Email to Finkelstein regarding Ziomnia

10/3/2008

In Abu’s letter to Finkelstein he points to thirteen links that deal with issues presented in Finkelstein’s numerous lectures and/or media appearances. Contained within these links are Finkelstein’s statements, which according to various claims posted on Zio Mania, do not mesh with the ostensibly Anti-Zionist stance that he portrays to the public.

On first impression Zio Mania appears as a website dedicated to the anti-Zionist struggle, but then loses me when they align themselves with the nonsensical arguments of Holocaust deniers as Lady Renouf. At the same time I want to bring up how repellent the neo-Con, Zionist Campus Watch website is as they try insidiously to shut out any rational discussion about the Israeli-Palestine conflict in college classrooms. Nonetheless, on the Zio Mania website I agree that there are two important points challenging Finkelstein’s statements regarding the following: 1) “Israel as a state was founded in 1948 on stolen land which was occupied by force and massive bloodshed. International law deems that it’s inadmissible to keep land acquired by force; 2) UN Resolution 194 that establishes the Palestinians’ right of return to their homes and villages that they fled or compensation given for their loss of property if they choose not to return. I too would like some clarification from Finkelstein with respect to his statements on these two points. I would like, however, to preface this discussion by saying that I will not tolerate the offensive remarks, “fuck you Finkelstein Jew” and “money grubbing Jew” it cheapens and does not enhance our capacity for dialogue between Arabs and Jews. As a person of Lebanese/Arab American heritage, I too was guilty of becoming completely unglued with Israeli policy and in the past, on many occasions displaced my anger with animosity towards Jews –in spite of having wonderful Jewish friends. At the same time I have heard a couple of my Jewish friends speak disparagingly of Arabs. We probably are all guilty of this malicious name-calling so I am not just singling Abu out for these comments. And Arabs might say, but the Jews started it so I am justified in fighting back with this language. Again, I reiterate ethnic name calling will not bolster Arab and Jewish relations towards arriving at a solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict.

I have one last comment on this ethnic slurring. Norman Finkelstein is not “a money grubbing Jew” seeking sole compensation for his fight for Palestinians’ rights. Let us look at his current situation realistically. If he were an opportunist for the Palestinian cause, what vast financial gain will he yield by lecturing at universities, mosques, churches, centers of human rights advocacy? We are talking about shekels here. Yes, he has a university settlement, but does that last an eternity or his life time provided he enjoys some degree of longevity? He has been blackballed from academia because of his activism, how do you expect him to make a living other than from his books he writes? Besides, if you are seeking to make a big financial splash in life a la Norman Podhoretz, you do not choose academia. Please, Norman is hardly the caricaturist image of Der Sturmer. He is a very humane and compassionate fellow whose activism lies outside the interests of the Israeli-Palestine War, such as leading the protest against the academic freedom case of Professor Ramlal-Nankoe. Today on his website, look at his incendiary comment with respect to the news article on the “European Parliament’s September 4th resolution on the situation of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails”. I now will refer to the discussion below.

I have had a difficult time all my life accepting the moral and legal rationale for the expulsion of (indigenous) Palestinians in order to carve out a state of Israel. My immediate response was why the Palestinians had to suffer for the injustices that the Germans inflicted upon the Ashkenazi Jews? I had no problem with the indigenous Palestinian Jews who lived there alongside with the Palestinian Arabs. According to Finkelstein, the years prior to the Zionist settlements, from 1800 to 1910 Jews constituted five to ten percent of the indigenous population. To bring in the Jewish argument, not all European and North American countries eagerly welcomed the immigration of Holocaust survivors (see Grace Feuerverger’s introductory chapter to Oasis of Dreams, although I do not agree with all her conclusions). I also know personally through friends of those survivors that there were some who did not want to emigrate to Israel or to another country of destination, but stay in their countries of origin after WWII. Like the Palestinians, the Jews and descendants lost their homes, when they fled, immigrated, or were sent to concentration camps, which later were occupied by non-Jews.

