Finkelstein went Head to Head with Finkelstein at Conway Hall

Norman Finkelstein's Head to Head discussion with Mehdi Hassan played to a capacity audience at the Oxford Union on Friday June 30.  Kamel Hawwash blogged about it on his Brum2Jerusalem blog under the question, Which Norman Finkelstein turned up to Aljazeera Head to Head with Mehdi Hasan? Kamel concluded that "it was the “I choose my words very carefully” Norman that turned up in Oxford".

Well the Norman Finkelstein that turned up in London at Conway Hall wasn't so careful.  118 people attended the launch of Old Wine Broken Bottle: Finkelstein's latest book taking down, successfully by all accounts, Ari Shavit's ethnic cleansing and crying book, My Promised Land. 

The room in Conway Hall has a capacity of 400 so 118 was a pretty poor turn out.  In spite of this, Norm, managed to make things worse by provoking a walkout by insisting on his two state position and denouncing those who didn't support it as failing to understand him or it. But the hosts had had 40 copies of his new book printed. They sold out at £5 a go.

Anyway, here's an account that has just been emailed to me by one of my spies at Conway Hall.  I should stress, this was someone who attended the launch, not a member of the Conway Hall staff:

Basically he is completely contradictory. It’s not that he has become a zionist - his latest book, which he was launching, is a great demolition job on Ari Shavit’s attempt to justify ‘liberal zionism’ and in doing so he demolishes all the ideological foundations of zionism. And then he goes on with his vendetta against BDS for not being explicit enough in endorsing ‘two states’, rather than just being agnostic on it.His whole line on the so called ‘international consensus is based on a ridiculous fetishisation of international law and UN resolutions. He ends up with a ‘realist’ rejection of the RoR on the grounds that its full implementation is ‘unrealistic’, and then ends up effectively justifying  this by the argument that Israel exists as a state and all states have the right in international law to control their own immigration policies.

I don’t think his position has any consistency. Frankly I think his experiences and his isolation have turned his mind a bit and he resents the fact that a movement he isn’t part of is now making the running. I think there is an element of injured ego in it, though I don’t normally like explaining political disagreements by psychology.

See this is the big contradiction.  He demolishes zionism with his intellect and then rebuilds it with his ludicrous insistence on two states and his fetishisation, not so much of international law, but of the UN. And this is down to "injured ego"?  I wish someone would injure his ego.

Come to London to see and hear Norman Finkelstein, the man who pissed off everybody

If you're in striking distance of London you could find yourself in striking distance of Norman Finkelstein by taking a trip to the Conway Hall at 25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL where his book, Old Wine, Broken Bottles, Ari Shavitt's Promised Land is being launched by publishers, OR Books, in association with Jews for Justice for Palestinians.

Here's the blurb from Conway Hall:

Special Events

Old Wine, Broken Bottle : Norman Finkelstein's Book Launch

Sat 31 May 2014, 19:00

Jews for Justice for Palestinians presents

London Launch of Norman Finkelstein's latest book: "Old Wine, Broken Bottle: Ari Shavit's Promised Land"

Start: 6.30pm for a 7pm start. End: 10pm.
Norman Finkelstein is a strong speaker celebrated for his brilliant demolitions of Zionist propaganda and full-tilt attacks on the American Israel Lobby.

His new book is a take-down of Ari Shavit’s “My Promised Land”, which he finds is an attempt to repackage Zionist propaganda and win back Diaspora Jews. "Old Wine, Broken Bottle" is a devastating and very entertaining critique that concludes that Shavit will not succeed, and that a broad-based mass movement is now growing that can pressure the Israeli government to withdraw to the 1967 borders.

But Finkelstein is nothing if not controversial: having defied the Zionist establishment, he now stands apart from the mainstream of Palestine solidarity by denouncing the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement as a marginal “cult”. His vehement insistence on the Two State Solution has also been widely challenged.

Professor Finkelstein will open with a conversation with JfJfP signatory Stephen Marks. Then fans and critics alike can put their own questions to him. All are welcome.

Expect a bumpy ride!

Tickets: Free event, but please help towards costs: £3 donation suggested at the door

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Finkelstein has written some wonderful stuff exposing the gulf between Israel's image in the west with its reality on the ground.  He's also given some good talks and made devastating ripostes to zionist critics.  More recently he has lashed out against proponents of the one state solution in Palestine and supporters of the campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against the State of Israel.  He's expressed a certainty about future events that seemed to some to be misplaced at the time and certainly hasn't been borne out by events.  I'm referring to his belief that Kerry was poised to impose a disastrous settlement on the Palestinians that would leave Israel in direct control of everything within the area of the wall.  This, of course, didn't happen.  Does that mean it won't happen?  I don't know.  Perhaps we should double check with Norman Finkelstein.

