RT
The "open-air prison" of Gaza is "on the brink of collapse," with Palestinians verging now on an unlivable situation, author Norman Finkelstein told RT's Going Underground.
Finkelstein, author of the book Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom, believes the "point of no return" has been reached when it comes to Gaza. "Seventy percent of the people of Gaza are refugees. More than half are children. They're trapped, there's no way out," he told the host, Afshin Rattansi.
"Ninety-five percent of the water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption. Each day, when a child drinks water, the child is poisoning him- or herself but they can't leave. They're caged in. As your former [Prime Minister David Cameron] put it, Gaza is an 'open-air prison.'"
The difference between Gaza and the rest of the world, according to Finkelstein, is that the rest of the world "has an option to flee" any bad situation.
He gave the examples of Syrians fleeing the country's civil war and of people who leave areas plagued by drought.
He noted that UN reports "and even Israel" have said that Gaza is "on the brink of collapse," and that those living in Gaza have a right to fight back. "The people of Gaza, they are under a legal obligation to just lay down and die? They don't have the right to resist? No, that makes no sense to me," he said.
However, he said that he doesn't think it's a "wise or prudent strategy" to resist in any way. "If they manage to stay non-violent, the people of Gaza, Israel will be forced by international pressure to break the siege," he said.
When asked about one Palestinian person who did fight back, teenage activist Ahed Tamimi, Finkelstein said "there's no hope of her getting a fair trial." Tamimi, 17, was detained and faces up to a decade in prison for kicking and slapping an Israeli soldier, after troops surrounded her home. The altercation occurred shortly after a soldier shot her 14-year-old cousin in the head at close-range with a rubber bullet.
Finkelstein noted that even Israeli human rights group B'Tselem has "stopped coordinating and cooperating with the Israeli military trials because it said they're just farces, so we're not going to even bother anymore to go through the motions because all it does is provide a smokescreen for Israel that there's a legal process going on when there isn't."
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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.
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Adam Horowitz
Sott.net via Mondoweiss
Joan Peters, the author of the book From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict over Palestine, died on January 5th, at 78. As David Samel wrote following her death,"The bizarre chapter of Joan Peters's contribution to the Middle East debate does not end with her death. Her arguments, both those she adopted from others and those she formulated herself, still constitute a huge portion of the go-to hasbara repertoire." I interviewed Norman Finkelstein and asked him to reflect on her work and legacy, as he played a central role in debunking much of her work as described in his book Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
Adam Horowitz: Could you start by saying a bit about how From Time Immemorial was received?
Norman Finkelstein: First of all the important primary factor is the context. Israel in 1982 took its first major public relations hit since the 1967 war. It was a public relations disaster for Israel. One of the reasons being I think, as Robert Fisk pointed out in Pity the Nation he said unlike all other Arab states Lebanon did not control the press and so mainstream reporters were able at that time to roam freely throughout Lebanon.
Mainstream reporters, I should say who had credibility, were able to roam freely through Lebanon during the Israeli attack, and what they were reporting was quiet horrifying. It's forgotten now but even against the Israeli attacks in recent years on Lebanon, on Gaza, they all pale in comparison to what Israel did in Lebanon in 1982. The usual figures are between sixteen and twenty thousand Lebanese and Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians, were killed during the Israeli attack. All the Lebanese killed in 2006 plus the three massacres in Gaza that doesn't even come to half of the figure that happened in Lebanon.
So now you had credible reportage of what Israel was doing and it was a major public relations setback for Israel. You could say the first layer of Jewish support for Israel, the first layer, peeled away and that was the layer of what you would call the Old Left, mainly those were identified with the Soviet Union and therefore identified with Israel because the Soviets supported the creation of the state of Israel in '48 and also because a lot of the signature institutions of Israel in that era were of a socialist leftist orientation, most famously the kibbutzim.
And so before 1982 the pro-Soviet, pro-Communist Old Left even those who were disaffected from the Soviet Union which still fell within the umbrella of the Old Left, they were still pretty much pro-Israel, there were just really a tiny handful of exceptions. The best known being of course Professor Chomsky. There was also Maxime Robinson in France, but in general the support was totally for Israel, overwhelmingly for Israel.
And so the first layer of support was peeled off, peeled away, but overall Israel took a public relations hit. There were the usual characters, and the usual liars, people like Martin Peretz who went on the Israeli army tour of Lebanon and famously said at the time that everything you have read in the newspapers and heard in the media about what happened in Lebanon just didn't happen, it didn't happen.
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The Electronic Intifada
The Israeli detention of and denial of entry to
Western activists, academics and humanitarian workers sympathetic to
Palestinians has received particular attention in recent years,
following the targeting of high-profile figures including Richard Falk, Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky.
During the first week in February, I was on the receiving end of
Israeli detention practices myself when I attempted to enter the
occupied West Bank from neighboring Jordan via the Allenby Bridge border crossing.
Once on the Israeli-controlled side of the crossing, I was detained
and interrogated for 12 hours before being denied entry and sent back to
Amman. I have been given a five-year ban on entering Israel, the
occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Israeli authorities also detained and interrogated my friend and
fellow traveler, who had never previously visited the region.
For those who follow events and developments in Palestine, my
experience will be unsurprising; stories of random and unexplained
clampdowns are depressingly familiar.
The opacity, lack of due process and disregard for human rights that
characterize Israeli detention practices also typify the occupation
authorities’ actions in the West Bank (including occupied East Jerusalem) and Gaza.
If the Israeli government will openly flout countless UN resolutions, it is hardly going to care about a traveler’s right to privacy.
Nevertheless, the nature and manner in which I was detained and
interrogated remain of value for what they reveal about the Israeli
occupation and how it continues to operate in 2014.
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