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Jefferson23

(30,099 posts)
Sat Mar 7, 2015, 06:02 PM Mar 2015

Peace or Palestinian surrender? An interview with Norman Finkelstein

3/5/2015

Aside from the renowned linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein is perhaps the best known, and most provocative, American Jewish critic of Israel. The son of holocaust survivors, Finkelstein was banned from entering Israel after a visit to Lebanon in which he expressed solidarity with Hezbollah; and frozen out of US universities after a fierce academic conflict with civil liberties lawyer and Israel supporter Alan Dershowitz.

More recently he has angered some “pro-Palestinians” by his adherence to a two-state solution, and criticism of some elements in the Boycott Diversity and Sanctions (BDS) campaign for equivocating over the continued existence of Israel.

A political firebrand, Finkelstein has advocated for the Palestinian cause, presenting himself as a beacon of moral truth in the murk of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His work, accusing Jewish charities of exploiting the Holocaust for monetary gain and attacking Israel for oppressing the Palestinians, has made him many enemies. Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, described Finkelstein as “poison: a disgusting self-hating Jew.”

In a 2009 documentary about his life, Finkelstein said that he inherited from his mother, Maryla, the conviction that Jews have a special obligation to ease the suffering of humanity because of what has been done to them.

- See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/peace-or-palestinian-surrender-interview-norman-finkelstein-1768836682#sthash.we45pX7A.dpuf

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