An Unpopular Man
By Jordan Michael Smith @JordanMSmith_ Photo: AP
Norman Finkelstein is an unpopular man. Norman Finkelstein has always been an unpopular man, but for decades he had a cult following among leftists and supporters of the Palestinian cause. Since coming out in 2012 against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, however, he has alienated his core followers. A few years ago, Finkelstein tells me, he made $40,000 in speaking fees from 80 talks to Palestinian Solidarity groups around North America. “This past year when I went to my accountant, he said, ‘I think there’s a mistake, because there’s only $2,000.” He laughs. “I told him there was no error. He said, ‘What happened?’ I thought to myself: Am I going to explain to him BDS?”
Finkelstein, 62, is wearing a t-shirt and shorts in his Coney Island apartment, where he lives alone. He has just completed a year teaching international law, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and political philosophy at Sakarya University in Turkey. He’s working on a book with the Dutch-Palestinian scholar Mouin Rabbani on how to solve the conflict. It includes a chapter on BDS, a movement to divest from Israel over its treatment of Palestinians that began a decade ago, on July 9, 2005. But he hates traveling and is angry that he can’t find a teaching job in North America or Europe. “There was a lot of resentment on my part that with a dozen universities within walking distance, I had to board an 18-hour flight to Turkey once a month,” he says.
Finkelstein was unemployed for seven years after being denied tenure at DePaul University in 2007 following a campaign against him, led by Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, that drew nationwide attention. “I spent large parts of my day sleeping, there were large gaps in my day, it has been a very depressing period,” he says, though he also found time to write books on Israel-Palestine and on Gandhi. “I consider them squandered years.”
Finkelstein’s longtime critics probably consider his previous two decades even less fruitful. He first gained attention in academic circles in 1984 for exposing the poor scholarship of From Time Immemorial, a book by journalist Joan Peters. The book claimed that Palestinians didn’t exist—that they lacked deep roots in historical Palestine but in fact were Arabs who swarmed the deserted land only once Zionists began developing it in the late nineteenth century. From Time Immemorial was a best-seller initially praised by everyone from Saul Bellow to Elie Wiesel to historian Barbara Tuchman, who called it “a historical event in itself.”
At the time, Finkelstein was an unknown graduate student. He had grown up in Brooklyn, the son of Holocaust survivors who, he has said, mentally “never left the camps.” His parents were eternally grateful to the Soviet Union for having liberated them from the Nazi camps, and they inculcated him with a political radicalism that he has never shed.
Finkelstein’s tendency toward political fanaticism first emerged in his adolescent adoration of Chairman Mao’s China. He hung Communist propaganda posters on his bedroom wall, studied with the world’s leading Marxist scholars in Paris, and would espouse the virtues of the socialist paradise Mao was building to anyone who would listen. When his shoes were stolen while he was napping in the study lounge at university, he scolded his classmates that “this would never happen in China.”
But when Mao’s political heirs, the Gang of Four, were overthrown to mass celebration in 1976, Finkelstein realized that he had been a willing dupe of Communist propaganda. Devastated, he spent three weeks in bed depressed. He was disillusioned by his own self-deception, a quality he thinks radical activists can be particularly susceptible to.
He became politically reengaged by opposing Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. But wary of being duped again, he spent an entire summer in the New York Public Library combing through the population records of historical Palestine and comparing them to Peters’s book. He discovered that From Time Immemorial was, as the Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath eventually put it, “a sheer forgery.” Finkelstein published his findings, and Peters’s book is now widely considered, as David Remnick wrote in the New Yorker a few years ago, “thoroughly discredited.” Finkelstein’s reputation was made.
Throughout the 1990s, Finkelstein became a prominent defender of the Palestinians and a relentless critic of Israel and what he called “the Holocaust Industry.” Culminating in his 2000 book of that name, Finkelstein claimed that Israel exploited the Holocaust to excuse its crimes against the Palestinians, and that claims by the lawyers of Holocaust survivors that they deserved compensation from Swiss banks for wealth expropriated during World War II were part of “a shakedown” by “a repellent gang of plutocrats, hoodlums and hucksters.” Finkelstein was called an anti-Semite and, in the memorable words of former New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, “poison, he’s a disgusting self-hating Jew, he’s something you find under a rock.”
Source: www.newrepublic.com