Professor Ilan Pappe on Norman Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah

Occupation Hazard

Norman Finkelstein Challenges the Conventional Line on Israel.

Why is the history of modern Palestine such a matter of
debate? Why is it still regarded as a complex, indeed
obscure, chapter in contemporary history that cannot be
easily deciphered? Any abecedarian student of its past
who comes to it with clean hands would immediately
recognize that in fact its story is very simple. For
that matter it is not vastly different from other
colonialist instances or tales of national liberation.
It of course has its distinctive features, but in the
grand scheme of things it is the chronicle of a group
of people who left their homelands because they were
persecuted and went to a new land that they claimed as
their own and did everything in their power to drive
out the indigenous people who lived there. Like any
historical narrative, this skeleton of a story can be,
and has been, told in many different ways. However, the
naked truth about how outsiders coveted someone else’s
country is not sui generis, and the means they used to
obtain their newfound land have been successfully
employed in other cases of colonization and
dispossession throughout history.

Generations of Israeli and pro-Israeli scholars, very
much like their state’s diplomats, have hidden behind
the cloak of complexity in order to fend off any
criticism of their quite obviously brutal treatment of
the Palestinians in 1948 and since. They were aided,
and still are, by an impressive array of personalities,
especially in the United States. Nobel Prize winners,
members of the literati, and high-profile lawyers, not
to mention virtually everyone in Hollywood, from
filmmakers to actor, have repeated the Israeli message:
This is a complicated issue that would be better left
to the Israelis to deal with. An Orientalist perception
was embedded in this polemical line: Complex matters
should be handled by a civilized (namely, Western and
progressive) society, which Israel allegedly was and
is, and not entrusted to an uncivilized (i.e., Arab and
regressive) group like the Palestinians. The advanced
state will surely find the right solution for itself
and its primitive foe.

When official America endorsed this Israeli position,
it became the so-called Middle Eastern peace process,
one that was too sophisticated to be managed by the
Palestinians and hence had to be worked out between
Washington, DC, and Jerusalem and then dictated to the
Palestinians. The last time this approach was
attempted, in the summer of 2000 at Camp David, the
results were disastrous. The second intifada broke out,
and it rages on as this article goes to press.

The Zionist narrative is as simple a story as the
history of the conflict itself. The Jews redeemed their
lost and ancient homeland after two thousand years of
exile, and when they "returned" they found it derelict,
arid, and practically uninhabited. There were others on
the land, but they were basically nomads, the kind of
people you could, as Theodor Herzl wrote in 1895,
"spirit away" outside the Promised Land. Still, the
empty land somehow remained populated, and not only
this, but the elusive population rebelled and tried to
harm the Jewish returnees. Like any other narrative,
this one too can be laid out elegantly and scholarly or
conveyed coarsely and simply. It can appear as a sound
bite on American television when a suicide bombing is
"contexualized," or it can dominate a book produced by
one of the prestigious university publishing houses in
the West. But however verbose or taciturn Israel’s
advocates may be, the historical narrative they insist
on broadcasting is a false representation of the past
and present realities in the land of Palestine.

In academia, the Israeli claim of complexity and the
Zionist time line as a whole have been exposed as
propaganda at best. Similarly, the pendulum has swung
in favor of many principal chapters in the Palestinian
narrative, regarded hitherto as an Oriental fable. The
emergence of critical and post-Zionist scholarship in
Israel helped this process along by providing internal
deconstruction of the Zionist metanarrative and
accepting many historical claims made by the
Palestinians, especially with regard to the events of
1948. The group of "new Israeli historians" who have
focused on 1948 have endorsed the basic Palestinian
argument that the native people were forcefully
dispossessed in what today would be called an ethnic-
cleansing operation.

But outside the universities, particularly in the
United States, public figures continue to be
embarrassingly and unapologetically pro-Israeli. Few
have dared to challenge these self-appointed
ambassadors because many of them are quite often
influential journalists, highly placed lawyers, or
former politicians, ex-hostages of the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee in its most active years.
Norman G. Finkelstein is one of the few who has. In
1984 he confronted head-on Joan Peters’s From Time
Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict
Over Palestine, which claimed that most of the
Palestinians made their way into the territory only in
the 1920s and ’30s, an assertion so ridiculous it made
Peters’s book easy prey. Finkelstein tore her argument
to shreds.

