For most of the past decade, Norm Finkelstein has been held up as a paragon of truth and justice. He is a darling of the anti-war, anti-Zionist set, and friend to Arab and Muslim groups around the world. What could be better?—a Jew critical of the Jewish state, and a champion of the Palestinians. But I think it is high time to expose a few weaknesses in his armor, and to make the case that he is, perhaps unwittingly, an apologist for Israel and for Jewish supremacy. I think one can make a pretty good case that he is, in fact, a Zionist stooge.
First of all, anyone familiar with contemporary Zionism should be able to figure out that Finkelstein could never publish as he has, or speak as he has, or get the publicity that he has, without the implicit support of the various Jewish lobbies around the world. If he were truly the threat that is portrayed, we can be sure that he would be stopped cold—censored, sanctioned, sued, or imprisoned. Anyone doubting this need only consider the treatment given to Muslim ‘extremists’ and Holocaust skeptics.
So he must be ‘acceptable’ in some sense; perhaps even ‘useful.’ That use is not hard to discern. Every power structure in the world has a need to control and mitigate its opponents. In the good ol’ days, a bullet to the head or a trip to the Gulag did the trick. Today one needs to be more subtle. The modern approach is to stake out the opposition’s turf, or to plant a ‘soft’ opponent. I doubt that Norman is a plant, but he serves the same purpose: a nice, safe, credible ‘critic’ of Zionism who knows his limits, and doesn’t go too far.
What do I mean by this? Two things. First of all, deep down, I have little doubt that Finkelstein is himself a closet Zionist—a true Zionist, meaning, a Jewish supremacist. This is the case with the vast majority of American Jews, and virtually all Israeli Jews. They firmly believe that Israel has a right to exist as an exclusively (or at least predominantly) Jewish state. This is a racist notion on any reading, and would be utterly unacceptable for any nation other than Israel. Certainly this is the case in Israel itself; it was recently reported in Al-Quds Al-Arabi (Feb. 15) that 75% of Israeli Jews are in favor of some form of ethnic cleansing, to achieve a purified Jewish state. American Jews are similarly inclined. No matter whether right or left, Republican or Democrat, pro-war or anti-war, nearly all Jews support the idea of Jewish-only state; the only disagreement is about the means of achieving it.
Finkelstein never questions this core of Zionism. It’s true that he, like any thinking person with a shred of decency, is appalled at what Israel is doing in the occupied territories, but this doesn’t make him anti-Zionist (in the deeper sense). He does not question Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He does not endorse the right of return for all Palestinians, or financial compensation for them. He does not call for full and equal rights of Israeli Arabs. Finkelstein is still, at heart, a Jewish supremacist.
Even worse is his stance on the Holocaust. He made his name in 2000, with his ‘radical’ book The Holocaust Industry. As before, we can be sure that neither his English publisher Verso, nor the printer of his German translation (Piper Verlag), nor any of the other 15 foreign-language publishers would have produced the book if it really got to the heart of the Holocaust story. Finkelstein’s main concern is the hype surrounding the event, and the misuse of the money—chiefly, that it’s not going to the ‘right people.’ But he implicitly accepts virtually all of the traditional story.
I have seen Finkelstein speak in person three times. Never once did he indicate any real knowledge about the Holocaust. In fact, at one event he was directly asked about this, and he replied, “I’m not an expert on the Holocaust�—which is a fairly astonishing admission from a man whose claim to fame rests on that event. When a questioner challenged him about the unreliability of the numbers—that the ‘6 million’ has no factual basis, that Hilberg claimed 5.1 million, that Reitlinger claimed 4.2 million, that Yad Vashem has less than 3 million names, that revisionists argue for 1 million or less—he waived off the whole point: “I just follow the experts.�
Finkelstein unquestioningly accepts the 6 million figure, without knowing anything of the massive difficulties behind that symbolic figure. He has no awareness of the physical impossibilities involved with the alleged mass murder and incineration; of the utter lack of forensic evidence, despite knowing where to look; of wartime air photos showing no evidence of mass murder; of 20 years of diary entries by Joseph Goebbels indicating a consistent process of evacuation and deportation rather than mass murder; and so on. At one time he apparently expressed doubt that gas chambers were used for mass murder, but no more; now he toes the line. In this sense, he is a champion of traditionalism, and thus poses no real threat.
