Norman Finkelstein responds to B’Tselem’s designation of Israel as an “apartheid regime” saying that the aspect of Israeli rule that most manifests its Jewish supremacist character is the worthlessness it attaches to Palestinian life. And this is the most effective label– insisting on characterizing Israel as a Jewish supremacist state.
In a few days Britain’s Labour Party will decide if it will adopt a controversial definition of anti-Semitism. Norman Finkelstein writes, “If the Labour Party adopts these taboos, respected scholarship will be suppressed while Israel will become the beneficiary of a pernicious double standard.”
The current hysteria engulfing the British Labour Party is based on the premises that anti-Semitism in British society at large and the Labour Party in particular has reached crisis proportions. There is no evidence for either claim, Norman Finkelstein shows.
First they came for me in Martha’s Vineyard,
But I was in Nantucket.
Then they came for me in Nantucket,
But I was in Cape Cod. . . .
Norman Finkelstein offers his support for Alan Dershowitz as he has become a social refugee in elite resorts across the Northeast due to his support for the Trump Administration.
Israel’s resort to any force against Gaza demonstrators cannot be legally justified, despite efforts by Sari Bashi of Human Rights Watch. If Israel wants to protect its border, it must lift its siege of Gaza, Norman Finkelstein explains. Its refusal to take this preliminary peaceful step puts it in double breach of international law: imposition of an illegal blockade and unlawful resort to armed force when peaceful means have not been exhausted.
Nickolay Mladenov, the UN coordinator for the Middle East peace process, was briefly a moral leader against Israeli violence. “Stop shooting children,” he tweeted. But in a recapitulation of the Goldstone farce, Norman Finkelstein relates, Mladenov has now collapsed under pressure, and turned on Palestinian incitement and provocation as matters for condemnation.
To determine whether demonstrations in Gaza are “peaceful protests or violent riots,” New York Times reporter David Halbfinger imbedded himself with Israeli forces. The one-sided report follows a pattern, Norman Finkelstein says, in which Times writers rely on official Israeli statements to portray the encounters at the fence as armed confrontations in which Israeli snipers return the fire of protesters.