Now, in Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism
and the Abuse of History, Finkelstein goes after bigger
targets and challenges some of the most sacred taboos
in the American public arena regarding Zionism and
Israel. One such exposure involves the misuse, indeed
abuse, of Holocaust memory in defense of Zionism. Any
substantial criticism of Israel is immediately branded
by apologists for the state as a new wave of anti-
Semitism. The Anti-Defamation League’s grotesque
manipulation of the message of Mel Gibson’s film The
Passion of the Christ and its purported association
with the Palestinian struggle against occupation makes
one wonder how intelligent people, even basically moral
people, could spin such idiotic tales and arouse
unwarranted, hysterical reactions with the effect of
papering over Israeli atrocities on the ground. The
puzzlement grows when one reads Finkelstein’s
industrious, at times sarcastic book, which shows how
easy it is to distinguish what happened in fact from
what Israeli sources (and their American defenders) say
happened. Scholarly work by historians Finkelstein does
not particularly care for because of their political
positions (such as Benny Morris) and self-inhibited
Israeli human rights organizations such as B’Tselem
show that even within their apologetic and cautious
representations there are few doubts remaining on two
issues: that Israel forcibly ejected the Palestinians
in 1948 and that it has abused, oppressed, and
humiliated those that remained ever since 1967.

I will spare most of the individuals for the purposes
of this review; they are all named in the book. One
after another, the most famous figures in the American
Zionist establishment, and some fellow travelers, like
the current president of Harvard, are all shown here to
subscribe to the exact same message: Criticism of
Israel feeds a new wave of anti-Semitism in the United
States. Reading their declarations in a single place,
one can appreciate the madness of their views, and
Finkelstein has not missed a thing.

And to his further credit, he does not dismiss the
possibility that anti-Jewishness has in fact risen as a
result of Israeli brutality in the occupied
territories. But the cry of anti-Semitism is not a
response to this development; it is rather, in his
words, "an ideological weapon to deflect justified
criticism of Israel and, concomitantly, powerful Jewish
interests."

No one co-opts intelligence in defense of a fable
better than Alan Dershowitz. Finkelstein observes that,
unlike Elie Wiesel, a troubled Jew who cannot apply his
universal moral standards to the state of Israel and
thus legitimizes all its misdeeds and crimes by
default, Dershowitz comes from the realm of criminal
law and has himself stated that "the criminal lawyer’s
job, for the most part, is to represent the guilty,
and, if possible, to get them off." Israel must be
guilty in Dershowitz’s mind, as becomes apparent in The
Case for Israel, which defends his client’s most
obvious crime. its human rights record. It would have
been a more "complex" case had he chosen to stand for
Israel’s right to exist or its wish to represent world
Jewry, but no: He opted to cleanse the most glaringly
unpleasant feature of the Jewish state since its
inception, its treatment of the Palestinians. In so
doing, Dershowitz attacks everyone from Amnesty
International and the United Nations to Israeli human
rights organizations and Jewish peace activists, on top
of course of condemning anyone who is Palestinian or
pro-Palestinian. They are all part of the new anti-
Semitism.

The most original aspect of Finkelstein’s book is his
deconstruction of Dershowitz’s praise for the Israeli
Supreme Court and his own examination of the court’s
record. Finkelstein’s book is full of evidence of
Israeli oppression that in itself is essential reading
for those who wish to judge Dershowitz’s propagandist
claims. But the Israeli Supreme Court is one of the
strongest links in an otherwise very weak chain on
which Dershowitz hangs his defense of Israel. It is
after all a body commended throughout the world for its
professionalism and impartiality. Finkelstein
systematically shows how the most callous aspects of
the occupation, torture centers, demolition of houses,
targeted killings, and denial of medical care. were in
fact legitimized a priori by the Israeli Supreme Court.
The court, and the legal system as a whole, like the
Israeli media and academia (neither of which is treated
in the book), are essential components in the state
oppression and occupation of the West Bank. Much more
work needs to be done in this direction; hopefully
Finkelstein will be one of many who further analyze
this atrocious reality.

The concluding section of Finkelstein’s book is devoted
to the historiographical aspects of Dershowitz’s work.
We can only concur with Finkelstein that "next to Alan
Dershowitz’s egregious falsification of Israel’s human
rights record and the real suffering such falsification
causes, Dershowitz’s academic derelictions seem small
beer." In fact the coda is anticlimactic in such a
powerful book, but to be fair it appears as an appendix
and not as an integral part of the work. Morris stars
as the main source for refuting Dershowitz’s historical
claims; it would have been better to use Palestinian
historians and oral history sources in addition to
Morris. But this does not undermine the overall service
Finkelstein has performed in exposing one critical
layer of knowledge production concerning Palestine that
for years defeated any attempt for the Palestinian
plight to receive a fair hearing from the American
public. The Palestinians deserved, but never received,
the same empathy and support good-hearted Americans
usually lend to occupied, oppressed, and persecuted
people the world over, even those harassed by their own
government. Shrewd advocates of the occupier and the
oppressor. abusing Holocaust memory and heightening
years of anti-Semitism, succeeded for a long time in
stifling solidarity with the Palestinians. This book
cracks the wall of deception and hypocrisy that enables
the daily violation of human and civil rights in
Palestine. As such, it has the potential to contribute
to the removal of the real wall that shuts out those in
the occupied territories.

Ilan Pappe is the author, most recently, of The Modern
Middle East (Routledge, 2005).

http://www.bookforum.com/pappe.html