Norman Finkelstein

On the shooters of the Charlie Hebdo shooting on January 7, 2015, Finkelstein commented two weeks later:

Finkelstein taught at Sakarya University Middle East Institute in Turkey in 2014–15.

Finkelstein grew up in Borough Park, then Mill Basin, both in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended James Madison High School. In his memoir he recalls strongly identifying with the outrage that his mother, who witnessed the genocidal atrocities of World War II, felt at the carnage the United States wrought in Vietnam. One childhood friend recalls his mother's "emotional investment in left-wing humanitarian causes as bordering on hysteria". He had "internalized [her] indignation", a trait that he admits rendered him "insufferable" when talking about the Vietnam War, and which imbued him with a "holier-than-thou" attitude he now regrets. But Finkelstein regards his absorption of his mother's outlook—the refusal to put aside a sense of moral outrage in order to get on with one's life—as a virtue. Subsequently, his reading of Noam Chomsky played an important role in tailoring the passion bequeathed to him by his mother to the necessity of maintaining intellectual rigor.

I warned him, if you follow this, you're going to get in trouble—because you're going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they're going to destroy you.

[Peters] coins the phrase "turnspeak"; she says she's using it as a play off of George Orwell, which as all listeners know used the phrase "Newspeak." She coined her own phrase, "turnspeak". You go to Mr. Dershowitz's book, he got so confused in his massive borrowings from Joan Peters that on two occasions—I'll cite them for those who have a copy of the book, on page 57 and on page 153—he uses the phrase "George Orwell's 'turnspeak'." "Turnspeak" is not Orwell, Mr. Dershowitz. You're the Felix Frankfurter chair at Harvard; you must know that Orwell would never use such a clunky phrase as "turnspeak".

Finkelstein is a sharp critic of the state of Israel. Discussing Finkelstein's book Beyond Chutzpah, Israeli historian Avi Shlaim said that Finkelstein's critique of Israel "is based on an amazing amount of research. He seems to have read everything. He has gone through the reports of Israeli groups, of human rights groups, Human Rights Watch and Peace Now and B'Tselem, all of the reports of Amnesty International. And he deploys all this evidence from Israeli and other sources in order to sustain his critique of Israeli practices, Israeli violations of human rights of the Palestinians, Israeli house demolitions, the targeted assassinations of Palestinian militants, the cutting down of trees, the building of the wall—the security barrier on the West Bank, which is illegal—the restrictions imposed on the Palestinians in the West Bank, and so on and so forth. I find his critique extremely detailed, well-documented and accurate."

The problem as I see it with the BDS movement is not the tactic. Who could not support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions? Of course you should. And most of the human rights organizations, church organizations have moved in that direction. The problem is the goal . . . The official BDS movement, they claim to be agnostic, neutral—whatever term you want to use—on the question of Israel. You can't reach a broad public if you are agnostic on the question of Israel. The broad public wants to know, where do you stand? And if you claim not to have a stand, you lose them. The BDS movement, it always says, and I'm using their language, "We are a rights-based organization. We are based in international law." I agree with that. That's where you have to go: rights-based international law. But the international law is clear. You read the last sentence of the 2004 International Court of Justice opinion on the wall that Israel has been building in the West Bank, and the last sentence says, "We look forward to two states: a Palestinian state alongside Israel and at peace with its neighbors." That's the law. And if you want to go past that law or ignore the Israel part, you'll never reach a broad public. And then it's a cult. Then it's pointless, in my opinion. We're wasting time. And it's only a wasting of time. It becomes—and I know it's a strong word, and I hope I won't be faulted for it—but it becomes historically criminal, because there was a time where whatever we said, it made no difference. Nobody was listening. You could shout whatever you want—who cares? But now, actually, we can reach people. There is a possibility. I'm not saying a certainty. I'm not even saying a probability. But there is a possibility that we can reach a broad public. And so we have to be very careful about the words we use, and we have to be very careful about the political strategy we map out. Otherwise we're going to squander a real opportunity. And I don't want to squander it.

In February 2012 The Jewish Chronicle in England said that Finkelstein "launched a blistering attack" on the BDS movement, saying it was a "hypocritical, dishonest cult", "[l]ike the Munchkin cult in Oz," that cleverly poses as human rights activists while in reality aiming to destroy Israel. Finkelstein has said the BDS movement has had very few successes, and that as in a cult, its leaders pretend that they are hugely successful when in reality the general public rejects their extreme views.

In a June 2012 appearance on Democracy Now!, Finkelstein elaborated on his criticisms of the BDS movement:

American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein is an award-winning documentary film about Finkelstein's life and career, released in 2009 and directed by David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier. It has been screened at Amsterdam's IDFA, Toronto's Hot Docs, and more than 40 other national and international venues. It has a freshness rating of 100% on film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. The same year Finkelstein appeared in Defamation (Hebrew: השמצה ‎; translit. Hashmatsa) a documentary by award-winning Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir.

