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Palestine-Israel                                                                                                                                                                                                                


A call for “black love:” An outsider’s view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a dark, hot room in Buffalo

by Chuck Richardson


 

A review of Norman Finkelstein’s lecture, “Israel and Palestine: Roots of Conflict, Prospects for Peace,” Wednesday, April 29, at Allen Hall, SUNY Buffalo, North Campus; sponsored by the University and Western New York Peace Center.

 

 

"So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice -- or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill, three men were crucified. We must not forget that all three were crucified for the same crime -- the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thusly fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment."

                                       -- Martin Luther King, Jr., >
                                        Letter from a Birmingham Jail (April, 1963)

 


To Norman Finkelstein, the issues involving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are straightforward and their details beyond dispute. And, like most people with zeal for a cause, Finkelstein is controversial, feeling that the screwed up state of affairs he’s obsessed with is simple and would be easily resolved if his enemies would only admit to the facts they know are true and accept the ramifications.
 

Finkelstein acknowledges these differences and categorizes them as legitimate or illegitimate. His view that much of his opposition is illegitimate complicates the already problematic debates over the Israeli-Palestinian dilemmas despite his passionate declarations to the contrary, that the world is “at an unusual juncture” and that “there’s agreement on the facts and issues” regarding settlements and the occupied territories.

 
However, that doesn’t seem true. Yes, we are “at an unusual juncture,” but looking at all the violence it seems hard to believe there’s much prospect for peace. In fact, it seems that we’re increasingly staring into the abyss.

 
Finkelstein seems to be the photographic negative of his adversaries—Israel’s right-wing Likud party and so-called Zionist American Jews—who tout the absolute rightness of their positions, creating profoundly different interpretations of events from their enemies—Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Western liberals and American progressives, including so-called “self-hating Jews” like Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky.

 
Finkesltein, whose parents were Jewish Holocaust survivors, is touring the country hyping his book, The Holocaust Industry, and made a stop at SUNY Buffalo’s Allen Hall last Wednesday evening, delivering a lecture called Israel and Palestine: Roots of Conflict, Prospects for Peace.

 


The Tinder Box
 

Outside, lecture goers were greeted by a pair of protestors—a young man and woman, the man wearing a yarmulke—bearing signs: “Finkelstein appearance for book denying the Holocaust: $25,000; The Jewish Holocaust: Priceless,” and “Support Democracy in Israel.”
 

Campus security also made its presence known with officers wearing bulletproof vests to keep peace among a diverse audience of 200 in the stifling lecture hall.

 
A woman, upon entering the building while clutching flyers protesting the talk, commented that she didn’t know Finkelstein was so “controversial.” A general murmur of affirmation passed around those within earshot. Indeed, an Eyewitness News truck lingered in the distance, its crew on the ready to shoot any mayhem that might erupt.
 

Once the audience had somewhat assembled, Finkelstein made a dramatic entrance, proceeding with an entourage of hosts down the far right aisle, while arguing with an apparently Jewish professor, who was following him. At one point, two members of the human train had to get between them. Finkelstein then turned and went silently to his seat in the front row, the eyes of more than 100 people bearing down on him while the man yelled, “How dare you call my students imbeciles? You’re a guest of this university!”

 
Possibly, Finkelstein hadn’t liked the protestors’ signs and/or literature, made a derisive comment about it, and their mentor had taken exception to it. Campus security was alerted, and more showed up (wearing bulletproof vests), ready to escort the professor—presumably the pro-Israeli one—from the premises if he created another ruckus.

 
The audience then roasted for several minutes, waiting in cramped seats for the unventilated room to reach capacity and tempers, somehow, to calm, making some wonder why the visit wasn’t taking place in one of the fine venues at the North Campus’s Center for the Arts.

 
Finally, UB English professor James Holstun, who chairs the Western New York Peace Center’s Taskforce for a Peaceful Resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, took to the podium and commended the university for allowing the lecture to go on despite concerns from some quarters that Finkelstein’s visit would “incite violence against Jewish students.”

