Palestine Talks | Norman Finkelstein

So thank you very much Norman for allowing us to visit you at your apartment today. It's a pleasure to be here to talk to you. I hope we can explore some things that have to do with the politics of memory and how it is being exploited. by certain actors, Germany is one of those suppressing pro-Palestinian voices and also how we can still genuinely honor the memory of the Holocaust and at the same time be in solidarity with pro-Palestinian efforts, but before addressing those questions seriously, I would like to invite you to go out. of curiosity mainly U because your approach as a thinker and activist involves a lot of rigor and nuances, if you could give us a little idea of ​​what your superior was like, that connects with the fact that my parents were refugees from Europe, they came after the war they were literate I would say my mother was very literate she was she attended a good school she received a classical education she knew Latin she knew French uh she knew classical music uh apparently she was pretty good at math when the war ended she was on the brink, she was enrolled at the mathematics faculty at the University of Wara, which I suppose was unusual because she was a woman and she was Jewish.

So, despite those two obstacles, she was enrolled in medical school for mathematics. After the war, my father was a vocational worker he was a factory worker um I have to say I didn't have much contact with my father because it was a time when factory workers got up early, it was before the alarm clocks, alarm clocks were a luxury, you only had an internal alarm. clock and got up punctually at 6:00 a.m. I'm sure it wasn't much different from surfing for a peasant in Central Europe, they didn't have a gadget, they rang an alarm clock and they went to work, they worked. six days a week to be exact 5 and a half I worked on Saturdays until 2:00 and the rest of the time at home I slept it was not an easy life for my father my mother had to raise three children alone It may not seem like a great task for her listeners, but when I say on her own I mean it literally because every member of her pre-war family and every member of my father's pre-war family were exterminated, so she couldn't turn to a sister , you know a sister to help grandpa, you know her parents to help her and she didn't trust anyone, there was no way she would have a babysitter, so she was, as they say, a hands-on mother, uh, which meant very little time for my father or mother for intellectual activity, however, they read the New York Times, which was the newspaper of reference at that time, they read it religiously, they read every page, which was a family ritual, Sunday Times, the Sunday New York Times.

It came in a lot of sections it was the magazine section, the book review section, the arts section, of course, the business section and the two news sections, it was very thick paper, very thick and I remember that On Sunday morning there was also the sports section. and on Sunday morning at breakfast, we would hand them over and divide which section you would get. Oh, and there was also the week's news in the review section because you had to read it when you were a kid, say in 10th grade history class. Grade Mrs. Geren hobber, we received quizzes about the news of the week in review, you have to read it for school, but we read it as a family, so although there was no time for intellectual activity due to the loads of my father's work and my my mother's work at home uh there was no time yet it's a Jewish family and the life of the Mind was uh there was a prize attached to the life of the Mind no one had to tell us to do well in school no one had to order us that we did it you did well in school you just knew you had to do well in school I was just going with it was just part of a Jewish cultural wall I grew up in a highly competitive and ambitious neighborhood and competition and ambition I gave it my all I want to say as an aside I'm sorry that these interviews that I am doing are a kind of gift from the interviewee because you have done a lot and it must be recognized that you are mobilizing people.

It seems like the last six months have been brutal for me. I am not a young man and I did not expect this to happen at all. He had renounced Gaza in 2020. He had registered it for 15 years. I gave 42 years of my life to the Israel-Palestine conflict that's all I did that's all I did I read and reread and reread and reread these human rights reports because I basically consider myself a forensic scholar media forensics I try to end up analyzing the evidence in particular the evidence that Israel presents and try to show why it is not true, why it is false and it is never blatantly false or sometimes it is blatantly false but most of the time it is not and it requires great concentration read it, reread it and reread it to find the errors in the logic the errors in the supposed evidence the ju the position between what was said on page three what was said on page 30 and what was said on page 300 you know and but you have to keep rereading and rereading to see wait but they said that on page three, but they also said that on the page, you know, so I did that for 42 years, in fact, I'm only going to get up for half a second, how I started?

Oh, excuse me, did I drop something? problem no problem okay so how did I get started in all this? um, I was a follower of madong a maist in the 1970s and I was a fan, I was a true believer. I also maintained my intellectual self-esteem and there were people. of very high intellectual caliber Paul Sweezy, my professor and Father Charles Bleheim, were people of very high intellectual caliber who were also M and I read them. I studied with them, which showed that I suffered from a lot of illusions and those illusions were shattered, they were pulverized when Madong passed away and everything turned upside down shortly after he passed away and then in 1982, so I was devastated when that happened.

