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71 of 77 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Well Argued Critique of Israel's Apologists , 14 Aug 2006
This book sets out to demolish the arguments of some of Israel's most vocal supporters in the United States, and largely suceeds in this task.
The first 85 pages are devoted to those who claim that criticism of Israel is fuelled by anti-Semitism, rather than any action of Israel's. Finkelstein argues that this claim is merely an attempt to deflect criticism from indefensible Israel policies.
However, the main body of the book is devoted to an attack on one man, Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz is the author of the best selling "The Case for Israel". In his influential book Dershowitz made a number of extremely controversial claims about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Finkelstein's book is devoted to methodically going through these claims and demolishing them. For example Dershowitz implied that Palestinian refugees may have been recent immigrants to Palestine, rather than the native population of the country. Finkelstein shows how all the evidence Dershowitz produces for this claim is essentially plagiarised from the discredited work of Joan Peters.
Unfortunately Finkelstein focuses mainly on showing how Dershowitz has little grasp of the facts of the conflict. It would have been nice if there was also more of a challenge to Dershowitz's arguments. Particularly his repulsive view that collective punishment should be inflicted on Palestinian civilians.
This book comes across as being meticulously researched, as you would expect given that it is an attack on one of the most sucessful lawyers in America. However, it relies almost entirely on Western or Israeli sources to challenge Dershowitz. I couldn't find a single quote from a Palestinian.
Despite being about on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this book focuses only on Israel. Next to nothing of value is said about the Palestinians or wider Arab world. This is a flaw found in Finkelstein's other books as well.
This book does provide a pretty good summary of Israel's widespread human rights abuses as a challenge to Dershowitz's claims. Other than this however the book will mainly be of interest to those who have already read "The Case for Israel". For those who are familiar with Dershowitz work, this book is a must read, as it shows quite how inaccurate his arguments are. For everyone else who is interested in the wider Palestinian-Israeli conflict there are better books out there, including Finkelstein's last book "Image and Reality of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict".
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A very fine book, 17 Nov 2008
Norman Finkelstein is controversial. Look at the review ratings for this book, on this site in the middle of November 2008 - ten reviews, with eight of them being five- or four-star, and two being one-star. You can't be indifferent about the guy. He is bullish, angry, abrasive and confrontational, very much like the man who is his chief antagonist in this book: Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz. These two were destined to end up in a head-to-head match and it finally happens within the pages of "Beyond Chutzpah", the very title of which is a sardonic nod at Dershowitz's own book "Chutzpah". Readers who have no Yiddish may be forgiven for thinking that "chutzpah" means simply "bravery". It also has connotations of "nerve", "cheekiness" and even "impudence". Finkelstein has clearly run out of patience with what he sees as Dershowitz's chutzpah.
Living as I do in Ireland, and being an atheist gentile with a merely scholarly interest in Judaism, I would point out to Mr. Finkelstein that his scepticism about Irish antisemitism is not entirely well-founded. "Jew" was still a term of abuse among kids when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s. Fairly recently, within the last few years, I witnessed a well-known Irish actor making crudely antisemitic remarks in a Dublin bar; I called him on them, and only narrowly avoided having him kick my head in (his friends ushered him out before he could cause any trouble).
Nevertheless, any book that carries endorsements from Israeli academics such as Baruch Kimmerling and Avi Shlaim surely ought to have something to it. The genius of Norman Finkelstein is that his method is completely transparent; like Chomsky's, it is nothing but scholarship, in that he compares one document to another and points out consistencies and, where they are obvious, inconsistencies. As he says himself, it is not very difficult to demonstrate that Alan Dershowitz has consistently misquoted sources, used other people's sources without citing them, twisted statements made by his enemies, etc. etc. Finkelstein demonstrates the fact, over and over again. The hard bit is getting anyone to take notice. The unexpected pleasure of this book is Finkelstein's exhaustive demonstration of the depths to which Alan Dershowitz will sink in order to win a fight. Finkelstein has elsewhere succeeded in utterly discrediting Joan Peters' infamous book "From Time Immemorial": here, he shows that Dershowitz not only quotes whole chunks of guff from that book without giving it credit, he often didn't even bother to do it himself, but got his research assistants to do it for him. I find it hard to believe that Dershowitz's reputation as an honest commentator can long survive an onslaught such as this. And yet all Finkelstein has done is point out the extent to which Dershowitz's remarks simply fail to correspond to documented reality.
Yes, Finkelstein can be rude and obnoxious. His website in particular is littered with heavy-handed sarcasm and clunking polemic, but then he has been repeatedly penalised for simply attempting to tell the truth, whereas Dershowitz has risen to the heights of US academia whilst being, all along, a shameless apologist for disgusting brutality and hypocrisy. Finkelstein, for all his bad temper and inability to be serene about his situation, is simply and inconveniently in the right. He may be an embarrassing person to have on one's side, but the likes of Dershowitz, on the evidence that this book supplies in such careful and meticulous detail, are morally repugnant.
The moral nadir of the book is Dershowitz's shameless attempt to claim that Finkelstein thought that his own mother - a concentration camp survivor - had been a camp "Kapo", based on a blatant misreading of a passage in Finkelstein's own memoir. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? It would take a better man than me to forgive Dershowitz for something like that.
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57 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quite simply a PRICELESS piece of scholastic brilliance, 16 Jun 2007
Finkelstein is a man motivated above all else by the need to find truth and honesty. In this work - perhaps his best - he debunks the lies and fabrication of leading Zionists and their pitiful use of the Shoah to brook no real examination of the murderous policies of the Israeli state.
The real gem of this work is how Finkelstein lays bare the lies and fabrication of Alan Dershowitz in that man's travesty of a book 'The Case for Israel'.
Finkelstein is a man who, from his earliest days as a Princeton graduate student in the early 1980s, put integrity and truth above his own career. Precisely, when he pushed and pushed to get a hearing for his research that showed that Joan Peter's book 'From Time Immemorial' was a complete fabrication. He knew that, and showed that by corresponding with every journal in the US that reviewed that book ('outstanding', 'brilliant', 'seminal work'), only for them to ignore him. Only when it was published here in the UK, where the Zionists have no such control, was his research read by scholars here, and that book - that suggested Palestine was in fact 'unpopulated' until the 1948 wars - was discarded as the worst kind of fraud. That one act, piece of work, by Finkelstein sealed his future fate. Immediately after, no single Academic at Princeton would ever agree to meet him again - he was completely shunned. In fact, Princeton granted him a Phd with NO supervision and out of 'embarrassment'.
This man has virtually sacrificed any chance of a 'tenured' Academic career in the US (8 June 2007 DePaul University, Chicago refuses his application for tenure, despite 17 out of 24 committee professors voting in his favour, as a result of a 'jihad' against him by Alan Dershowitz, the plagiariser and fabricator)and it is to be hoped he will be given the chance to teach students here in the UK or Europe generally.
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