 
The First Amendment, apparently, is alive at UB even if it is stuffed in a shoebox off Main Street.
 

Holstun then introduced the evening’s guest, and Finkelstein took the stage greeted warmly by a somewhat willfully segregated audience, as Jewish persons apparently opposed to Finkelstein’s views sat in a small group in the auditorium’s right hand side behind an apparent clutch of university professors and their students. The left side of the auditorium seemed dominated by Finkelstein supporters, many of who appeared to, perhaps, be students from the Middle East.

 
Wearing blue jeans, an open-collared shirt and sport jacket, Finkelstein cut the image of a dashing intellectual under the stage’s bright lights. He began by offhandedly deriding the New York Times review of his book, reminding his audience that venerable institution had brought us “the likes of Jayson Blair,” a plagiarist, and how plagiarism is one of his pet peeves (1).

 
According to Omer Bartov, in his Times review, “A Tale of Two Holocausts,” Finkelstein claims that if the Jews and Zionists “’not had the Holocaust already, they would have had to invent it.’ Since the real Holocaust already existed, however, an ideological version of `the Holocaust’ was created to legitimize 'one of the world's most formidable military powers,' Israel, allowing it to 'cast itself as a 'victim' state,' and because it provides 'the most successful ethnic group in the United States,' the Jews, with 'immunity to criticism,' leading to 'the moral corruptions that typically attend' such `immunity.”’

 
Finkelstein, in a nutshell, said the same thing Wednesday night, suggesting that Bartov’s criticism was based on some consensus of detail with the author regarding his text.

 
A longwinded speaker [sic], Finkelstein went to some lengths to explain that both sides—Zionists and Palestinian freedom fighters—now agree on the facts of the situation thanks to his debunking of Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial.

 

Zionist Fraud
 

Calling Peters’ book a “hoax,” Finkelstein told the story of how he “monomaniacally” vetted all of her footnotes and sources, until he had that eventual “eureka” moment that all gotcha journalists “dream of having,” that the numbers Peters used to support her argument that there were no Palestinians in Palestine prior to the twentieth century—that it was a desert the Jews made bloom—were “fabricated.” The debunking takes form in his first book, Image and Reality in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Peters’ book, a once highly regarded best seller, is now mostly ignored by experts in the field with a few notable exceptions, like Alan Dershowitz, who Finkelstein is accusing of plagiarizing Peters’ work in his latest book, The Case for Israel.

 
Finkelstein, who cited some of the alleged plagiarisms and actual fabrications in these pro-Israeli books, told his audience that the Israeli-Palestinian issue isn’t that complicated, but controversy arises thanks to legitimate political arguments over the interpretations of facts, and illegitimate viewpoints based on deception and falsehood.

 
He listed three techniques pro-Israeli fabricators like Peters and Dershowitz use to complicate matters that would otherwise be simple:
 

§         Mystify the conflict. This occurs when pro-Israelis speak of the conflict as unique, an ancient clash of civilizations for control of the Holy Land. In truth, according to Finkelstein, it’s a situation that’s been around a short while, having started long after the Irish struggle for independence from the United Kingdom, for example (see Uris’ Trinity). However, Finkelstein’s thesis seems to misunderestimate [sic] the religious “realities” at play in the conflict in the secular humanistic belief that reason will eventually rule the day, even though he himself is prone to emotional bloodletting and there’s little evidence to suggest that any such optimism regarding enlightenment is rational.


