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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Appearances
As I said, when the war was thrown into the court of the United Nations, they were faced with a practical problem. And I, for one, am not going to try to adjudicate the rights and wrongs from the beginning. I do not believe... that if territorial displacement and dispossession was inherent in the Zionist project, I do not believe it can be a legitimate political enterprise.
Now, you might say, that's speaking from 2022, or 2024. But we have to recognize that from nearly the beginning, for perfectly obvious reasons, having nothing to do with antisemitism, anti-Westernism, anti-Europeanism, but because no people that I am aware of would voluntarily cede its country. You can perfectly understand Native American resistance to Euro colonialism.
You can perfectly well understand it without any anti-Europeanism, anti-whitism, anti-Christianism. They didn't want to cede their country. to invaders. That's completely understandable.
You minimize it.
Professor, why is it that if you read your book, Righteous Victims, you can read it and read it and read it and read it, as I have, you will find barely a word about the Arabs being motivated by anti-Semitism. It exists, though. I didn't say it doesn't exist.
Hey, I don't know a single non-Jew who doesn't harbor anti-Semitic sentiment. We're talking about Arabs now. But I don't know anybody that's just part of the human condition.
Yes, I do. And among the Arabs. So, Professor Mars, here's my problem. I didn't see that in your righteous victims. Even when you talked about the first intifada, and you talked about the second intifada, and you talked about how there was a lot of influence by Hamas, the Islamic movement. You even stated that there was a lot of anti-Semitism in those movements.
But then you went on to say, but of course, at bottom, it was about the occupation. It wasn't about... I've read it.
No, I'm not moving. I'm talking about your whole book. Your whole book. The occupation began in 67, the one you're talking about. I looked and looked and looked for evidence of this anti-Semitism as being a chief motor of Arab resistance to Zionism. I didn't see it. Did he make that claim? I don't remember the word chief.
Please don't give me this post-modernism binary. You're the one.
You're the one that said the chief motor.
Page 137.
He did say that. I'm not going to deny it. It's true. I can understand the sentiment, but I think it's wrong.
Okay, I'll just comment on that. I was rereading Shlomo Ben-Ami's last book, and he does at the end discuss at some length the whole issue of the refugee question bearing on the so-called peace process. And on the question of 48 and the Arab emigration, if you'll allow me, let me just quote him.
Israel is particularly fond of the awkwardly false symmetry she makes between the Palestinian refugee crisis and the forced emigration of 600,000 Jews from Arab countries following the creation of the state of Israel, as if it were, quote, an unplanned exchange of populations, unquote.
And then Mr. Ben-Ami, for those of you who are listening, he was Israel's former foreign minister, and he's an influential historian in his own right. He says, in fact, envoys from the Mossad and the Jewish agency worked underground in Arab countries and Iran to encourage Jews to go to Israel.
More importantly, for many Jews in Arab states, the very possibility of emigrating to Israel was the culmination of millennial aspirations. It represented the consummation of a dream to take part in Israel's resurgence as a nation. So this idea that they were all expelled after 1948, That's one area, Professor Morris, I defer to expertise. That's one of my credos in life.
I don't know the Israeli literature, but as it's been translated in English, there is very little solid scholarship on what happened in 1948 in the Arab countries and which caused the Jews to leave. The Arab Jews. The Arab Jews, right. But Shlomo Ben-Ami knows the literature, he knows the scholarship, he also has stories. He also comes from the Tangiers.
And Avishlaim, when he was interviewed by Merrin Rappaport on this question, he said, you simply cannot say that the Iraqi Jews were expelled. It's just not true. And he was speaking as an Iraqi Jew who left with his father and family in 1948. They were pushed out. They weren't expelled.
No, you're not interrupting me, because I only know what's been translated into English, and the English literature on the subject is very small and not scholarly. Now, there may be an... Hebrew literature? I don't know. But I was surprised that even Shlomo ben Ami, a steward of his state, fair enough, on this particular point, he called it false symmetry.
Showing 61–80 of 305 · page 4 of 16
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