Marilyn Garson
Mondoweiss
GAZA An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom
Norman Finkelstein
440 pp. University of California Press. $34.95.
After the 2012 war, I told my Gazan team that we needed a new word. 'War' was a goal-oriented pursuit, tempered by mortal and strategic risk. Israel's conflict maintenance was neither.
After the 2014 war, while we still wore those 1000-yard stares, I set out to assign proportionate responsibility. I read books on military accountability, the arc from force projection to force protection, law of war handbooks, and every report I could find. I could not unpick their crazy-making inconsistencies. From their conclusions, I could not recognize what I had seen. I told my team that we needed a new kind of scholarship. Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom, enables a different scholarship. Norman Finkelstein has set out to deconstruct the false narrative of war in Gaza, by refuting its component parts. One by one. Finkelstein is an author, activist and scholar with decades of archives and outrage to bring. Gaza is one exhaustive act of witness. I differ with some of its choices, and I note that in order to emphasize that agreement is not required. I found Gaza hugely valuable as an argument, a demand for accountability, and as a response to the question my team repeated, "What do they think we are?"
From the outset, Norman Finkelstein is specific about his task. "This book is not about Gaza. It is about what has been done to Gaza." The following 400 pages confront and debunk a decade of headline violence. Finkelstein excoriates not only Israeli political and military actors, but also those NGOs and institutions whose work should protect Gazan rights. Instead, he says, Gazans are pounded by the military, and then "betrayed" by a complicit set of institutions.
Finkelstein has said that he sought to combine rigorous scholarship with his anger at the lies which enable the violence. He digs his heels in, and he does not let go. And although he warns of the book's tedium, I found his writing highly readable although, of course, his content is shocking.
To aid others' research, I greatly appreciated the choice to include extensive footnotes, not endnotes. They are rich with sources for further reading. I would have loved a comprehensive bibliography, although that might have doubled the book's length.
He wades straight in, with little repetition of the history.
Read more
Mondoweiss
GAZA An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom
Norman Finkelstein
440 pp. University of California Press. $34.95.
After the 2012 war, I told my Gazan team that we needed a new word. 'War' was a goal-oriented pursuit, tempered by mortal and strategic risk. Israel's conflict maintenance was neither.
After the 2014 war, while we still wore those 1000-yard stares, I set out to assign proportionate responsibility. I read books on military accountability, the arc from force projection to force protection, law of war handbooks, and every report I could find. I could not unpick their crazy-making inconsistencies. From their conclusions, I could not recognize what I had seen. I told my team that we needed a new kind of scholarship. Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom, enables a different scholarship. Norman Finkelstein has set out to deconstruct the false narrative of war in Gaza, by refuting its component parts. One by one. Finkelstein is an author, activist and scholar with decades of archives and outrage to bring. Gaza is one exhaustive act of witness. I differ with some of its choices, and I note that in order to emphasize that agreement is not required. I found Gaza hugely valuable as an argument, a demand for accountability, and as a response to the question my team repeated, "What do they think we are?"
From the outset, Norman Finkelstein is specific about his task. "This book is not about Gaza. It is about what has been done to Gaza." The following 400 pages confront and debunk a decade of headline violence. Finkelstein excoriates not only Israeli political and military actors, but also those NGOs and institutions whose work should protect Gazan rights. Instead, he says, Gazans are pounded by the military, and then "betrayed" by a complicit set of institutions.
Finkelstein has said that he sought to combine rigorous scholarship with his anger at the lies which enable the violence. He digs his heels in, and he does not let go. And although he warns of the book's tedium, I found his writing highly readable although, of course, his content is shocking.
To aid others' research, I greatly appreciated the choice to include extensive footnotes, not endnotes. They are rich with sources for further reading. I would have loved a comprehensive bibliography, although that might have doubled the book's length.
He wades straight in, with little repetition of the history.
Read more
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