Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A brilliantly written, thought provoking scholarly book., 23 Feb 1997
By A Customer
Dr. Norman Finkelstein has written a brilliant and scholarly expose of
the Israel-Palestine conflict. He is not a dispassionate historian/scholar
nor does he pretend to be. He dedicates the book to his parents,
survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi extermination camps:
"May I never forget or forgive what was done to them."
Finkelstein's keen intellect is breathtaking. His painstaking research
which supports the evidence how the "reality" of the causes of the
conflict is vastly different than the "image" presented to us by the media
is a marvel to behold.
My favorite chapters in the book are chapters 2 and 4.
In Chapter 2, he discusses Joan Peters book "From Time Immemorial"
and masterfully exposes it as a hoax. The crux of Peters' thesis was
that "Palestine was, literally, 'uninhabited' on the eve of the Zionist
colonization; and that if the Arab population did not materialize, literally,
ex nihilo in Palestine, it did surreptitiously enter to exploit the economic
opportunities that the Jews created when they made the 'desert bloom'." By that logic, most Palestinians were not even there in 1948 to be expelled from their homes.
The fact that such a threadbare hoax can be published in this country
is not surprising. But the fact that this book received accolades from
journalists and scholars alike, from such luminaries as Daniel Pipes,
Sidney Zion, Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz, and Nobel
peace prize laureate Elie Wiesel, speaks volumes about the American
commissar culture. After the book went through several printings and
was exposed as an utter fraud in Britain, it finally prompted Anthony
Lewis to write a column for The New York Times aptly entitled "There
Were No Indians."
Perhaps the most illuminating part of the book is Chapter 4 entitled
"Settlement, Not Conquest." Finkelstein's dissection of how the
historical rhetoric and justifications for conquest are strikingly
similar -- "from the British in North America to the Dutch in South Africa,
from the Nazis in Eastern Europe, to the Zionists in Palestine" --
is both enlightening and comical.
Finally, it is noteworthy to mention Finkelstein's poignant observation
for those of us who want to see justice done to the Palestinians and
to all people who are suffering as a direct result of America's
diplomatic and military support to the darkest and most oppressive
regimes around the globe: "The plea of 'not knowing' cannot in
good faith be entered at history's bar. Those who want to know can
know the truth; at all events, enough of it to draw the just conclusions."
To buttress his point, he quotes Albert Speer's mea culpa at
Nuremberg: "Whether I knew or did not know, or how much or little I
knew, is totally unimportant when I consider the horrors I OUGHT to
have known about and what conclusions would have been natural
ones to draw from the little I did know . . ."
Thus, Finkelstein concludes: "Indeed, the [ordinary] Germans could
point in extenuation to the severity of penalties for speaking out
against the crimes of state. What excuse do we have?"
Perhaps, we may want to do some genuine soul-searching
as we ponder that question.
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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exception - Lucid, hard-hitting. An essential read, 29 Jan 1997
By A Customer
This book is a meticulous exposition of the multitude of
propaganda theories that have been peddled as truth, and
are now accepted as the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is concise and very well researched. An
essential read for anyone who is interested in the history of this conflict.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Its point of view is nothing but respect for the truth, 3 Dec 2008
Somebody, I forget exactly who, pointed out that Norman Finkelstein's books about the Arab-Israeli conflict are not actually works of Middle Eastern history but books about American history. This is essentially true, in that Finkelstein does not write narrative history or even critical history; he is essentially a scholarly critic of American opinion on the conflict, and the general tendency of his work is to point out the gap between what American writers have tended to say about the conflict and what the historical record actually shows. So, the meat of this book is his relentless, meticulous and devastating demolition job on Joan Peters' book "From Time Immemorial", a work that no professional historian is now willing to cite but which still has a loyal and uncritical readership out there among people who think that the Israeli government can do no wrong.
It can be seen, therefore, that criticising Finkelstein for having an "agenda" is beside the point. It's never very to the point anyway, since everybody who writes a book about anything whatever has an agenda, in that they have something that they want to say about the subject. Finkelstein's agenda is simply open for anyone to see. This book also contains his relatively brief and offhand dismissal of Michael Oren's "Six Days of June", which is interesting partly because that book is often cited as an "objective" history of the Six Day War, and Finkelstein doesn't find it difficult to prove that it is nothing of the sort, being heavily biased in favour of the Israeli side.
He performs an essential public service, and has been vilified and slandered for doing so. Finkelstein remains one of those fiercely independent thinkers who are the backbone of any secular culture; when there are no more guys like him, who are prepared to insist on telling the plain truth no matter how much it costs to him personally (and it has cost him a great deal, in terms of advancement in his actual career as an academic), then you live in a society where there are no effectively more public intellectuals, merely timeservers and lickspittles. My own country, Ireland, has reached that condition.
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