Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History,
Norman G Finkelstein, Verso, 2005, £16.99 (HB), 332pp
When we reviewed Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry in 2000, we lost a subscriber who protested that is was not possible to criticise any aspect of Jewish conduct because of the Holocaust. Five years on it is still a challenge to have a discussion about the history of the Jewish people and the establishment of the Zionist state of Israel without meeting irrational hostility and accusations of anti-Semitism. Finkelstein has faced a torrent of abuse since the publication of Beyond Chutzpah, directed not at the book, but at him personally as a ‘self-hating Jew’. The book, which is a work of substantial scholarship, had not received one review in any of the hundreds of academic and general media publications in the US months after its publication.
Finkelstein alerts the reader to the ‘vast proliferation of sheer fraud masquerading as serious scholarship’ that surrounds the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, which is in essence very simple. Israel is in illegal occupation of Palestinian lands. Controversy surrounding this situation, he asserts, is politically contrived in order to conceal or distort the facts and the documentary record and thereby deflect criticism from Israel.
In the first part of his book, Finkelstein charts the resurgences of claims of a ‘new’ or ‘real’ anti-Semitism by following the publication of books of the same name, most of them written by the leaders of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the United States. Highlighting the main targets said to be leading the anti-Semitic offences in each of these books, Finkelstein shows how over time the authors are moving politically further and further to the right, and that this reflects their class interests.1
For example, Forster and Epstein’s The New Anti-Semitism, published in 1974, claims that the main thrust of anti-Semitism, apart from that supposedly coming from the African American community, comes from the ‘Radical Left’, and sectors of the religious and peace community. The next publication, in 1982, Nathan and Ruth Perlmutter’s The Real Anti-Semitism, was devoted to the alleged anti-Semitism of the mainstream left and even centre. By 2003, Abraham Foxman’s Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism cast as the heart of anti-Semitic darkness mainstream human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The ‘new’ or ‘real’ anti-Semitism embraces everyone from Andrew Lloyd Webber, who wrote the musical Jesus Christ Superstar to those who challenge Jewish interests anywhere.
It is significant that each new book, each campaign to combat ‘the new anti-Semitism, has coincided with renewed international pressures on Israel to withdraw from occupied Arab territories in exchange for recognition from neighbouring Arab states’. Moreover, the construct of a pervasive new anti-Semitism has not prevented leaders of the ADL from making open political alliances with right-wing Christian fundamentalists whose theology ‘reeked of anti-Semitism, [but] it was of no account as long as they gave backing to a militarised Israel’.
Accusations of anti-Semitism serve to gag criticism of Israel and have been largely successful. There have been witch-hunts across university campuses – we have seen many in Britain, for those showing the slightest sympathy for the Palestinian people. Steven and Hilary Rose and others calling for an academic boycott of Israel have been subject to abuse. FRFI’s regular pickets of Marks and Spencer calling for a boycott of the largest corporate sponsor of British-Israeli trade, a company that has had market gardens producing food directly for its stores on illegally occupied land in Gush Katif, have been abused, arrested and boycotted by the media. The most recent act of university bullying occurred at the School of Oriental and African Studies where a Muslim student, Nasser Amin, was given a formal reprimand and threatened with charges of incitement to racial hatred for having written an article for a student magazine arguing that the Palestinians had the right to use force against Israel’s occupation.2 Campus Watch invites students to report teachers who are insufficiently supportive of Israel, a practice commonplace in the US alongside false allegations of assaults by Palestinian students on Jews.
Finkelstein shows that unremitting accusations of anti-Semitism are used as a smokescreen to conceal the real issues of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. The chief motor for Arab antagonism is fear of territorial dispossession. The Zionist project was never to merely exploit the Arabs but always to dispossess them. The ethnic cleansing of 1948 was ‘premeditated, indeed deeply entrenched in the Zionist goal of creating an overwhelmingly Jewish state in a territory overwhelmingly non-Jewish.’ Such precise statements on the 1948/9 War introduce and conclude the book and the appendices blow away many of the repeated myths about the so-called ‘War of Independence’, but Finkelstein’s own focus remains on the two-state solution, showing in the appendices how the Zionists have repeatedly rejected it. The bulk of this study is a closely monitored critique of the occupation of Palestinian land since 1967.
In the second part of the book Finkelstein turns his attention to Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz, and especially his 2003 book A Case for Israel, an ‘immediate and influential bestseller’. Finkelstein’s aim is to expose the brutality and criminality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as he picks apart the Dershowitz main thesis – that Israel’s human rights record is ‘generally superb’.
Finkelstein demonstrates over and over again how Dershowitz’s claims are made without evidence, and that human rights organisations have a consensus showing that Israel’s occupation is ‘morally indefensible’. Finkelstein takes information from a variety of human rights organisations, particularly Israeli and Palestinian, and also the US-based Human Rights Watch, United Nations affiliated groups and Amnesty International – whose ‘manifold reports’ are a ‘most underutilised resource’.
Dershowitz makes many unfounded contentions: that Israeli killings are ‘unintentional’; that Israelis are punished for killing civilians. Each time Finkelstein presents well-documented examples that prove the exact opposite (nearly half of all those shot are shot in the head; of 72 Military Police investigations only three resulted in convictions – maximum sentence was 65 days in prison). Finkelstein details Zionist abuse of children; attacks on the Palestinian medical system, ambulances and personnel; extra judicial assassinations; house demolitions used as punishment for families of suspects. Destruction of property is used both as punishment and to create permanent facts on the ground – Israel’s expansion.
Torture of Palestinian detainees by Israel is routine. B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation, reported in 2000 that 85% of those interrogated are subjected to torture. The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel concluded in 2003 after a two-year study that the number of detainees ‘against whom no method of ill-treatment whatsoever was used is negligible.’ Amnesty International and B’Tselem concurred in the late 1990s, following Israeli Supreme Court decisions that Israel is the only country to have legally sanctioned torture.
Dershowitz argues that the forms of torture used instil fear rather than pain, and that destruction of homes is ‘among the most moral and calibrated responses’. Never once does he cite a mainstream human rights organisation to support his claims, accusing the Palestinians of: biological warfare (no evidence, but Israeli settlers are poisoning Palestinian fields); using human shields (no evidence of Palestinian use but evidence of Israeli use and in the orders that Israeli soldiers receive); ‘terrorist abortion’ – women raped and then shamed for their pregnancy into becoming suicide bombers (no evidence – hundreds of women volunteering). He described the siege of Jenin in 2002, considered a war crime by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, in which Palestinians were murdered in their own houses as they were bulldozed, as ‘a model of how to conduct urban warfare’.
The Israeli Supreme Court is, according to Dershowitz, ‘among the best in the world’. B’Tselem disagrees, observing in a press release entitled ‘Israel’s contempt for fundamental legal principles’ that: ‘What renders Israel’s abuses unique throughout the world is the relentless efforts to justify what cannot be justified.’
Finkelstein’s book is a valuable and exhaustive documentation of Israel’s abuses in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from many sources. This book is useful to us in Britain as a powerful tool in fighting against Israel’s apologists here in Britain and building a movement to sever all British support for the Zionist occupation of Palestine.
Fiona Donovan
1. ‘Reflecting its elite Jewish constituency, ADL had in fact become a bastion of reaction.’ (Finkelstein, 2005, p31)
2. To protest against the mistreatment of Nasser Amin contact Colin Bundy: [email protected]
FRFI 189 February / March 2006
