From Democracy Now!:
“The battle over political science professor Norman Finkelstein to receive tenure at DePaul University is heating up. Finkelstein has taught at DePaul for the past six years. Finkelstein’s two main topics of focus over his career have been the Holocaust and Israeli policy. We speak to two world-renowned scholars in these fields: Raul Hilberg, considered the founder of Holocaust studies, and Avi Shlaim, a professor of international relations at Oxford University and an expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Shlaim calls Finkelstein a “very impressive, learned and careful scholar”, while Hilberg praises Finkelstein’s “acuity of vision and analytical power.” Hilberg says: “It takes an enormous amount of courage to speak the truth when no one else is out there to support him.””
High praise, indeed. Prof. Finkelstein certainly deserves it – his consistent and principled stand for justice for the Palestinians, in the face of a level of invective and vilification that is really beyond belief, is truly admirable. For a recent example of the kind of crap he has to deal with, see this drivel from Steven Plaut, published (of course) on FrontPageMag.com. It brands Finkelstein a “pseudo-scholar”, a “Holocaust trivializer” and a “radical leftist” (in the pejorative, naturally), who, when he’s not busy luvvin’ up to everyone from David Irving to Hassan Nasrallah, spends his free time “baiting” Jews and spouting “crude anti-Semitism”. As I wrote in a recent email to Prof. Finkelstein,
Hi,
Just read Plaut’s article on your site. Apparently, you’re a “Holocaust Denier” because the ADL says you are, you’ve written “books” as opposed to books and your life is totally dedicated to “jew baiting”, “anti-Semitism” and “anti-Americanism”. I must say I sympathise with you entirely – who doesn’t indulge in a bit of “jew baiting” of an evening? But writing for that bastion of “anti-Americanism” and “anti-Semitism”, The Nation magazine…you really went too far there. An official apology is in order, I think, and may I recommend that you stick to true patriotic news sources like FrontPageMag.com in the future.
Best.
For those previously unaware of this whole, nasty affair, it can basically be summed up as follows. Many years ago, Norman Finkelstein demonstrated that the book From Time Immemorial, by Joan Peters, which purported to show that the vast majority of the “indigenous” Palestinians expelled by Israel in 1948 had in reality only recently immigrated to Palestine, was a poorly constructed hoax. This pissed a lot of mainstream commentators off mightily, since they’d just spent a year or so praising it as the best thing since the Nakba. From that day, Prof. Finkelstein has been persona non grata as far as mainstream commentary is concerned – his consistently “anti-Israel” (read: pro-international law) views, expressed in lectures and in his many books, vis-a-vis the Israel/Palestine conflict haven’t exactly helped. Then, a couple of years ago, Alan Dershowitz published a book called The Case for Israel, which was not only a complete fraud, but was a fraud that had actually been plagiarised from the very same book Finkelstein had debunked years earlier – From Time Immemorial! Finkelstein pointed this out during a heated Democracy Now! debate – and, more recently, in his book Beyond Chutzpah – and Dershowitz’ campaign against him has continued ever since. It is currently manifesting itself in a disgraceful attempt by Dershowitz and other so-called “pro-Israel” commentators to deny Finkelstein tenure at DePaul university, where he teaches political science.
What has happened to Prof. Finkelstein, both with regards to this specific affair over his tenure at DePaul university and in general (there’s a reason why he’s one of the oldest “assistant professors” in the United States, despite his readily acknowledged record of excellent scholarship), clearly demonstrates that, in the U.S. at least, there is a significant and material cost for any public figure who dares take a stand against Israeli oppression. Here’s what Raul Hilberg had to say on the topic (in the discussion linked to at the top, which I highly recommend watching):
“I was struck by the fact, even as I, myself, was researching the same territory that Professor Finkelstein was covering [in his book, The Holocaust Industry], 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…
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…
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 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. 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.” [emphasis and link mine]
Prof. Avi Shlaim continued in a similar vein:
“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…
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.” [my emphasis]
Hilberg concluded that Finkelstein’s “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.” That displaying academic and moral integrity when it comes to the Israel/Palestine conflict entails a “great cost” is a great shame, and surely represents a huge victory for those self-designated “pro-Israel” propagandist groups that work tirelessly to distort and silence debate. Finkelstein recently took part in a BBC Doha Debate on precisely this topic (whether or not the “pro-Israel” Lobby is stifling debate about the I/P conflict), which you can watch below:
(Sorry it’s in five parts – on Google Video it’s available all in one go, but I don’t know how to embed that here).
Unfortunately, it features that arrogant `Euston liberal’ and Times columnist David Aaronovitch, and the presenter seems to think he’s being `combative’ by not allowing anyone to finish their sentence, but it’s worth a watch nevertheless.
On the subject of Prof. Finkelstein’s tenure `difficulties’, see Noam Chomsky on a recent edition of Democracy Now!, where he accused Alan Dershowiz of launching a “jihad” against Finkelstein. It’s an accurate description, capturing perfectly the viciousness and bloody-mindedness that has characterised Dershowitz’ attempts to exact revenge on Finkelstein for exposing his fraud.
Chomsky continued,
“The whole thing is outrageous. I mean, he’s an outstanding scholar. He has produced book after book. He’s got recommendations from some of the leading scholars in the many areas in which he has worked. The faculty — the departmental committee unanimously recommended him for tenure. It’s amazing that he hasn’t had full professorship a long time ago.
And, as you were saying, there was a huge campaign led by a Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, to try in a desperate effort to defame him and vilify him, so as to prevent him from getting tenure. The details of it are utterly shocking, and, as you said, it got to the point where the DePaul administration called on Harvard to put an end to this…
What’s behind it? It’s very simple and straightforward. Norman Finkelstein wrote a book, which is in fact the best compendium that now exists of human rights violations in Israel and the blocking of diplomacy by Israel and the United States, which I mentioned — very careful scholarly book, as all of his work is, impeccable — also about the uses of anti-Semitism to try to silence a critical discussion.
And the framework of his book was a critique of a book of apologetics for atrocities and violence by Alan Dershowitz. That was the framework. So he went through Dershowitz’s shark claims, showed in great detail that they are completely false and outrageous, that he’s lying about the facts, that he’s an apologist for violence, that he’s a passionate opponent of civil liberties — which he is — and he documented it in detail.
Dershowitz is intelligent enough to know that he can’t respond, so he does what any tenth-rate lawyer does when you have a rotten case: you try to change the subject, maybe by vilifying opposing counsel. That changes the subject. Now we talk about whether, you know, opposing counsel did or did not commit this iniquity. And the tactic is a very good one, because you win, even if you lose. Suppose your charges against are all refuted. You’ve still won. You’ve changed the subject. The subject is no longer the real topic: the crucial facts about Israel, Dershowitz’s vulgar apologetics for them, which sort of are reminiscent of the worst days of Stalinism. We’ve forgotten all of that. We’re now talking about whether Finkelstein did this, that and the other thing. And even if the charges are false, the topic’s been changed. That’s the basis of it.”
Indeed. By the way, don’t forget to join the Finkelstein Solidarity Campaign!
(See also here for a good examination of the depths of dishonesty and desperation to which Dershowitz has sunks in order to smear Finkelstein, and see here for a reasonably fair summary of the whole affair in The Nation).
Cross-posted at The Heathlander