§         Playing the “holocaust card” to justify atrocities. According to Finkelstein, there was little concern about the Nazi Holocaust in America prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict—known as the Six Day War—in which Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia attacked Israel hoping to drive it into the Mediterranean Sea, but ended up losing the Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza Strip, with the latter two being occupied and settled by Israelis to this day. Before 1967, Finkelstein says the American government didn’t want to offend its West German allies in the cold war, many of who were former Nazis, as the leftists had moved to East Germany after the partition (2). After 1967, however, Israel allegedly (in Finkelstein’s view) became a democratic island in a hostile Arabic sea, and became a strategic partner in the West’s struggle against the Soviet Union, which had backed the Arab states that lost territory as a result of their attack. To garner American public support for the cause, pro-Israeli forces started what Finkelstein terms “the Holocaust industry” to link all attacks against Israel to the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. According to this standard, anyone opposed to Israel was anti-Jew, because the “unique suffering” of the Jews during the Holocaust gives them “a moral license” to keep that from ever happening to them again, using any means necessary to protect their inalienable right to exist as a nation. Finkelstein cited the “blonde-haired, blue-eyed” hero of Leon Uris’, Exodus (3)), as an example of how this Jewish suffering had been perverted by Zionist spin doctors to provoke the American conscience into siding with Israel, specifically stating that Uris named his protagonist “Ari,” short for “Aryan,” and that somehow cemented the racial element to the West’s moral responsibilities for the holocaust, making it very difficult to oppose Israeli interests. Furthermore, Finkelstein re-enforced “Uris’ description of “Ari” as having blonde hair and blue eyes by pointing out that Paul Newman had starred in the 1960 Otto Preminger film based on the book. Interestingly, in Exodus, Uris actually depicts Ari as a dark haired, brown-eyed Semite. Also, note that the film was released seven years before the war.


§         The “new” anti-Semitism industry. Finkelstein precisely pinpointed how each time Israel has faced a crisis since 1967, particularly one in which it’s been accused of committing atrocities, stories appear in the mainstream press reporting that a “new anti-Semitism” is on the rise in Europe. Among the specific examples he cited were recent articles that appeared after the Israeli massacre at the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. He called these Zionist polling efforts phony, saying their worrisome numbers were manufactured, as there was no general anti-Semitic blowback against Israel’s draconian policies in the occupied territories, and cited recent polls showing anti-Semitism is lower among Europeans today than it was in the early 1990s [uncorroborated by this writer, who can only find facts to the contrary]. Therefore, Finkelstein believes there’s no established link between the anti-Israeli policies of European countries and concurrent spikes in anti-Semitism among their populations. Simply put, opposition to Israel does not lead to increased negative attitudes in the general population toward Jews as people in Finkelstein’s opinion.

 
Finkelstein takes questions from the audience after his lecture (Photo by Patrick Lowther).



Q & A: Empathy for Dershowitz?

 
When Finkelstein finished, he immediately opened the floor to questions and chose the professor he’d argued with earlier, who asked him what his source was for Uris’ character Ari being short for Aryan.

 
Finkelstein stammered, searching for a response, then said he read that in a critique of the novel, but upon further badgering couldn’t cite the source of the critique he read. The professor continued, reminding one of how Finkelstein had grilled Dershowitz on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, but Finkelstein ended the jousting with “next question,” picking out a young man in the back of the audience.

 
“Could you please tell me what we can do to learn to love each other? I mean, to get both sides to respect each others’ views so we can rise above all this?”

 
Finkelstein responded that human beings were under “no moral mandate to love their enemies,” and that it would be unwise to expect that if one pushes someone, one won’t get pushed back. In other words, if you’re smart you won’t expect someone you abuse to love you. That’s the way of the world, like it or not.

 
The next question took the form of a comment. It was from a Jewish gentleman.

 
“I know Hebrew. Ari is short for Ariel, not Aryan. I’m know expert, but I think it means desert lion or something.”

 
A murmur of consensus passed over the audience, and much of the Jewish contingent spontaneously arose from their seats and departed.

 

Prospects for Peace?


Bartov, in his Times review of The Holocaust Industry, writes of Finkelstein’s manner of polemics:

There is something sad in this warping of intelligence, and in this perversion of moral indignation. There is also something indecent about it, something juvenile, self-righteous, arrogant and stupid.

What I find so striking…is that it is almost an exact copy of the arguments it seeks to expose. It is filled with precisely the kind of shrill hyperbole that Finkelstein rightly deplores in much of the current media hype over the Holocaust; it is brimming with the same indifference to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics and dubious contextualizations; and it oozes with the same smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority.