I felt like it wasn't just that I was wrong, but that I felt like a fool. I had fired everyone who disagreed with me. the language of the time as bourgeois or petty bourgeois that is the language we use and it turned out that they were right and I was very arrogant very conceited very self-confident yes I read a lot but I didn't read the other side I read my site and I was completely bedridden for 3 weeks, as I said not so much because I was wrong but because I was humiliated, so in June 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon.

I was always a political activist. Israel and Palestine were not on my radar at all. Not at all, then Israel invades Lebanon. I got involved as an activist and then, for Reon, it's not worth getting into, I started deciding, hey, this is a topic for a doctoral thesis, and even though I had finished my studies at Princeton, I hadn't done it. I still wrote the thesis, so I thought what the hell would I write my doctoral thesis on the topic when I chose the topic of Zionism, which was my doctoral thesis was a study of the theory of Zionism and just when I was finishing the thesis in 1982 or 83 just when I was finishing it I came and I started reading about this book called Time in Memorial this is the book and this book claims that it is going to revolutionize our understanding of the conflict between Israel and Palestine and everything we thought about it.

I was wrong and said that the claim was that the author demonstrates through this rigorous demographic study that Palestine was empty on the eve of Zionist colonization, the Zionists came to Palestine, made the desert bloom and then all these Arabs and neighboring countries sneak in to Palestine and claim to be indigenous. to the land, okay, a lot of people in what you could call support for Palestine. I don't like that term in the pro-Palestine community dismissed this, oh this is just Zionist garbage, you know I wasn't ready to do that, why, why not too. I had long ago dismissed everyone who didn't share my views on China as bourgeois or petty bourgeois and now I hear oh, that's just Zionist this and Zionist that.

I thought I never once bit myself. Shy, I'm not going to do it. I made that mistake again of simply dismissing what I didn't agree with, so I sat down. I was working at that time in a settlement house with poor children from projects that we call projects in the city and I worked. I used to work on my thesis in the morning, work in the stud house in the afternoon and then go home and do my thesis work in the evening and then when I'm on this book I decide I'm not coming back I make that mistake and start. read the book and read the book and read the book and read the book I have to know if what she says is true because if it is true I am leaving here I am not going to support what is not true so if this is the truth, so the cause is false, I'm out and the book had these tables at the end, as you can see, I didn't use calculators or anything back then, I just used paper and pencil and I'm going over it over and over again and one night, um, it was like 1:00 a.m. m., I suddenly discovered that the demographic day that was false, I can't tell you, you know, it was so long ago, almost half a century ago, my heart.

I started throbbing and started sweating I lived in a small studio apartment I started pacing back and forth. I kept saying I did it, I did it. It proves that the book is a fraud and without going into all the other details, that's how I started a career as a forensic scholar and did it for 42 years and then in 2020 I decided it's over, they lost, the case is lost and I I had given up on Gaza even in my last books on the subject the last two were these two this was Gaza an investigation into his martyrdom and at the end of the book, the end I say, if I can find it, the author has a vague hope that this book find an audience among your contemporaries yet the truth must be preserved it is the least that is owed to the victims perhaps one day in the distant future when the tenor of the times is more receptive someone will stumble upon this book gathering dust on a shelf from the library, shake off the cobwebs and be Stung by indignation at the fate of a people, the people of Gaza, if not abandoned by God, then betrayed by the C greed and corruption, careerism and cynicism, cowardice and cowardice of men mortals, so I didn't think anyone would read the book.

When the case came before the international criminal court, not for the International Criminal Court, not for the international court of justice, for the international criminal court, I wrote this long and simple dissection of the evidence presented by Israel to assist in the criminal process of the book as my reader. he lamented, it sold about 350 copies, most of which I bought to give to the pig people for the case and that was it, no one read it. 350 copies sold half of them, I bought them, which means a lot of work, a lot of work on 100 people may have read, you know, I gave up, so when October 7th happened already I had moved on to other topics, but I was physically tired, I'll be honest, physically exhausted, I'll be honest about it, so I was out.

Ready, I know it was the first thing I had to do. You brought this approach to forensic scholarship as well, as I was starting from the beginning with memory and the politics of memory and I'm wondering how you got involved in that when this is. When you first got involved in the forensic approach to memory politics and saw how various states, be it Israel or Germany, weaponized memory for nefarious purposes, well, the only book of mine that sold was The Memory Industry. Holocaust, it was a complete coincidence. I know it's funny, the Genesis of these things there was a book written by a professor at the University of Chicago named um uh Peter Novic it was called The Holocaust in American Life now one thing I knew from life experience was the Holocaust and life.

