There is another side to Norman
Finkelstein, apart from the notorious YouTube clips and public feuds with world
known scholars, such as Alan Dershowitz and Benny Morris. As I was preparing my
interview with Prof. Finkelstein, I carefully went through his books,
interviews and lectures online. I quickly found what motivated him to commit
academic suicide, a term Noam Chomsky used when he warned Prof. Finkelstein
what would happen if he started a fight with Alan Dershowitz. Being the son of
holocaust survivors, it seems as if justice and truth were core values in his
upbringing. Those are not only the values that he uses prolifically when
describing the purpose of his books. They are also, undoubtedly, the main
reasons for his career choice, namely writing about the conflict between Israel
and the Palestinians. I asked Prof. Finkelstein, to what extent it is even
possible to claim the truth, when debating the conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians.
“We start off with two basic
premises. Premise number one is that we are setting out to search for something
called truth. There is something called truth, and that is what we are trying
to reach, but on the other hand, we all have to recognize that we are imperfect
vessels and that we will never reach truth. We also have to be open to the fact
that we think is the truth, might not be. It’s as simple as that. With that in
mind, it seems that we have enough basic scholarly research to establish some
facts, and you might say that by the process of elimination, certain things are
no longer plausible explanations. There is always the possibility that our
explanation at some point in the future date will be shown to be false”.
Prof. Finkelstein frequently
uses the work of Benny Morris as references in his books, but Morris himself
has criticized Prof. Finkelstein for misusing his work, by selectively picking
out facts and constructing his own narrative about the history of the
Israel-Palestine conflict. A criticism that Prof. Finkelstein throws back at
Morris:
“First of all, Morris does his work. He is a conscientious
searcher of archives and he comes up with lots of interesting information. In
my opinion, he was the most conscientious of those who researched the archives
on 1948. He did a lot of research, no doubt about that. He is what Noam Chomsky
once referred to, as a good clerk. He goes into the archives, comes up with
interesting information, but in terms of reconceptualization of what happened,
there is nothing there. That’s okay. We should recognize his
achievements, but we shouldn’t get carried away. He is a good clerk, and a good
clerk is better than a bad clerk. Most academics don’t even clerk. They just
talk nonsense. So I grant him that, for sure. Secondly, what you
described is not unusual. I spent some time going through the Human Rights reports
on Operation Protective Edge, and there is this huge gap between their factual
findings and their legal interpretations. The latter, as far as I could tell,
are not connected with what their research found”.
So, finding the facts and
then delivering them truthfully is where Morris went wrong?
“There is a certain selectivity
in the facts that he takes from the archive, and which then forms his picture
of what happened. That’s true of everybody, we all have an agenda. There is a
famous expression, which is that you are entitled to your opinion but not to
your facts. The problem with Morris is that he changes his opinion, but there
are no new facts. How is it that on the basis of the same facts you suddenly
conclude the reverse. In his case it’s literally the reverse, he has just
inverted the whole reality, he starts off by saying that Zionists are coming to
disposes the indigenous population. The idea of transfer is inbuilt and
inevitable in Zionism, and then he said that the fear of territorial dispossession
was the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism. Now he just turned the whole
thing upside down. Suddenly it was the Arabs who wanted to expel the Jews, and
the Jews were resisting”.
No topic is more debated today
than truth. President Trump is currently waging a war against the liberal
media, simply referring to them as “fake news”. Prof. Finkelstein agrees with
Trump in his criticism of the media, but he is not a fan of Trump or his
version of the truth:
“The whole talk about facts
makes me want to comment on the fake news and alternative facts. This is not a
new phenomenon at all. I’m not particularly outraged by Trump’s lies, because
they are simplistic and easy to expose. They don’t really cause much damage. In
my opinion, the real purveyors of fake news and lies, I agree with Trump, are
the media. I will give you an example. During the last month of the election campaign, the media went
berserk in its attacks on Trump. It was kind of surreal. In the last month of
the election, The New York Times was writing about how Obama turned around the
economy, how he has reduced inequality. [Joyce Carol Oates. Kate Welch. Keren Ann.] This was people like Paul Krugman, who
called Bernie Sanders’ economics voodoo. I was thinking to myself, it really is
like Pravda in the Stalin era. I really thought these lies were more disgusting
that anything Trump has said. If the
economy were so good, can you explain to me why Trump won? Why did Bernie have
such a resonance? A majority of Americans supported either Trump or Bernie. The
entire corporate media across the US supported Hillary. Trump got the
endorsement of only one newspaper in the whole US. The entire political elite
class and the Wall Street billionaire class supported Hillary. There has never
been an election in the US where a person was elected, but was opposed by the
entire corporate elite, political elite and media elite. The masses ignored the
media, which I think was a wise thing”.