This book is, in a word, an ideological fanatic's view of other people's opportunism, by a writer so reckless and ruthless in his attacks that he is prepared to defend his own enemies, the bastions of Western capitalism, and to warn that ''The Holocaust'' will stir up an anti-Semitism whose significance he otherwise discounts. Like any conspiracy theory, it contains several grains of truth; and like any such theory, it is both irrational and insidious. Finkelstein can now be said to have founded a Holocaust industry of his own.

 
So what are the prospects for peace with the likes of Finkelstein and his enemies in the mix? How do we get them, if not learn to love each other, at least stop the fighting and drawing the whole world into their personal pathologies?

 
It would seem that Finkelstein should be a defeated man, that he’s just all messed up and thoroughly debauched, but then again, maybe not. As he has pointed out, time and again, his opponents are ruthless and not wedded to the truth. He’s in a war for survival, like Palestine itself, against a greater power. His tactics at times, though seemingly indecent, are understandable in light of their context, if not morally excusable.


Thank God the Middle Eastern students at the lecture, who outnumbered the apparent pro-Israeli contingent, tolerated the antagonistic behavior against a speaker they obviously identified with in the hot, crowded room. Of course they, more than anyone, were well aware of the security forces present.

 

The Anti-Finkelstein coalition


In the summer of 2000, when The Holocaust Industry was published, Jewish organizations from around the globe began a rigorous effort to raze Finkelstein's scholarly standing and authority, force publishers not to distribute his book, and mass media to not supply publicity via news stories or reviews (note: Eyewitness News, though present, did not report on the lecture).


At the time the book was published, he was a political science professor at New York University. He was soon forced from that position to CUNY College, then black balled from teaching in New York altogether, his hometown, and now professes in exile at Chicago’s DePaul University on a temporary basis, much to his displeasure.


To make matters worse, Finkelstein, who claims to have never made more than $22,000 in one year, is being sued for libel in the French courts for making false charges in his book that the Anti-Defamation League alleges will bring about a rise in anti-Semitism in that country (4).


One thing that so infuriates the anti-Finkelstein coalition is his rejection of the uniqueness of the Jewish persecution during the Holocaust.


In a 2001 interview with Counterpunch magazine, Finkelstein says the Zionist Jewish establishment believes one can’t compare the suffering of the Jews to, say, the misery of Amerindians, Rwandans or Armenians, because “it’s not the same thing…Nothing compares to the Jews…You have to understand that the great tragedy of the Second World War, was not that Jews per se were killed, but such a cultured people were killed—if you kill uncultured people, who cares?”


This portrayal of Zionist racism—trumping the race card on the race card trumpeters—appalls Finkelstein’s ideological opponents, who he also accuses of trying to set up a caste system in the Holy Land, placing European Jews on top, Semitic Jews in the middle, and Arabs on the bottom.


Finkelstein, in the same Counterpunch interview, cited Dr. David Rabeeya, an Iraqi-born American rabbi, who “claims that the wholesale importation of Russian Jews [by Israel] was to ensure the demographic majority of secular European Jews over their Sephardic countrymen for generations to come.”


According to Finkelstein, Rabeeya says that a “large percentage of the so-called 'Russian Jews' are not Jewish,” and that recently, “it has been more than 50%…because the Israeli establishment likes the blue eyed, blonde haired Aryan types as a racial group. The Russians look right even if they are not Jewish, and they preserve the Ashkenazi elite's dominance.”


Finkelstein can add the West’s military-industrial complex and mainstream Americans to his enemies list, which is not so short to include just Zionists.


With regards to 9/11, Finkelstein told Counterpunch three months after the attack that, “it's payback time for the Americans, and they have a problem because all their other enemies since the end of World War Two that they pretended to contend with…were basically fabricated enemies. The Soviet Union…enemies like Libya, Iraq, narco-terrorists and so forth, these were basically enemies created by the United States to—among other things—justify repressive policies around the world, and to inflate its military budget.”