In a 2009 telephone interview with Today's Zaman, Finkelstein said:

On May 23, 2008, Finkelstein was denied entry to Israel, according to unnamed Shin Bet security officials, because "of suspicions involving hostile elements in Lebanon" and because he "did not give a full accounting to interrogators with regard to these suspicions." Finkelstein had visited south Lebanon and met with Lebanese families during the 2006 Lebanon War. He was banned from entering Israel for 10 years.

Finkelstein argued one of Israel's primary motivations for launching the 2008 offensive in Gaza was that Hamas was "signaling that it wanted a diplomatic settlement of the conflict along the June 1967 border." Finkelstein believes Hamas had joined the international community in "seeking a diplomatic settlement" and describes Hamas's stance towards Israel prior to the war as a "peace offensive."

In 2007, after a highly publicized feud between Finkelstein and Alan Dershowitz, an academic opponent, Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul. He was placed on administrative leave for the 2007–08 academic year, and on September 5, 2007, he announced his resignation after coming to a settlement with the university on largely undisclosed terms. An official statement from DePaul strongly defended the decision to deny Finkelstein tenure and said that outside influence played no role in the decision. In 2008 he was banned from entering Israel for 10 years for criticizing Israeli policies.

On Dershowitz's behalf, Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan asked former Harvard president Derek Bok to investigate the assertion of plagiarism; Bok exonerated Dershowitz of the charge. In an April 3, 2007 interview with the Harvard Crimson, "Dershowitz confirmed that he had sent a letter last September to DePaul faculty members lobbying against Finkelstein's tenure."

In April 2007, Dr. Frank Menetrez, a former Editor-in-Chief of the UCLA Law Review, published an analysis of the charges Dershowitz made against Finkelstein and concluded that Dershowitz had misrepresented matters. In a follow-up analysis he concluded that he could find "no way of avoiding the inference that Dershowitz copied the quotation from Twain from Peters's From Time Immemorial, and not from the original source", as Dershowitz claimed. In an interview given for the film American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein in 2009, Dershowitz said of Finkelstein: "I don't think he is a Jew. He's Jewish only on his parents' side."

In early 2007 the DePaul Political Science Department voted nine to three, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Personnel Committee five to zero, in favor of giving Finkelstein tenure. The three opposing faculty members subsequently filed a minority report opposing tenure, supported by the Dean of the College, Chuck Suchar. Suchar stated he opposed tenure because Finkelstein's "personal and reputation-demeaning attacks on Dershowitz, Benny Morris, and the Holocaust authors Elie Wiesel and Jerzy Kosinski" were inconsistent with DePaul's "Vincentian" values; as examples of the latter, Suchar argued that Finkelstein lacked respect for "the dignity of the individual" and for "the rights of others to hold and express different intellectual positions". Amidst considerable public debate, Dershowitz actively campaigned to block Finkelstein's tenure bid. In June 2007, a 4–3 vote by DePaul University's Board on Promotion and Tenure (a faculty board), affirmed by the university's president, the Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, denied Finkelstein tenure.

In June 2007, after two weeks of protests, some DePaul students staged a sit-in and hunger strike in support of both professors denied tenure. The Illinois Conference of the American Association of University Professors also sent a letter to the university's president stating, "It is entirely illegitimate for a university to deny tenure to a professor out of fear that his published research ... might hurt a college's reputation" and that the association has "explicitly rejected collegiality as an appropriate criterion for evaluating faculty members". In a 2014 interview, professor Matthew Abraham, author of Out of Bounds: Academic Freedom and the Question of Palestine, described the Finkelstein tenure case as "one of the most significant academic freedom cases in the last fifty years" and said it demonstrated "the substantial pressure outside parties can place on a mid-tier religious institution when the perspectives advanced by a controversial scholar threaten dominant interests".

Finkelstein's books attempt to examine the works of mainstream scholarship. The authors of whose work he has been critical, including Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and Dershowitz, along with others, such as Benny Morris, whose work Finkelstein has also cited in his scholarship, have in turn accused Finkelstein of grossly misrepresenting their work, and selectively quoting their books. Morris said in 2007 that "Finkelstein is a notorious distorter of facts and of my work, not a serious or honest historian."

In September 2006 Dershowitz sent members of DePaul's law and political science faculties what he called "a dossier of Norman Finkelstein's most egregious academic sins, and especially his outright lies, misquotations, and distortions" and lobbied DePaul's professors, alumni and administrators to deny Finkelstein tenure. DePaul's political science committee investigated his accusations against Finkelstein and concluded that they were not based on legitimate criticism. The department subsequently invited John Mearsheimer and Ian Lustick, two previously uninvolved academics with known expertise on the Israel–Palestine conflict, to evaluate the academic merit of Finkelstein's work; they came to the same conclusion.