In truth the Holocaust story is fraught with difficulties, as I tried to show in my book Debating the Holocaust. Normally one would expect a person like Finkelstein to pick up on this point, since it actually serves his purpose of arguing that emphasis on Jewish suffering was over-blown and exploited for financial gain. But faithful Norman knows that, should he start raising these issues, or take seriously the ideas of Rudolf, Mattogno, Graf, or Faurisson, that he, like they, would be totally shut down. Bad for book sales, eh Norm?
Even the alleged resistance he gets at his various speaking engagements is, at least in part, bogus. On more than one occasion, where his talks were supposedly cancelled by “local Jewish opposition,� it was he himself who cancelled out. He is in regular contact with Jewish leaders everywhere he goes, and if he gets a whiff that the crowd might be ‘uncooperative,’ or might raise uncomfortable issues (e.g. Holocaust revisionism) , then he cancels. Ask him, for example, what happened to the evening talk to a local Catholic student group in Ghent, Belgium, in 2008.
Readers out there are invited to ask Norman a couple pointed questions at his next local speaking engagement: (1) Do you repudiate the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state? If not, how can you deny being a racist? (2) On what basis do you accept the symbolic ‘6 million’ Jewish Holocaust deaths, without knowledge of the many serious difficulties with that figure?
These would make for an interesting response; be prepared for some fancy footwork.
Perhaps I am wrong about Norm Finkelstein; I hope I am. In fact, I would like nothing better than for him to prove me wrong, in public, by clearly exposing Jewish supremacism and racism within Israel itself, and by exposing, or at least acknowledging, the many holes in the Holocaust story. But don’t hold your breath.
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Solidarity from "Pro-Palestinian" Jews Revisited
Ibrahim Alloush
No Palestinian Arab would ever argue whether international solidarity with our cause is welcome or not. In fact, it's our obligation to garner such support wherever we may. Moreover, we can never neglect our obligation to confront Zionist propaganda internationally and to debunk Zionist myths in any language, shape, or form. So at least as far as this goes, ALL Palestinian activists would NOT disagree.
The question remains, however, what actually constitutes support for the Palestinian cause: sympathy with the victimization of Palestinians, like one would sympathize with road kills for example, conscious political support for a platform for liberation, or something in between?
There are plenty of people out there who claim to be 'pro-Palestinian' , or to support 'Palestinian rights'. And many of us are taken in by such people, especially that some of us have a soft spot for Westerners and therefore feel flabbergasted when they see one of them leaning a tad our way... (Some call it an inferiority complex but I will not get into that here).
Nevertheless, not everyone who claims to support us is actually a supporter. Many such supporters actually oppose some of the most crucial things we stand for, except they dislike some of the human rights violations that the Zionists are visiting upon us. That is, they: 1) recognize the right of "Israel" to exist and the alleged right of Jews to settle in Palestine, 2) they oppose our strategy to liberate Palestine, and 3) they especially oppose the armed struggle of Palestinian organizations. Such 'supporters' are not actually supporting us, but simply trying to make themselves feel better...
In some cases, you find Jews claiming to support the Palestinian cause. But when you scrutinize carefully what they stand for, you'll find they simply want what amounts to a 'nice occupation', as opposed to a brutal one. In reality they just wish there could be an occupation without administrative detentions, targeted assassinations, land confiscations, house demolitions, and all the rest. Otherwise, those same 'supporters' try as hard as they could to convince Palestinians to present their case 'in a civilized manner' without resorting to human bombs and military operations, especially against what they call "Israeli civilians". One such Jewish 'supporter' is Noam Chomsky who says that it would be immoral for Palestinians to target even an off-duty "Israeli" soldier!
This makes one wonder whether these Jewish "supporters" are just trying to whitewash the occupation with their own professed guilt, as Jews, or whether they're simply out to present another 'positive' side of Zionism!
Some of us are so happy to see a Jew or a Westerner criticize Zionist oppression that they trip all over themselves to the point of becoming oblivious to the essence of the POLITICAL MESSAGE such 'criticism' of Zionism is concealing. There are Zionists criticizing each other all the time for goodness sakes. That doesn't make them anymore pro-Palestinian than Arabs criticizing each other are pro-Zionist.
