"The era of the
"beautiful" Israel has passed, it seems irrevocably, and the disfigured Israel
that in recent years has replaced it in the public consciousness is a growing
embarrassment. It is not so much that Israel's behavior is worse than it was
before, but rather that the record of that behavior has, finally, caught up with
it. The truth can no longer be denied or dismissed."
"For a long while Israel's "supporters" deflected the impact of this
accumulating documentary record by wielding the twin swords of The Holocaust and
the "new anti-Semitism"... if 'another flare-up in the region, similar to the
Gaza operation, will probably lead to an even more severe out-break of
anti-Semitic activity against communities worldwide' (quote from the Israeli
Coordination Forum for Countering Anti-Semitism), then an efficacious method to
fight anti-Semitism would appear to be for Israel to stop committing massacres."
In his book analysing the Israeli invasion into Gaza, Norman Finkelstein takes a
clear and uncompromising position. It is a well researched and referenced
polemic that does not shirk from pointing the finger at those responsible for
what the UN Goldstone report (whose author is both Jewish and a self-declared
Zionist who "worked for Israel all of my adult life") clearly termed war crimes,
stating that "the Israeli assault on Gaza constituted "a deliberately
disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian
population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to
provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency
and vulnerability." Anybody still in doubt about the justification of this
characterisation should read Finkelstein's book as the testimony of a Jew who
speaks out against crimes committed in the name of people who used to keep quiet
about it, but now, he asserts are increasingly coming off the fence whilst
Israel grows more and more distant from its alleged support amongst the Jewish
people in the diaspora.
In a brief history of the Israel-Palestine conflict Finkelstein explains the
rationale for Israel to have broken a ceasefire with the Hamas-led Palestinian
government after first ensuring that both that government and its people were
weakened by a prolonged economic blockade: After the blunders in the Lebanon,
where Israel also stands accused of having committed widespread war crimes, the
Israeli governing elite felt the need to restore Israel's "deterrence capacity",
and that could only be achieved by showing unrestrained and disproportionate
force against a defenceless civil population. Israel's two major concerns which
it hoped to deal with by its Gaza invasion were that its enemies were less
afraid of it than they once were, and that any future peace initiative might
succeed in forcing Israel to concede in a compromise what it never had any
intention to concede, the existence of a Palestinian people with sovereignty
over any territory of their own.
Dealing with "Operation Cast Lead" as Israel termed the invasion, Finkelstein
takes apart any attempt of Israeli apologists to justify the carnage it
unleashed and describes minutely the progression of the military operation,
based on testimonies from Palestinians, independent observers and human rights
organisations as well as Israeli soldiers themselves, leaving no doubt that the
intended humanitarian disaster was not by accident but by design. As a fan of
Mahatma Ghandi he tries to show that Ghandi's advocacy for non-violent protest
did not extend to a call for oppressed people to take oppression lying down but
instead supported resistance in the face of impossible odds as "a refusal to
bend before overwhelming might in the full knowledge that it means certain
death", and he quotes Ghandi's response in 1947 to what might be the most
acceptable solution to the Palestinian problem as "The abandonment wholly by the
Jews of terrorism and other forms of violence".
Finkelstein supports a two-state solution of peaceful coexistence for Palestine.
He is hopeful that after the Israeli propaganda has had to take a serious dent
when the extens of Israel's crimes became known, the Palestinian position of
only asking for what the International Court of Justice and the United Nations
General Assembly repeatedly stated as their inviolable right - freedom from
occupation and self-determination - might gradually shift public opinion and,
with it, policy makers. I am not that optimistic since in my understanding
Israel is only a stepping stone on the road to world government (as predicted by
Ben Gurion in 1962), with Israel's designs not being limited to controlling and
subjugating people on the territories occupied so far. Nor do I support an
artificial two-state solution: Israel claims to be a democracy yet gives
favoured status to a set of people perceived as genetically Jewish. A
single-state solution with "one person, one vote" is what democracy would demand
instead. In spite those differences, Palestinians do have a strong advocate in
Norman Finkelstein, and I highly recommend his passionately written book in
their support.
