1.
Goodman:
The battle over political science professor Norman Finkelstein to receive
tenure at DePaul University in Chicago is heating up. Finkelstein is one of the
country’s foremost critics of Israeli policy. He has taught at DePaul for the
past six years. His tenure has been overwhelmingly approved at the departmental
and college level. A college-wide faculty panel voted 5-0 to back his 10-year
bid, but the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has opposed it. A
final decision is expected in the next few weeks. Professor Finkelstein has
accused Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz of being responsible for leading
the effort to deny him tenure. In an interview with The Harvard Crimson,
Dershowitz admitted he had sent a letter to DePaul faculty members lobbying
against Finkelstein’s tenure. Then, last week The
Wall Street Journal published an article by Dershowitz titled
“Finkelstein’s Bigotry.” In it, Dershowitz accuses Finkelstein of being an
anti-Semite and says he “does not do scholarship in any meaningful sense.” Professor
Finkelstein’s two main topics of focus over his career have been the Holocaust
and Israeli policy. Today, we’re joined by two world-renowned scholars in these
fields. Raul Hilberg is one of the best-known and most distinguished of Holocaust
historians. He is author of the seminal three-volume work, The Destruction
of the European Jews. He’s considered the founder of Holocaust studies. He
joins us from his home in Vermont. Avi Shlaim is a professor of international
relations at Oxford University in Britain. He is the author of numerous books,
most notably The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. He’s widely
regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the Israeli-Arab
conflict. We’ll begin in Vermont with Professor Hilberg. Can you talk about
Professor Finkelstein’s contribution to Holocaust studies with his book, The
Holocaust Industry?
2.
Hilberg:
Yes. I read this book, which was published about
seven years ago, even as I, myself, was
researching actions brought against Swiss companies, notably banks, but also
other enterprises in insurance and in manufacturing. And the gist of all
of these claims, all of these actions, was that somehow the Swiss banks, in
particular, and other enterprises, as well, owed money to Jews or the survivors
or the living descendants of people who were victims. The actions were brought
by claims lawyers, by the World Jewish Congress, which joined them, and a blitz
was launched in the newspapers. Congressmen and senators were mobilized,
officials of regulatory agencies in New York and elsewhere. Threats were issued
in the nature of withdrawal of pension funds, of boycotts, of bad publicity. And I was struck
by the fact, even as I, myself, was researching the same territory that
Professor Finkelstein was covering, that the Swiss did not owe that money,
that the $1,250,000,000 that were agreed as a settlement to be paid to the
claimants was something that, in very plain language, was extorted from the
Swiss. I had, in fact, relied upon the
same sources that Professor Finkelstein used, perhaps in addition some Swiss items.
I was in Switzerland at the height of the crisis, and I heard from
so-called forensic accountants about how totally surprised the Swiss were by
this outburst. There is no other word for it. Now, Finkelstein was the first to
publish what was happening in his book, The Holocaust Industry. And when
I was asked to endorse the book, I did so with specific reference to these
claims. I felt that within
the Jewish community over the centuries, nothing like it had ever happened. [Revealing
aboutHilbergTheBulldog.] And even though these days a couple of billion dollars are sometimes
referred to as an accounting error and not worthy of discussion, [StevenSoderbergh.
GeorgeClooney. HarveyWeinstein. DavidFincher. AaronSorkin.] there is
a psychological dimension here which not must be underestimated. I was also
struck by the fact that Finkelstein was being attacked over and over. And
granted, his style is a little different from mine, but I was saying the same
thing, and I had published my results in that three-volume work, published in
2003 by Yale University Press, and I did not
hear from anybody a critical word about what I said, even though it was the
same substantive conclusion that Finkelstein had offered. So that’s the gist of the matter right then and
there.
3.
Goodman:
Why do you think, Professor Hilberg, he was criticized and you were not?
4.
Hilberg:
Well, Finkelstein — I believe Finkelstein was criticized mainly for the style
that he employed. And he was vulnerable. And it was clear to me already years ago
that some campaigns were launched — from what sector, I didn’t know — to remove
him from the academic world. Years ago, I got a phone call from
someone who was in charge of a survivors’ group in California who told me that
Finkelstein had been ousted from a job in New York City at a university —
actually, a college there — and this was done under pressure. And then, again, I gave a lecture a year and a half ago
in Chicago, which is the place where Finkelstein had been employed at DePaul
University, and my lecture was about Auschwitz, and it was based on the
records, which we’ve now recovered from Moscow, about the history of this camp. Not exactly a simple
topic. But there was a question period, and I awaited pertinent
questions, when someone rose from his chair and asked, “Should Finkelstein be
tenured?” Now, for heaven’s sake, I said to myself, what is going on here? And whether he’s being intimidated, whether he is in a
situation where, whatever else may be happening, the employers are being
intimidated, it’s hard for me to say, but there is very clearly a campaign,
which was made very obvious in The Wall Street Journal, when Professor
Dershowitz wrote in a style which is highly uncharacteristic of the editorial
page of this newspaper, which incidentally I read religiously. [Dulynoted.] So
I, myself, cannot fully explain this outburst, but it clearly emanates from the
same anger, from the same revolt, that prompted the whole action against the
Swiss to begin with.
5.