American because my parents They were real survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, uh, they were, they came here as refugees when we were children, they were contemptuously called novices, novices means they don't know the customs of the United States because many of the Jews that I meet We came into contact, they came, their families came in the Great Wave of Jewish immigration at the beginning of the 20th century, okay, so they grew up in the Jewish ghettos in places in New York like Brownsville, etc., and they were already them, they were second, second and second generation, second or third generation, so they knew how to be American and my parents were newbies, they were not yet assimilated into American life, so they came and I knew exactly what the experience was.

The Jews who survived the Nazi Holocaust what was their experience in the United States were my parents, so when I read the book The Holocaust in American Life there were parts that I agreed with and parts that I disagreed with and I had quite confident in my judgments and, um, but there are some things I don't totally agree with, so my editor at the time was a small publisher called Verso, the director of Vero at the time is a guy called Colin Robinson and Colin Robinson, whatever conversation you have, any conversation. you can be talking about oh, it's going to be a nice day tomorrow and he says why don't you write a book about it.

Always when you say why don't you writea book about it, he said why not. I wrote a book about the Holocaust nelvi uh in American life, so I sat down. I first wrote a review of the book for the London Review of Books. It was the last time they had me in their ranks and then I said, "Okay." We will turn it into a book and if it had an impact, it became an international bestseller. It is very difficult to estimate how many copies of the book are sold because many countries do not have copyright laws and therefore pirated additions and a large part of the Middle East, where the book was popular for reasons that are quite obvious.

All these pirated additions came out there. Of course, one of my fears is how it was translated and whether they were faithful to the accuracy of my language or whether the Jews invented the Holocaust, which was not the point of the book actually, um, so, uh, also before the Holocaust industry had written another book about the no with no myself um me and a German historian Ruth Batina Burn wrote a book about this book by a long-forgotten guy named Daniel Jonah Gold Hogen it was called The Willing Executioners of Hitler, which is a huge international event the publication of that book.

I thought the book was rubbish and I sat down and dissected it. I think I did it. I produced a competent piece of forensic scholarship and then came the Holocaust industry, where I became involved again in the question of The Nazi Holocaust not as a historical event on which I never felt qualified to comment, but as an ideological event, i.e. how the Nazi Holocaust had been instrumentalized to protect Israel from criticism and was also being used at that time. as a blackmail weapon against several European countries, starting with Switzerland, and obviously the effect of the Holocaust weapon's effectiveness over time has seriously diminished due to excessive use, so I don't think it is as effective now as it was then with obviously the exception of Germany itself, where he's used to bullying Germany into doing things they should know are wrong, but I admit it.

I think Germany is in a very difficult moral situation because it is very difficult for them to criticize Israel for that historical baggage. I understand that I am not going to deny it. I just wish and don't want to sound more vulgar. I just wish they would shut up. They know what they are doing is wrong. Because? Do you have to do it in such a blatant, scandalous way? You could simply say that, for historical reasons, we feel uncomfortable criticizing Israel. We will simply defer to the EU consensus opinion. Okay, for me, that would be a reasonable position, but to defend what is happening now until about 3 weeks ago unconditionally unacceptable if I were in Germany and saw the chancellor I would spit in his face no not unacceptable I understand the moral dilemma I understand, but with the exception of Germany it would They say the Holocaust weapon has not been particularly effective in recent years in the Democratic Party because the mantle of the Democratic Party became identity politics at its base, like the Black Lives Matter movement and all the similar Kindred movements that had adopted Palestine as a cause is true and then when October happened and then the genocide in Gaza, that base was now energized by Palestine because they already supported the cause and that created the big split in the party , now with the leadership he doesn't know what to do.

Do the Biden Schumer thing to Nancy Pelosi, that leadership doesn't know what to do because they created this monster, I mean, they invested in identity politics and now identity politics says, well, Israel is also a settler colonial state that was part of Israel's identity politics. It's oppressing the Palestinian identity, you know, and that's why, in some ways, identity politics backfired on the Democratic Party because the leadership is deeply rooted both ideologically and financially, it's deeply rooted in support for Israel, but the base of the Democratic Party because it was created in the uh ideology of political identity, the base is totally committed to Palestine and, as I said, it was kind of counterproductive for the party because the base had identified if I had appropriated Palestine as its cause, you actually frame it so well because yes, there is ide identity politics at the grassroots level and then also at the elite level and the elite level never embraced Palestine because it seems to have been that way for years, so progressive.