The sceptic optimist
Most Israelis would agree that
they live in a democracy. However, this is not the judgement of Prof.
Finkelstein. He raises a simple question, which is often forgotten when
describing Israel as the only real democracy in the Middle East.
“If during 70% percent of your
existence, half of the population under your control had inferior or no rights,
how can that be a democracy? It may have been a plausible description up until
1967, but after that, it simply cannot be describe as such”.
You have once said that
politics is about reaching the masses, and getting people to act on what they
already know is wrong. Given the current situation between the Israelis and the
Palestinians, when will they reach a common understanding of what is wrong and
what is right?
“When the occupation begins to
hurt, and there is a recognition that we need to end it. Right now, the
Israelis have a cost free occupation. The Palestinians do the dirty work, the
torture and the jailing, the Europeans pay the bills, and the Americans give
them political protection. So why should they care?”.
Would mass resistance give
Palestinians what they want?
“During the first Intifada the
leadership emerged from the people. Their formal leadership was exiled in Tunis
at the time, and it was from the mass organization that they produced a new
leadership. But ultimately nothing came of mass resistance. They lost any hope
in collective action; there is no mass organization there anymore. That’s what
makes me hopeless. So long as I see people in motion, you know there are
possibilities, but with the Palestinians, there is no resistance any more. They
have given up. I would say the financial corruption is the most significant
factor”.
Although pessimistic in his
view of the current situation between Israel and the Palestinians, he is more
optimistic about the possibilities of a real change in the US. Even though it
could go both ways with President Trump, the way to change what he refers to as
an elitist system, will always start from a mass resistance.
“I see
possible danger with Trump. If his economic plans don’t produce, he is going to
lose his base and do what any person in his position would do, which is
starting a war. It could be a war with China, because he is very erratic. On
the other hand, we could see that there are real possibilities now in the US.
There is a lot of resistance, discontent, rejection of the elites and the
policies they put forth. I was not happy Trump won, but I was very happy to get
rid of the Obama’s and Hillary’s of this world. They are still there of course,
you can’t stop these people. Obama’s reputation is still good, and
because of political correctness and him being black, we are all supposed to
say what a genius he is. He still hasn’t been exposed, unfortunately”.
In one of his lectures on John
Stuart Mill, Prof. Finkelstein predicted that the next step in human development
would be equality for animals. This prediction encapsulates one of Prof.
Finkelstein’s values, namely justice. It should therefore come as no surprise
that his thoughts on the future of human beings recall those of Immanuel Kant.
Perpetual peace is possible, according to Prof. Finkelstein:
“I don’t find that a remote
possibility. There is an increasing awareness about how small our planet is. I
don’t find the prospect of the abolition of war inconceivable. I think other
issues like abolishing gross inequality is a problem, and of course, power is
the toughest one there is. The power lust is very tough. The ego, you see it everywhere
in such petty ways. In academia for example. In that sense, I’m not optimistic
about taming the ego”. [Émy Guerrini. Jennifer Campbell & Lauren Whitehead.
Timothy Snyder.]
But you are optimistic about
people not slaughtering each other?
“Yes, I don’t find that part so
far-fetched, but I’m not optimistic about the problems of power and ego, and
the corruption that attends them. I’m much less idealistic about that. I have
seen too much”. [Mnemotechnique. Ha-Joon Chang. Rhee Syng-man. Young-Oak Kim.]
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