Norman Finkelstein at Columbia
What stinks about Norman Finkelstein is not his scholarship. Plenty of academics holds views similar to his on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. People can disagree. It's his rhetoric, his demogoguery, his intellectual dishonesty, his hypocrisy, and his bad faith toward those who disagree with him that has gotten him into trouble.Finkelstein was at his demagogic best on Wednesday night at Columbia University, where he gave a speech on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that focused on two main themes. The first was that the conflict was uncontroversial because everyone agreed that Israel was violation of international law and was the conflict's aggressor. The second was that reports of increased antisemitism around the world were a hoax and were driven by the goal of stifling criticism of Israel.
The coalition of student organizations responsible for bringing Finkelstein to the campus consisted of the school's major Muslim and Arab groups.
Real intellectuals acknowledge differences of opinion. Finkelstein, who has always chosen the path of mocking polemicism to civil intellectualism in his public addresses, chose to argue that the other side didn't really exist. He used a mix of half-truth and demagoguery to do it. Finkelstein quoted at length from the International Court of Justice's opinion to back his assertion that there was nothing controversial about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because of the agreement of all 15 judges that Israel was in contravention of international law. The World Court, he claimed, was the world most important legal body, and thus, the verdict being in, there was simply nothing to argue about.
He then went on to say that a similar consensus exists among human rights organizations on the issue of Israel's culpability and that this was further proof that there was little to argue about.
But like most weak arguments, this one rested on the faulty assumption that there was nothing whatsoever controversial about international law, human rights law, or the international arbiters who create and apply these laws, and that a World Court opinion was the final say on whatever issues of international law there were as applied to the conflict.
Of course, neither one of these assumptions is accurate. International law, particularly as applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, continues to be a highly controversial discipline, an unregulated, unbalanced, unacountable concept. General Assembly resolutions, so often cited by pro-Palestinian propagandists for their lopsided support of anti-Israel resolutions, prove only that the Arabs wield the powerful weapon of oil effectively and that third-world states continue to hold a misguided view of Israel as a colonial power and hold its association with the United States against it. It proves nothing about the feeling of these states for the values of human rights, both because many of these states are human rights violators themselves, and because they are unwilling to spend any comparable amount of ink condemning much worse situations, from the Sudan to Libya to Congo to China to Saudi Arabia. Israel is thus a political issue, not a human rights issue, and a controversial political issue at that. It is true that the UN Human Rights Commission has condemned Israel early and often. It is not true that these condemnations are not controversial, because many of the countries that run the UNHRC are among the world's worst violators of human rights laws.
International law, because of these political imbalances, does not yet contain a definition of terrorism. This is solely because most of the Arab and Islamic states are unwilling to accede to any definition that would define the killing of Israeli civilians as terrorism. This adds to the controversy of international law, at least as promulgated by the General Assembly and the World Court, as a reliable medium for assessing the conflict.
And though Mr. Finkelstein would like us to believe that the World Court is, in essence, a Supreme Court of the world on issue of international law, the system simply doesn't work that way. Like the resolutions of the General Assembly, the opinions of the World Court are non-binding. They are advisory. They are not the final say. They are only binding if the parties before the Court agree to be bound by its decisions. That is why, outside of an occasional advisory opinion on something like the legality of the use of nuclear weapons, the World Court mostly settles highly technical border disputes and things like water rights.
As any honest scholar of the conflict knows, only certain resolutions of the United Nations Security Council are binding, and that is why, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, most major human rights organizations, as well as most governments, affirm that UN Security Council resolution 242 is the operative resolution. 242 calls for a negotiated settlement to the conflict, and does not, as Mr. Finkelstein claimed, call for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. It is not the case that there is a consensus that such a withdrawal is the solution to the conflict; even many Palestinian negotiators are willing to accept the assumption that there will be adjustments made so that Israel can keep large settlement blocks and sovereignty over the Western Wall. To the extent that 242 contradicts views expressed by the World Court, it is 242 that controls in international law, not the World Court.
Finkelstein went on to discuss what is now the tired topic of how Zionists stifle debate by accusing critics of Israel of antisemitism. Finkelstein's most outrageous rhetoric came in this section of the program, where he made the totally unsupported and false accusation that it was now common for critics of Israel to be referred to as Holocaust deniers, and that he thought that soon, Holocaust epithets would enter the slang lexicon, such as "mother-Holocauster" and the like. A joke to be sure, but a joke in very bad taste, based on a total lie. Finkelstein also cited last year's controversy over anti-Israel bias in the classroom at Columbia as another example of a false controversy.