So who's right about BDS, Kerry or Finkelstein?

Remember Finkelstein railing against BDS:





He wasn't happy about the video and wanted it pulled.  Further down the line he got more out of line and began to misrepresent the movement altogether but his basic point was that BDS, as currently framed, can't work.

Now take a look at Kerry shuttling all over the place (mostly between Washington and Tel Aviv) to try to get some deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.  See what The Guardian had to say about his warning to Netanyahu:

Kerry... warn[ed] on Saturday that failure to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians would damage Israel's capacity to be a democratic state and could lead to more boycotts.

"The risks are very high for Israel," he said at an international security conference in Munich. "People are talking about boycott. That will intensify in the case of failure. We all have a strong interest in this conflict resolution. Today's status quo absolutely, to a certainty, I promise you 100%, cannot be maintained. It's not sustainable. It's illusionary. There's a momentary prosperity, there's a momentary peace."

  So the genie's out of the bottle.  BDS works.  Certainly it works enough for Kerry to panic about bouncing Israel into a settlement that Kerry at least can sell to a sceptical world.  But now here's a thing about which Finkelstein could be right.

In an interview last month with New Left Project's Jamie Stern-Weiner, Finkelstein expressed the concern that Kerry and Israel were trying to impose a settlement on the Palestinian Authority that might look sound in terms of international legality but will be a complete disaster for the Palestinians.  He complained that BDSrs were ignoring the possibility of this and that a deal that had the PA accepting some kind of Greater Israel will make Israel's ethnic cleansing of those within its walls far easier in future.

As it happens this is what we abolitionists have worried about regarding the two state solution all along.  Now in fairness, Finkelstein is often felt to place too much credence in the appearance of legality and I believe anyway that if a manifestly unjust deal is foisted on or accepted by the PA leadership then BDS will continue and hopefully Kerry's worry about the threat of BDS will not be misplaced.

Who said "Land swap...precludes any possibility of a Palestinian State"?

Well it was Norman Finkelstein finding his old form in an interview with Jamie Stern-Weiner at the New Left Project:

Jeremy Ben-Ami, who heads J Street, the main liberal Zionist lobby in the U.S., welcomes renewed peace talks as a potentially "historic opportunity" to reach a two-state settlement. You've been a close observer of the peace process for more than two decades. Can renewed talks produce a "historic" moment, or should we expect more of the same?

When folks like Jeremy Ben-Ami speak of the "two-state solution", they are talking about two states divided by the pre-June 1967 border, with, they are always careful to add, land swaps. By "land swaps", they mean Israel’s annexation of the major settlement blocs and giving Palestinians some territory in return.  In fact the delineation of their proposed border is very clear. It's the route of the Wall. Israelis speak fairly openly of the Wall as the "future border", to quote Israel's current Minister of Justice Tzipi Livni.

That kind of two-state settlement precludes any possibility of a Palestinian state. Israeli retention of the settlement blocs of Ariel, Karnei Shomron and Ma'ale Adumim would trisect the West Bank, appropriate some of its most valuable land and resources and cut off East Jerusalem. When people talk about the terms of a final settlement they often focus on percentages—what percentage of the West Bank will Israel retain, and so on—which misses the point made by the Palestinian delegation to the Annapolis talks: it's not just about percentages. East Jerusalem comprises just 1% of the West Bank, but a Palestinian state in its absence is unthinkable. Greater East Jerusalem—the triangle going from East Jerusalem to Ramallah to Bethlehem—accounts for 40% of the Palestinian economy.

However, I agree with Ben-Ami that we are approaching a potentially historic moment. Why? Because Palestinians are now the weakest they have ever been.

Finkelstein identifies four factors colluding to put the Palestinians in their weakest ever position and he is withering in his criticism of the PA which is nice.  For me the most interesting bit is where he speaks of the fickle and therefore unpredictable nature of public opinion and behaviour in responding to events.  He uses two contrasting examples of the civil rights in the American South in the 1960s and Egypt today:

Anyone who predicts these things with any degree of confidence is a charlatan. The Montgomerybus boycott was completely spontaneous, as were the original student sit-ins in Greensboro. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, the NAACP’s plan was to go through the legal system to get a favourable court ruling. What happened—a mass popular boycott—was spontaneous. Imagine these working people, walking to work or going in makeshift car pools for a year.  A year, getting up in the wee hours of the morning.  Who could have guessed that they would find the inner moral resources to make that kind of sacrifice?