I even remember the time when I came back from grad school and I was going through some of the Canadian newspapers I was thinking how long has it become the establishment so I'm supposed to feel happy I guess so because like when you got involved in the social justice like I don't remember because it was fake social justice it was classless social justice but what happened was they didn't really care if the base was Pro Palestine because the cause seemed dead and um all these activists are for about BDS, no one cared because at this point what was the only thing there was. no, there were no negotiations underway, there was no longer a peace process, everything was over and then, on October 7, it was not over and they were in a great moment, not every day, it is evident that the Biden Administration is in a big mess because just today, if you don't mind, it was just today, so if we're going to see how the Goda protesters are challenging the Democratic leaders, the biggest story of the time, the entire base, yeah, because of the identity politics, that's the irony, the entire base because of identity politics is in rebellion against the leadership and the leadership created identity politics to get a base to replace the white working class, it was an irony, it was a irony, I mean, people told me that you have to admit not even for everyone. your criticism of identity politics you have to admit that they put Palestine on the map, which is true, it's true, you know, my creed in life is to never fight with the facts, that's really true, you have to explain it, the facts you can.

Don't ignore them and I think the explanation is that it all backfired on them because they thought the cause was dead so they didn't care, let them shout BDS, who cares? You know, uh, it's been like Zigu Brinsky said when he was National Security Advisor. to Carter at a moment in the eternal peace process when he says that it is byby p, it was his famous phrase bye P, which means the representative Palestinian organization at that time, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and it seemed that it was by bye Palestine, remember Before October 7th, everyone was talking about the Abraham Accords.

Saudi Arabia joined Israel and the United States in the defense and defense pact and there was no talk of the Palestinians, so everything backfired because suddenly the Palestine C came back to life and there was If there had been a um, had become one of the litmus tests of the identity politics movement, although it seemed that before October 7th it seemed irrelevant, so, as I said, in this case it was really complicated what happened, it requires a fine. analysis, so just before we finish with Norman I wanted to ask you why, to your credit, you have been able to so consistently exercise a certain degree of fairness in the face of great opposition throughout your academic career and as an activist and I wonder If you have any advice for young academics, journalists or activists who may be experiencing something similar.

The advice is very simple. There was a philosopher named Julian Bender and he wrote a little book. It is called in French LA or um. The Betrayal of the Intellectuals I'm going to get it because it's on my shelf. Oops, just give me a moment, it'll be up here because it's arranged alphabetically, so it's a small book. The betrayal of the intellectuals is a complex book. but the one of his central thesis not all except one is that there are basically two sets of values ​​in the world one are material values ​​of Val everyone knows them Fame and Fortune um Fame and Fortune uh power power and privilege Fame and Fortune power and privilege is what that 99% of humanity strives to achieve a little recognition in life, a little fame, what Andy Warhol called the 15 minutes of fame, everyone wants their 15 minutes of self-recognition and everyone wants a little money, a small privilege, you want the power. you want the privilege, you want the fame, the 15 men of fame and you want some fortune, that's what 99% of people strive for and Benda says that the real world values ​​the material values ​​of the material world and then he says that, on the other hand, there is a small fraction of people who strive for spiritual values ​​and spiritual values ​​that everyone knows, the cameraman knows, the cameraman's assistant knows, the soundman knows that it is called Truth and Justice, okay , those are, so here we have fame and fortune and here we have truth, justice and Thena. he says those two sets of values ​​always conflict, there is a fundamental contradiction between the two, the more fame you have, the more fortune you have, the less truth there is in your life and the less justice there is in your life if you want to stay. faithful to those values ​​of your youth the values ​​of Truth and Justice the idealistic values ​​that we call young people who uh Embrace those values ​​we call them idealistic which is true because what is the opposite of idealistic materialist and it is blessed spiritual material idealist materialist okay then don't expect reward comes with a Turf I'm at the end of my life I made decisions at a very young age relatively young age I would say that around 15 I was clear about the path I would carve out in life the path I would take I don't think it would be fair to say Me I have strayed from it What I set out to do I did it I have been bitter I have been angry I have been furious What I felt were betrayals of me personally by people I considered friends and comrades.

My only regret at this particular moment is that I don't have the mental energy or physical wherewithal to rise to the occasion. I do the best I can, it's the best I can do at this particular moment I feel is inadequate to the task at hand, which is the horrors that are being inflicted on these godforsaken people, half of whom They are children. Thank you very much Donan for this deeply insightful, thought-provoking and very moving conversation. for me too, just wondering if there are any final observations or thoughts. Not well. I think I've already said what should be said at this particular moment.

Thank you so much. You are welcome. Alright. That is wonderful. Thank you so much.