Also in 2006 The Washington Post said "the ADL repeatedly accused" Finkelstein of being a "Holocaust denier" and that "These charges have proved baseless." Finkelstein's mother survived the Majdanek concentration camp, his father survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, and most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust.

The New York Times reported that Finkelstein left Hunter College in 2001 "after his teaching load and salary were reduced" by the college administration. He has said he enjoyed teaching at Hunter and was "unceremoniously kicked out of" the school after begging it to keep him on with just two courses a semester for $12,000 a year. Hunter set conditions that would have required him to spend four days a week teaching, which he thought unacceptable.

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering was published in 2000. In this work Finkelstein argues that Elie Wiesel and others exploit the memory of the Holocaust as an "ideological weapon". Their purpose, writes Finkelstein, is to enable Israel, "one of the world's most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, [to] cast itself as a victim state"; that is, to provide Israel "immunity to criticism". He alleges a "double shakedown" practiced by "a repellent gang of plutocrats, hoodlums and hucksters" seeking enormous legal damages and financial settlements from Germany and Switzerland, moneys which then go to the lawyers and institutional actors involved in procuring them rather than actual Holocaust survivors.

After the war they met in a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria, and then emigrated to the United States, where his father became a factory worker and his mother a homemaker and later a bookkeeper. Finkelstein's mother was an ardent pacifist. Both his parents died in 1995. Of his parents, Finkelstein has recalled that "they saw the world through the prism of the Nazi Holocaust. They were eternally indebted to the Soviet Union (to whom they attributed the defeat of the Nazis), and so anyone who was anti-Soviet they were extremely harsh on". They supported the Soviet Union's approval of the creation of the State of Israel, as enunciated by Gromyko, who said that Jews had earned the right to a state, but thought that Israel had sold its soul to the West and "refused to have any truck with it".

Finkelstein's doctoral thesis examined the claims made in Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, a best-selling book at the time. Peters's "history and defense" of Israel deals with the demographic history of Palestine. Demographic studies had tended to assert that the Arab population of Ottoman-controlled Palestine, a 94% majority at the turn of the century, had dwindled toward parity due to massive Zionist immigration. Peters radically challenged this picture by arguing that a substantial part of the Palestinian people were descended from immigrants from other Arab countries from the early 19th century onward. It followed, for Peters and many of her readers, that the picture of a native Palestinian population overwhelmed by Jewish immigration was little more than propaganda, and that in actuality two almost simultaneous waves of immigration met in what had been a relatively unpopulated land.

In 1986 the New York Review of Books published Yehoshua Porath's review and an exchange with critics of the review in which he criticized the assumptions and evidence on which Peters's thesis relied, lending independent support from an expert in Palestinian demographics to Finkelstein's doctoral critique.

By the end of 1984, From Time Immemorial had...received some two hundred [favorable] notices ... in the United States. The only 'false' notes in this crescendoing chorus of praise were the Journal of Palestine Studies, which ran a highly critical review by Bill Farrell; the small Chicago-based newsweekly In These Times, which published a condensed version of this writer's findings; and Alexander Cockburn, who devoted a series of columns in The Nation exposing the hoax. ... The periodicals in which From Time Immemorial had already been favorably reviewed refused to run any critical correspondence (e.g. The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, Commentary). Periodicals that had yet to review the book rejected a manuscript on the subject as of little or no consequence (e.g. The Village Voice, Dissent, The New York Review of Books). Not a single national newspaper or columnist contacted found newsworthy that a best-selling, effusively praised 'study' of the Middle East conflict was a threadbare hoax.

Finkelstein received his Master's degree in political science in 1980, and later his PhD in political studies, from Princeton. His doctoral thesis was on Zionism. Before gaining academic employment, Finkelstein was a part-time social worker with teenage dropouts in New York. He then taught successively at Rutgers University, New York University, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and DePaul University in Chicago. During the First Intifada, he spent every summer from 1988 in the West Bank as a guest of Palestinian families in Hebron and Beit Sahour.

Finkelstein completed his undergraduate studies at Binghamton University in New York in 1974, after which he studied at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. A deep admirer of Paul Sweezy, he was then an ardent Maoist and was "totally devastated" by the news of the trial of the Gang of Four, which led him to abandon Marxism–Leninism.

Norman Gary Finkelstein (/ˈ f ɪ ŋ k əl ˌ s t eɪ n / ; born December 8, 1953) is an American political scientist, activist, professor, and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D. in political science at Princeton University. He has held faculty positions at Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and DePaul University, where he was an assistant professor from 2001 to 2007.