Finkelstein does circumvent the question about the inadmissibility of acquiring land by force by embarking upon a detailed explanation on the changes in international law governing the legality of war and the subsequent conundrum facing the United Nations General Assembly to reach a consensus on whether the acquisition of territory by war was legal. He admits to the “moral indefensibility” of the UN’s decision on the partition of Palestine, but sums up that we cannot belabor complicated circumstances surrounding the final decision--basically it is what we have to work with at the present time. But what we need to know from you, Norman, is do you personally think the partition was a fair decision, given that many Palestinians were forced to abandon their homes. I am aware that your opinion alone is not going to weigh heavily towards a change in Israeli policy decision making or in American/European foreign policy. In watching the you tube presentation of Finkelstein’s Washington Peace Center talk, he did disclose his personal belief in stateless borders, but qualified that it would not precipitate a settlement to the Palestinian’s painfully longstanding and arduous struggle for statehood.

Second, do you think the Palestinians’ Right to Return can ever become a reality for a sizable minority of Palestinians---given that the majority of the homes of first generation Palestinians presently are occupied by Israeli Jews? Specifically in question is the Palestinians’ right to return to their homes and villages in Israel not only to the UN designated Palestinians lands of the West Bank and Gaza. If so, is it possible that a refugee return can be implemented within the present Israeli infrastructure? There is this prevailing view, though certainly not shared by all Israeli Jews that there is a “clash of cultures” which would prohibit the integration of Arabs into the Israeli state. Perhaps, Norman, you have addressed these questions in full in a lecture of which I am unaware.

On a third link of Zio Mania there is this debate on the number of Jews who perished during the Holocaust. Why keep persisting with this nonsensical number game, historical documentation shows the Holocaust happened. Is 1,000,000 exterminated sound less egregious than 6,000,000—it was a horrific tragedy to not only Jews, but gypsies, homosexuals, disabled, and non-Jewish resisters of the Nazi occupation. Prior to the Jewish holocaust, the Young Turk Revolution in 1915 committed a genocide of both Armenians and the Lebanese, the former by the sword and the latter from starvation as declared by Enver Pasha in 1916. Actually, in the case of the Lebanese, there was simultaneously a locust infestation, the British and French armies unwittingly were complicit in this starvation by blockading the Beirut port to the entry of food supplies, which they feared would fall into the hands of the Turkish army. The Turkish army instead took advantage of the few crops left among the domestic farmers. In Beirut, the Place des Martyrs honors those fifteen Lebanese nationals, Christian and Muslim, who revolted against the Young Turks and were hung. Finkelstein’s argument is that holocausts, regardless of the number perished, have occurred throughout history, the Indonesian genocide of the East Timorese, My Lai massacre of Vietnamese. In this sense, the Jewish holocaust is not unique.

In closing, Norman is your ally, he is not your enemy---US foreign policy and Israeli policy is. During the Vice presidential debates last night, there was absolutely no mention about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The two candidates agreed on their unilateral support of Israel. They both acknowledged their support in ending the continuing genocide in Darfur. What the United States fails to realize is that in Sudan both ethnic Arab Muslims (nomadic Baggara cattle herders) and African Muslims (Fur sedentary agriculturalists) have suffered abuses on both sides. Essentially, the two ethnic groups have intermarried over centuries, and any visible biological differences are blurred, stemming from their interdependence upon the Fur’s millet production and the Baggara’s livestock for subsistence (see Fedrick Barth, Ethnic Boundaries, 1969).

Norman, this past week you have been the target of Arabs and Muslims hatred, but a continual basis from your own people. I can only speak for Arab Americans, the source of this hatred is we are tired, restless, frustrated that in terms of U.S. foreign we can never get a fair shake—the cards always are stacked against us. We sometimes resent having Jewish brokers, as I expressed to you in an email, because we have not been successful in solving the Israeli-Palestine conflict ourselves. Yet in the depths of cynicism and desperation, we can point to the Free Gaza movement. These human activists demonstrated that not only Jews and Arabs can work together, but all ethnicities and nationalities, Europeans, Americans, Canadians, to crack open the siege through non-violent means.