Norman Finkelstein
speaker
305 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Norman Finkelstein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Okay. Mr. Bonnell referred to cherry-picking and handful of quotes. Now, it's true that when you wrote your first book on the Palestinian refugee question, You only had a few lines on this issue of transfer. Four pages. In the first book. In the first book, four pages. Maybe four. You know, I'm not going to quarrel. My memory is not clear. We're talking about 40 years ago.
I read it, I read it, but then I read other things by you. Okay. And you were taken to task, if my memory is correct, that you hadn't adequately documented the claims of transfer. Allow me to finish.
And I thought that was a reasonable challenge because it was an unusual claim for a mainstream Israeli historian to say, as you did in that first book, that from the very beginning, transfer figured prominently in Zionist thinking. That was an unusual, if you read Anita Shapiro, you read Shabtai Tevit, that was an unusual acknowledgement by you. And then,
I found it very impressive that in that revised version of your first book, you devoted 25 pages to copiously documenting the salience of transfer in Zionist thinking. And in fact, you used a very provocative and resonant phrase. You said that transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism. We're not talking about circumstantial factors, a war, Arab hostility.
You said it's inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism. Now, as I said, so we won't be accused of cherry picking, those were 25 very densely argued pages. And then in an interview, and I could cite several quotes, but I'll choose one, you said, removing a population was needed. Let's look at the words. Without a population expulsion, a Jewish state would not have been established.
Now, you're the one, again, I was very surprised when I read your book. Here I'm referring to righteous victims. I was very surprised when I came to that page 37. where you wrote that territorial displacement and dispossession was the chief motor of Arab resistance to Zionism. Territorial displacement and dispossession were the chief motor of Arab resistance to Zionism. So you then went on to say
because the Arab population rationally feared territorial displacement and dispossession, it of course opposed Zionism. That's as normal as Native Americans opposing the Euro-American manifest destiny in the history of our own country, because they understood it would be at their expense It was inbuilt and inevitable.
And so now for you to come along and say that it all happened just because of the war, that otherwise the Zionists made all these plans for a happy minority to live there, That simply does not gel. It does not cohere. It is not reconcilable with what you yourself have written. It was inevitable and inbuilt. Now, in other situations you've said, that's true, but I think it was a greater good.
to establish a Jewish state at the expense of the indigenous population. That's another kind of argument. That was Theodore Roosevelt's argument in our own country. He said, we don't want the whole of North America to remain a squalid refuge for these wigwams and teepees. We have to get rid of them and make this a great country. But he didn't deny it. that it was inbuilt and inevitable.
There's some misunderstandings here. So let's try to clarify that. Number one, it was the old historians who would point to the fact, in Professor Morris's terminology, the old historians, what he called not real historians, he called them chroniclers, not real historians. It was the old Israeli historians who denied the centrality of transfer in Zionist thinking.
It was then Professor Morris who, contrary to Israel's historian establishment, who said, now you remind me it's four pages, but it came at the end of the book. It was- No, no, it's at the beginning of the book. Transfer. Yes, transfer is dealt with in four pages at the beginning of my first book on the Palestinian refugee problem. It's a fault of my memory, but the point still stands.
It was Professor Morris who introduced this idea in what you might call a big way.
I'm not quoting a part, I'm quoting 25 pages where Professor Morris was at great pains to document the claim that appeared in those early four pages of his book. You say it never became part of the official Zionist platform. It never became part of policy.
We're also asked, well, if this is true, why did that happen? Why did that happen? It's because it's a very simple fact, which everybody understands. Ideology doesn't operate in a vacuum. There are real-world practical problems. You can't just take an ideology and superimpose it on a political reality and turn it into a fact. It was the British mandate.
There was significant Arab resistance to Zionism. and that resistance was based on the fact, as you said, the fear of territorial displacement and dispossession. So you couldn't very well expect the Zionist movement to come out in neon lights and announce, hey, We're going to be expelling you the first chance we get. That's not realistic.
Later it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is true because the Arabs attacked the Jews. I read through your stuff. Even yesterday, I was looking through Righteous Victim. You should read other things. You're wasting your time. No, no. Actually, no. I do read other things, but I don't consider it a waste of time to read you. Not at all. You say that this wasn't inherent in Zionism.
Now, would you agree that David Ben-Gurion was a Zionist?
Right. Would you agree Chaim Weizmann was a Zionist? Yeah. Okay. I believe they were. I believe they took their ideology seriously. It was the first generation. Just like with the Bolsheviks, the first generation was committed to an idea. By the 1930s, it was just pure realpolitik. The ideology went out the window. The first generation, I have no doubt about their convictions. Okay?
They were Zionists. transfer was inevitable and inbuilt in Zionism. You keep repeating the same thing. As I said then, Mr. Morris, I have a problem reconciling what you're saying. It either was incidental or it was deeply entrenched. Here I read, it's deeply entrenched. Two very resonant words. Inevitable and inbuilt.
According to your 25 pages, everybody talked about it.
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