An Interview With Norman Finkelstein
by M. Junaid Levesque-Alam / September 29th, 2008
Norman Finkelstein is one of the world’s most outspoken and tenacious scholars on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and a fierce critic of the way Israel’s supporters try to wield the memory of anti-Semitism as a baton to beat up on those who criticize the country’s well-documented atrocities.
Author of Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, along with Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and other books, Finkelstein was hailed by a leading authority of Holocaust studies, the late Raul Hilberg, for his “acuity of vision and analytical power” and by prominent Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim as “as a very able, very erudite and original scholar.”
In 2007, Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University because of an intimidation campaign spearheaded by Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, whose book The Case for Israel was pilloried by Finkelstein as blatant plagiarism of an earlier work Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial, which was long ago exposed as a hoax.
In our hour-long phone interview on Sept. 14th, Finkelstein discussed a broad range of topics, including Gaza, the paralysis gripping the Arab world, and the reach and the limits of the Israeli lobby. He reflected on his teaching career (“I’ll almost certainly never teach again”), his pursuit of self- improvement, and the “battery of humorless lawyers” who vet his printed works, which frequently combine painstaking research with searing polemics. He also talked about his raging battles with Alan Dershowitz, who once mangled Finkelstein’s words to claim that he called his mother, a Holocaust survivor, a Nazi collaborator. Finally, acknowledging the consequences of his intellectual activism (“You speak out, you pay a price”), Finkelstein spoke about the meaning and impact of his scholarship.
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