Let's put the issue in a nutshell: Palestine is occupied. Palestine is not only occupied by an army of soldiers, but by an army of colonists. In any country, when there is occupation, the natural anecdote is liberation. No one in their right mind would have asked Europeans to tolerate or to coexist with the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe or France. Yet that is exactly what is being asked of Palestinians today by 'our supporters'. These supporters are basically asking us to either cede most of Palestine to colonists under a two-state solution, or to embrace the right of colonists to live in Palestine under a one-state solution. The latter 'solution', in fact, amounts to embracing the fruits of Zionism in retrospect, since Zionism is nothing but the project of building a Jewish colony in Palestine.
So, we don't need 'supporters' who try to dictate to us what our political strategy should be.
Our cause is crystal clear, and the only thing that can possibly make us lose our true supporters is allowing fake supporters of the Palestinian cause to mystify it.
When there is occupation, the anecdote is liberation. Period. If you are an anti-Zionist, that must mean by definition that you are against Jewish settlement in Palestine that came on the heels of a Zionist project. It also means you support our platform to liberate Palestine, our way, not some other platform to make Palestinians more tolerant of Jews by parading a handful of "pro-Palestinian" Jews!
Mind you, throughout the centuries, we never ever opposed Jews coming into Palestine as individuals, BEFORE THE ONSET OF THE ZIONIST PROJECT. If you check the annals of history, you'd find that Palestinians opposed Jewish immigration into Palestine only AFTER the onset of the Zionist project. But let's not wallow on that too much. Palestine is ours, and as such, it's our prerogative to decide whom we want to let into our country just like any other normal people on earth.
Hence, each and every Jew in Palestine today is objectively part and parcel of the Zionist project. S/he is forcibly occupying space whence a Palestinian was dislodged. For such a Jew to even claim, on top of my land and from within my home, that s/he is an anti-Zionist, means that he either thinks we must be complete idiots or... that we are complete idiots. In fact, we would be if we accepted such preposterous claims. It would be exactly like believing George Bush lecturing about 'world peace' for example. FOR STARTERS, anti-Zionism necessarily implies that a Jew is practicing it OUTSIDE Palestine. Any Jew in Palestine today cannot possibly be anti-Zionist by definition.
Furthermore, if you take revisionist historians in the Zionist entity for example, you'll find that even those among them who have meticulously documented Zionist atrocities against Palestinians do not think it amounts to much compared to the alleged "Holocaust". Take Ilan Pappe for example. He has said repeatedly in articles and interviews that the Nakba is ethnic cleansing, but that the "Holocaust" is mass genocide, and therefore as abhorrent as the Nakba may be, it cannot possibly be compared to the "Holocaust"; and that only the Jews could have gotten away with something like the Nakba because of the sympathy they harnessed in the West due to the "Holocaust". In essence, Jewish colonists like Ilan Pappe justify the Zionist colonization of Palestine in retrospect as a natural response to Nazi persecution. Indeed, if you check out his website, you'll find he explains his parents coming into Palestine in that manner. In the end, he's calling for Palestinians to accept Zionism in retrospect under the thin veneer of a 'one-state solution'.
There is a real danger when our political vision becomes so hazy we cannot distinguish colonists usurping our land and identity from true supporters of our cause.
Such political myopia, however, remains rampant amongst some Arab intellectuals, officials of Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority, and Arabs bending over backwards to get themselves accepted by Westerners or by Jews. But rarely would one see such pathetic overtures towards the enemy amongst average Arabs on the Arab street, that is, among the overwhelming majority of Arabs. Arabs on the street, by and large, still regard ANY DEALINGS with the invader, under any pretext, as an act of normalization. Normalization of course is the act of dealing with the enemy as if they were not the oppressor, the invader, the murderers of our people, and the usurpers of our Haifa, Akka, and Jalil.
Frequently Palestinians are set up in a guilt trip. They have to prove that they do not hate Jews. The proving really never ends until you eventually embrace the doctrine of "Israel's" security. But, really, Palestinians have NOTHING to prove to the invader. It is exactly the other way around. A Jew who claims to be anti-Zionist is the one who has something to prove (to himself first of all), not a Palestinian who is fighting a Jewish occupation.
If someone supports you, that means they support your cause to liberate your land from an occupation. It doesn't mean that you have to change your strategic objective away from liberation so they can start supporting you. Otherwise, you have already lost your cause before even beginning. 'Support' which comes with attached strings is no support at all, but an impediment.
http://www.freearab voice.org/ articles/ SolidarityfromPr o-PalestinianJew sRevisited. htm |
