to disappear. The liberation gospel is that we don’t need to control our thoughts and neither do our thoughts define us.
It’s what we do that matters. 3 So is it a disadvantage, asks the man who wrote The Holocaust Industry, to be Jewish in America or Europe? Are bad things being systemically done to Jews in the West? Are they overrepresented in the criminal justice system, underrepresented in all the really prestigious careers?
Or has an antisemite accusation more appropriately directed at Kiev been hijacked to cover for mass murder?
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- Ten years ago I raised eyebrows at a Peace Conference by rhetorically asking whether there was any serious doubt that, had the USA retained its nuclear monopoly, Hanoi would not have gone the way of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- To Norman Finkelstein’s argument we can add that by their very nature, nukes can only be used “next door” by a state heedless of the radioactive fallout on its own people.
- The distinction between mind and deed has long interested me. For my former teacher a superstitious relationship to thought and feeling prevents enlightened awareness. Now, as one highly critical of idPol obsession with speech and thought crimes, the distinction continues to interest me for reasons a Caitlin Johnstone observation points us toward:
In just 200 years we’ve progressed from expecting our leaders to slaughter brown-skinned people while saying racist things, to expecting our leaders to slaughter brown-skinned people while condemning racism.