Goodman:
I wanted to bring Professor Avi Shlaim into this discussion, a professor of
international relations at Oxford University, has written numerous books,
including The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. Can you talk about
the significance of Professor Finkelstein’s work?
6.
Shlaim:
Yes. I think very highly of Professor Finkelstein. I regard him as a very able,
very erudite and original scholar who has made
an important contribution to the study of Zionism, to the study of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, in particular, to the study of American
attitudes towards Israel and towards the Middle East. Professor Finkelstein specializes
in exposing spurious scholarship on the Arab-Israeli conflict. And he has a
very impressive track record in this respect. He was a very promising graduate
student in history at Princeton, when a book by Joan Peters appeared, called From
Time Immemorial, and he wrote the most savage exposition in critique of
this book. It was a systematic demolition of this book. The book argued,
incidentally, that Palestine was a land without a people for people without a
land. And Professor Finkelstein exposed it as a hoax, and he showed how
dishonest the scholarship or spurious scholarship was in the entire book. And
he paid the price for his courage, and he has been a marked man, in a sense, in
America ever since. His most recent book is Beyond Chutzpah, follows in
the same vein of criticizing and exposing biases and distortions and
falsifications in what Americans write about Israel and about the Middle East.
So I consider him to be a very impressive and a very learned and careful
scholar. I would like to make one last point, which is that his style is very
polemical, and I don’t particularly enjoy the strident polemical style that he
employs. On the other hand, what really matters in the final analysis is the
content, and the content of his books, in my judgment, is of very high quality.
7.
Goodman:
Professor Shlaim, what about the whole issue of when you criticize the Israeli
government, being charged with anti-Semitism? What is your response to this?
You were born in Iraq. You’re also an Israeli citizen and then moved to
Britain?
8.
Shlaim:
I am. I was born in Baghdad. I grew up in Israel. I
served in IDF. And for the last 40 years, I have lived in Britain, and I teach
at Oxford. My academic discipline is international relations, and I am a
specialist in the Arab-Israeli conflict. And I think that there is no — that
we must be very careful to separate questions of anti-Semitism from critique of
Israel. I am critical of Israel as a scholar, and anti-Semitism just doesn’t
come into it. My view is that the blind supporters of Israel — and there are
many of them in America, in particular — use the charge of anti-Semitism to try
and silence legitimate criticism of Israeli practices. I regard this as
moral blackmail. [WoodyAllen. SaulBellow. NoamBaumbach.] Israel
has no immunity to criticism, moral immunity to criticism, because of the
Holocaust. Israel is a sovereign nation-state, and it should be judged by the
same standards as any other state. And Norman Finkelstein is a very serious
critic and a very well-informed critic and hard-hitting critic of Israeli
practices in the occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians. His last
book, Beyond Chutzpah, is based on an amazing amount of research. He
seems to have read everything. He has gone through the reports of Israeli
groups, of human rights groups, Human Rights Watch and Peace Now and B’Tselem,
all of the reports of Amnesty International. And he deploys all this evidence
from Israeli and other sources in order to sustain his critique of Israeli
practices, Israeli violations of human rights of the Palestinians, Israeli
house demolitions, the targeted assassinations of Palestinian militants, the
cutting down of trees, the building of the wall — the security barrier on the
West Bank, which is illegal — the restrictions imposed on the Palestinians in
the West Bank, and so on and so forth. I find his critique extremely detailed,
well documented and accurate.
9.
Goodman:
Professor Hilberg, like you, Norman Finkelstein is the son of Holocaust
victims, his mother and his father both in concentration camps. Your final
thoughts on this whole dispute and whether Norman Finkelstein should get tenure
at DePaul University in Chicago?
10.
Hilberg:
Well, let me say at the outset, I would not, unasked, offer advice to the
university in which he now serves. Having been in a university for 35 years
myself and engaged in its politics, I know that outside interferences are most
unwelcome. I will say, however, that I am impressed by the analytical abilities
of Finkelstein. He is, when all is said and done, a highly trained political
scientist who was given a Ph.D. degree by a highly prestigious university. This
should not be overlooked. Granted, this, by itself, may not establish him as a
scholar. However, leaving aside the question of style — and here, I agree that
it’s not my style either — the substance of the matter is most important here,
particularly because Finkelstein, when he published this book, was alone. It
takes an enormous amount of academic courage to speak the truth when no one
else is out there to support him. And so, I think that given this acuity of
vision and analytical power, demonstrating that the Swiss banks did not owe the
money, that even though survivors were beneficiaries of the funds that were
distributed, they came, when all is said and done, from places that were not
obligated to pay that money. [HilbergTheBulldog does not care about how the
reparation is distributed.] That takes a great amount of courage in and of
itself. So I would say that his place in the whole history of writing history
is assured, and that those who in the end are proven right triumph, and he will
be among those who will have triumphed, albeit, it so seems, at great cost.
11.
Goodman:
Well, Professor Raul Hilberg and Professor Avi Shlaim, I want to thank you both
very much for being with us. Raul Hilberg, speaking to us from his home in
Vermont, one of the best-known and most distinguished of Holocaust historians,
his three-volume work is The Destruction of the European Jews. Avi
Shlaim, professor of international relations at Oxford University in Britain,
his book, his latest, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. Thank
you very much for joining us.
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