As if that wasn’t inflammatory enough, Finkelstein added: “Why should Americans go on with their lives as normal, worrying about calories and hair loss, while other people are worrying about where they are going to get their next piece of bread? Why should we go on merrily with our lives while so much of the world is suffering, and suffering incidentally not with us merely as bystanders, but with us as the indirect and direct perpetrators.”


What rankles his opponents most, however, is that his arguments are given a great deal of weight by the fact he’s an American Jew whose parents survived the Holocaust. None of their usual arguments stick, so he’s labeled a “self-hating Jew,” and explained away with various other psychobabble digressions deconstructing Finkelstein’s motivations, some of which might not be discounted.



Separating anti-Semitism from pro-Palestinian
 

However, just as one can criticize American policy without hating America, one can criticize Israeli policy without being anti-Israel, much less anti-Semitic. Likewise, an American who criticizes American policies is not prone to self-hatred because of it; nor is a Jew who criticizes Israel.
 

In Counterpunch, Finkelstein spoke of how growing up Jewish did not mean growing up Zionist:

“First of all, I don't agree that Zionism and growing up in a Jewish household are inextricably linked. It is fair to say that growing up Jewish and having a consciousness about Israel are inextricably linked. As a Jew I felt that I bore a certain amount of responsibility for the policies of Israel because Israel claimed to speak in the name of the Jewish people, and therefore they were using the history and suffering of the Jewish people as a means to justify its policies. However, my family were not Zionists, and therefore I see no special connection between the two.”

These sentiments are easy for dissidents anywhere to empathize with. All one need do is replace “Zionism” with patriotism, and “Jew” and “Jewish” for their own nationality—whether it be American or Chinese.

In the strictest moral sense, it is essential for the good American and the good Jew to speak out against atrocities committed in their name.



Conclusion: Employing “Black Love” to Give Peace A Chance


This review can’t end without attempting to answer the fundamental question of Finkelstein’s lecture: what are the prospects for peace?

While researching his second book, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: The Intifadah Years, Finkelstein lived with Palestinian families in the Occupied Territories, and told Counterpunch that the first time he did so “it was a moral test of the values that are meaningful to me, and I wanted to see if I could bridge the chasm between a Jew and a Palestinian based upon our common humanity and our shared commitment to justice and decency. To that extent I would say that it was a satisfying experience, because I think that we developed close and meaningful relationships.”


One can’t help but wonder if Finkelstein ever attempted that with Zionists. After all, the chasm wasn’t so vast between he and the Palestinians as it seems between many of his fellow Jews and himself. Yet the likes of Rachel Corrie, an American who was killed by an Israeli Defense Forces tank while protecting a refugee’s home in the Gaza Strip last year, also disavow the hypocrisies of their homelands to side with what they deem a just cause. Such individuals have moral visions that extend beyond their own and nation’s well-being to the health of the planet and humankind as a whole.


These are brave people, worthy of admiration and support, even if one disagrees with them. The truth of the matter is that they’re right on this issue. Israel is brutalizing the Palestinians with the aid of America.


Regarding the conditions in the territories, Finkelstein said, “the situation…is horrible. Whenever I go I almost literally count the minutes before I leave. I can't stand it there because you feel that you are watching people endure a living death for no justifiable reason. People are suffering and they're wasting away a life. It's very hard to bear, because it is impossible to rationalize to oneself why you should have a meaningful and satisfying life, and these people have to endure a meaningless and horrifying life. It is impossible to rationalize, unless you consider yourself a superior human being and deserve better, then maybe it would be a tolerable situation. When you recognize your common humanity and realize that for reasons that have nothing to do with anything these people have ever done, that they should have to suffer this way…it's really hard.”


Truer words were never spoken, but Finkelstein’s anger last Wednesday did not lessen the suffering of his Palestinian friends, nor did it bode well for peace in the Middle East.


Still, an optimist can’t help but believe if Israel’s enemies embraced it, for the love of all that’s good and just, the whole world would win.


What’s needed is what Tavis Smiley calls “black love:”

"It was 'black love' that lifted me during the darkest moment of my professional career. It was 'black love' that lifted me out of the despair. When your back is against the wall and you are on your back, there's nothing like the power of the black love to lift you up. And that's why I believe that beyond God's love, black love is the most powerful force in the universe."

