A response from Norman Finkelstein GS ’87

The Daily Princetonian states that I delivered “anti-Semitic remarks” at a panel on black and Palestinian solidarity. This is a most serious allegation. But is it true?

The article, which was subsequently “edited to better reflect the context and content of the panel as a whole,” was originally a sustained libel against me to the exclusion of the other panelists. In the revised version, the other panelists are quoted, but the libel remains intact. Were it written by the Israeli consulate, the article would have made perfect sense, but the ‘Prince’ is supposed to prioritize the interests of the Princeton community.

The ‘Prince’ interviewed Jewish students who allegedly were pained by my remarks, but it apparently couldn’t find a single audience member who appreciated them, even as my intervention evoked loud applause. I went out for dinner afterwards with many of the attendees, including several Jewish students.

The ‘Prince’ managed to track down all the principals for a comment (sponsors, select audience members), but didn’t manage to solicit a comment from the headlined subject of the article.

The ‘Prince’ reported that Jewish students were scared for their safety, but missed the incongruity that, if they were so scared, why did these frightened persons come up afterwards to speak with me?

The ‘Prince’ noted that a dissenting Jewish student in the audience struggled to have his words heard, but it failed to mention that I was the one who firmly insisted dissenting voices from the audience be heard.

The oddest thing, however, is that the ‘Prince’ managed to report on every aspect of some Jewish students’ reaction to my talk, even on our private conversations afterwards, and to provide multiple hyperlinks to other alleged statements by me in the past, without once mentioning a single word about the subject of my lengthy talk: Gaza’s martyrdom.

In my remarks, I noted inter alia [among other things] that: over 70 percent of Gaza’s population consists of refugees, and half its population consists of children; Israel has imposed an illegal and inhuman medieval siege on Gaza since 2006 that has been uniformly condemned by humanitarian and human rights organizations as a flagrant violation of international law; Israel has punctuated its brutal siege by launching fully eight large-scale massacres since 2004, the last of which, Operation Protective Edge (2014), left 550 Gazan children dead and 18,000 homes methodically destroyed while one Israeli child was killed and one Israeli home was destroyed. In addition, 97 percent of Gaza’s water is unfit for human consumption; humanitarian and human rights organizations have repeatedly sounded the alarm that Gaza is on the brink of being physically unlivable; leading Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling of the Hebrew University and a leading Israeli journalist covering Gaza, Amira Hass of Haaretz, have both described Gaza as a “concentration camp;” and Israeli snipers have been intentionally targeting with lethal weapons children, medics, journalists, and disabled persons nonviolently protesting the blockade of Gaza.

Alas, none of these exhaustively documented, shocking facts registered with the ‘Prince.’ Its sole concern was the alleged hurt feelings of an Israel soldier in the audience who announced that he was one of the guards along the perimeter fence of this concentration camp caging in one million children.

The ‘Prince’ deemed it an “anti-Semitic trope” to describe Israeli snipers as “drinking the blood of Gaza’s one million children.” Perhaps it would have preferred the description by the world’s leading authority on Gaza’s economy, Sara Roy at Harvard University, who is also the daughter of survivors of Auschwitz: “Innocent human beings, most of them young, are slowly being poisoned by the water they drink.” Children being poisoned: that, too, is an “anti-Semitic trope.” It also happens to be true.

The ‘Prince’ quoted me as recalling by analogy abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s description of slave-catchers as “biped bloodhounds” and his public declaration that if a slave catcher sought to take the slave back, he “will be murdered in the street.” Both my parents were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, my father was a survivor of Auschwitz and the Auschwitz death march, and my mother was a survivor of Majdanek and two slave-labor camps. Every other member of my family on both sides was exterminated. I will perhaps be forgiven for loathing concentration camp guards and murderers of innocents.

The ‘Prince’ accuses me of anti-Semitism. It would appear, however, that not only is the messenger being vilified for his discomfiting message, but the delivery of that message is being tagged as anti-Semitic so as to silence future messengers.