As a questioner who had appeared in last year's documentary on anti-Israel bias in the classroom at Columbia reminded Finkelstein, no person who appeared in Columbia Unbecoming accused anyone of antisemitism, proving what many of us already know, which is that rather than critics of Israel being accused of antisemitism, it is far more common for critics of Israel to pronounce any criticism of themselves personally or the pro-Palestinian movement in general as an accusation of antisemitism. This is a valuable lie, because it justifies outrageous rhetoric of the type Mr. Finkelstein and others are known for. If one creates the impression that accusations of antisemitism are de facto without basis, one can immunize oneself from that charge. And indeed, the tactic appears to have been successful, because the reality is that there has been no stifling of debate. Mr. Finkelstein came to Columbia and gave his speech. If the Middle Eastern Studies Association is any measure, academe is dominated by people who share many of Finkelstein's political opinions. They haven't been silenced. There is not one case that I know of where a pro-Palestinian academic was fired for his viewpoint.
Mr. Finkelstein was no more honest in his surprisingly thin argument that there was no spike in European antisemitism. Mr. Finkelstein's sole support for this part of his thesis was a Pew survey finding a lessening in antisemitic attitudes among Europeans. No mention was made of the rise in actual antisemitic incidents. The logic of his argument was that Jews should take comfort if antisemitic viewpoints drop 20 or 30 percent, even if attacks rise 40 or 50 percent. In other words, it isn't a big problem if the fascists killed 100 more people than last year, so long as they dropped a couple of seats in the Parliament.
Mr. Finkelstein concluded his speech by attacking Alan Dershowitz's book, The Case for Israel, claiming that it was a hoax and a fraud, exemplified by Mr. Dershowitz's claim that Israel's human rights record was generally superb. Like so much else, this was a half-truth because Mr. Finkelstein did not tell the audience that Dershowitz's argument was not based on the assessments of human rights organizations based on the controversial discipline of international law, but was a relativistic argument based on the reality of conflict and the comparison of the conflict to other situations both past and present. Thus, Dershowitz could argue that whether a policy of targetted killing was considered legal by this or that human rights organization, when compared to, for instance, US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel's record was indeed superb. When compared to the responses of other states faced with terrorist insurgencies, such as Syria in 1982, Jordan in 1970, the US today, and so on, Israel's response had resulted in far fewer casualties, evinced a much greater respect for the principles of proportionality that are at the heart of international norms of armed conflict, and on this relative basis, could be reasonably characterized as generally superb.
Finkelstein also mischaracterized, as many have, the position of Benny Morris on the expulsion of Palestinian refugees in 1948. Morris has said that Israel's mistake was not expelling all of the Palestinians in 1948. He was almost certainly saying this tongue in cheek to illuminate the irony that states who perpetrated a complete ethnic cleansing, a "successful" ethnic cleansing as it were, came in for far less criticism than those that hadn't. The proof is that Morris also made the point that had the Arabs fulfilled their aims in 1948 and expelled the Jews, the world would not now be clamoring for repatriation of Jews to the region. They don't clamor for repatriation or restitution for Jews expelled from Arab countries, largely because these ethnic cleansings were by and large successful.
Finkelstein's mocking bad faith and nastiness were on display during the question and answer period. To a student who asked how Finkelstein could argue that antisemitism in Europe was on the wane when his own synagogue in Istanbul had recently been bombed, Mr. Finkelstein's response was that technically, Turkey was not part of Europe. To another question (mine) challenging Mr. Finkelstein's citation of casualty statistics as support for his thesis that Israel was a worse aggressor than Hamas by asking what Mr. Finkelstein would say if one of Hamas's many attempts to perpetrate a mega-terror attack were successful and resulted in thousands of casualties, Mr. Finkelstein compared it to asking if Grandma grew wheels, would she be a baby carriage.
I responded, by now fed up with Finkelstein's lack of good faith, by reminding Mr. Finkelstein that whereas Grandma was not trying to grow wheels, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had tried many times in the past to perpetrate a mega-terror attack. (I was shouted down by members of the crowd.)
Like so many other times that night, Finkelstein was responding to an argument by claiming that it didn't exist. That's intellectual dishonesty.
The promotion of your viewpoint as the only legitimate one of right-thinking people and the belittling and mocking of all others is demagoguery.
Accusing others of debasing the Holocaust when you are given to comparing Israelis to Nazis early and often is hypocrisy.
Claiming that the term "Holocaust denier" is used with any regularity as an epithet is a simple fib.
Claiming that the term "antisemite" is used with any regularity as an epithet began as an invidious exaggeration, and now has turned into a full-blown fabrication to legitimize hate speech.
Mr. Finkelstein is thus an intellectually dishonest, demagogic, lying hypocrite, and he did the groups that brought him to Columbia no good.
posted by Michael Brenner @ 9:05 PM
13 comments