Smiley, of course, when speaking of “black love,” uses it to explain why African-Americans, despite the racism and oppression they’ve faced, have by and large been good Americans, serving their country despite what it’s done to them.


Of course, this kind of love requires faith in a greater power than one’s own. Those who are lost in a cycle of violence, whether it be physical and/or psychological, who’ve lost faith in the goodness that life has to offer, are incapable of such love.


So the violence continues and the prospects for peace are nil until the cycle of revenge is broken. Finkelstein, it seems, is more concerned with keeping the wheel spinning than stopping it.

 


NOTES
 

Jayson Blair, Alan Dershowitz…style of attack, fighting fire with fire. In other words, since folks like these are lying for their cause, Finkelstein seems to lie for his.

This does not seem to be true. Check it out for yourself by doing a Google search, “West Germany Nazi politicians.” For a quick check, see World History at KMLA: Germany Occupied, 1945-1948 : the Western Zones.

From Al Jazeera: For readers, the novel­ and the film­ became a template for perceiving the Middle East. Uris popularized Israel as a place of righteous refuge, solidifying a link between the Holocaust and Israel that remains contentious among Israel’s own historians and intellectuals. This is not to say that his story was false; the refuge narrative is a valid Israeli theme. But Uris helped forge a connection between it and the Jewish genocide, effectively characterizing critics of Israeli policy in terms of that story, setting the terms of the debate for decades. US academic Melani McAlister has written that when Exodus came out, “most Americans still knew little about Zionism or Israel,” and that the story was “a foreshadowing of what Israel was to come to mean to Americans.” Author Edward Tivnan called the novel “the primary source of knowledge that most Americans had about Jews and Israel.” As recently as 2001, the scholar Edward Said said that, “the main narrative model that dominates American thinking (about Israel) still seems to be Leon Uris’ … novel Exodus.” Deborah Dash Moore of Yale University argues that Exodus not only gave Israel its positive persona, but also provided the model used by the US media to cover the 1967 war. Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, for example, was identified in the US press as the prototype for Uris’ hero. According to Moore, Uris borrowed his dramatic elements from the American Western. Exodus was created as a popular work that promulgated its ideas through action. Despite the many stories, films and poems dealing with Palestinians, there’s no real counterpart to Exodus. Many revered authors ­ Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, Khalil Baidas and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra among others ­ have taken up the themes of displacement, abandonment and exile, as have many untalented hacks. Yet no single Palestinian narrative emerged as the “anti-Exodus.” The best political novel to emerge from the Arab world at mid-century, according to a 1967 survey by critic George Sfeir, was Halim Barakat’s Six Days, a work that in some ways mirrors Exodus. It too is set in 1948, and involves the Arab confrontation with the nascent Israeli state. Its hero’s energies are also split between nationalism and romance. Yet while Uris’ man of action is a single-minded Zionist, Barakat’s hero is uncertain if Arab society is worth defending. Uris’ hero loves a woman who is won over to Israel’s cause; Barakat’s hero is unsure if he is in love or bored. Uris’ novel offers certainty and struggle; Barakat’s asks open-ended questions it cannot answer. Six Days is, in the end, an existentialist work for an elite readership that analyzes political struggle. Exodus is a work of political struggle in which readers participate by adopting its narrative as a call to action. Exodus was controversial from the time of its release. Otto Preminger, the director of the film version, regarded the book as unfair to Arabs, and thought his film more just. Uris accused Preminger of ruining his book. Yet, the book and film are now regarded as a single phenomenon that managed to displace the history that inspired it. No small achievement.

Simon Wiesenthal Centre Testifies in Paris Libel Suit Against Norman Finkelstein. Wiesenthal Center Los Angeles, Paris, 26 March 2004.
 

 

FURTHER READING
 

Documents on Norman Finkelstein's controversies.

Encyclopedia entry on Finkelstein.

.





written on
May 3, 2004

© Copyright NiagaraBuzz.com





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