So you can never predict these things. But we should also be careful to avoid predicting in the other direction. When I was speaking about changes in the Middle East the past couple of years, I always described developments in Egypt and Turkey as irreversible except in the event of a military coup in Egypt, which—I always added—I considered highly improbable. Why improbable? Because who would ever have thought that there would a popularly mandated military coup in Egypt? I could not, in my wildest imagination, predict that the secular liberal-left in Egypt would support a military coup. That's a shocker. The inaugural act of the putschists in Egypt was to shoot dead dozens of worshippers at 3.30am during morning prayers.  The secular liberal-left uttered not a word. Nothing. Who would have guessed that a year ago?

Insightful stuff. The whole thing is worth a read here.

Knowing Too Much and the Jewish Lobby

This is just a coincidence but an article I wrote many months ago to the New Left Project has been published. I re-post the beginning below with a link to the full article. 

Norman Finkelstein’s recent book Knowing Too Much surveys the trajectory of American Jews' infatuation with Israel in order to show—this is Finkelstein's main point—that it has entered a stage of disenchantment. But are the political implications of this disenchantment the ones Finkelstein himself draws?

One chapter particularly worth reading in Finkelstein’s book is dedicated to a thorough debunking of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "The Israeli Lobby made me do it" explanation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, and especially the Iraq War. In an essay and subsequent book, Walt and Mearsheimer famously argued that U.S. support for Israeli policies harms rather than serves American interests, and explained it, along with much of the U.S.'s behaviour in the Middle East, in terms of the machinations of pro-Israel lobby groups.


In his chapter, Finkelstein establishes a core communality of interests between Washington and Tel Aviv. Both fear indigenous local self-assertion that would limit their ability to project power in the region. Yesterday the principle threat was Egypt's Nasser; today it is primarily Iran. Israel is fundamentally 'a creature of the West' and therefore the only U.S. ally in the region whose subservience to the U.S. stems from deep cultural and popular roots. It therefore continues to be useful to the U.S. Moreover Finkelstein argues, correctly I believe, that the probable effect of the 'Arab Spring' in the short-term will be to increase U.S. foreign policy reliance on Israel, as an island of pro-western stability in an increasingly volatile region.

Debunking 'The Israel Lobby'

Finkelstein meticulously exposes the leaps of logic that underpin Mearsheimer and Walt’s theories, such as their claim that the failure of Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon shows that the Bush administration was coerced into supporting it, and their insistence that the Iraq war was contrary to U.S. interests because it failed. (But did the war “fail”? Only if one accepts the ridiculous justifications and pie-in-the-sky metrics offered to the public.)

Finkelstein debunks the theory that different U.S. administrations differed on policy towards Israel because of domestic electoral concerns. He traces the common thread, ignored by Lobby enthusiasts, connecting President Truman's tepid support for Israel's creation with President Eisenhower's purely tactical disagreement with Israel regarding the best way to remove Nasser from office. Finkelstein argues cogently that, their protestations notwithstanding, Mearsheimer and Walt are in fact accusing the American Jewish establishment of disloyalty on the basis of alleged 'Jewish interests', an accusation Finkelstein exposes as both false and based on flimsy reasoning.


The bulk of the proof takes Finkelstein into a deconstruction of the terminology that serves as the basis of the allegations. He takes apart the term 'neo-conservative', revealing the ingrained opportunism of its alleged disciples, their almost full alignment with the mainstream U.S. political vision of the world, and the impossibility of dividing Jewish from non-Jewish advocates for the same U.S. dominance. He runs methodically through the record of the Iraq War to demonstrate that Mearsheimer and Walt's contentions are unsubstantiated and incoherent. The coup de grace is an approving cite of the demolition of their thesis on the Iraq War by Norman Podhoretz, a neoconservative himself. Mearsheimer and Walt's supreme achievement seems to be to have made at least one neoconservative sound reasonable.

Continue Reading at New Left Project

Defending Norman Finkelstein

As I have taken issue quite strongly with Norman Finkelstein before, for example here, and here, and here, I feel I need to also take issue with a recently publish article by Steven Salaita, published on Electronic Intifada, that equates Norman Finkelstein with Alan Dershowitz. The article, a textbook example of smear by association, is unbecoming and EI editors should have done the author the favor of refusing to publish it.

I disagree with both Finkelstein's analysis of the political moment and his notions about social movements strategies. On the first matter I think the "opportunity" allegedly presented by the wide international consensus over partitioning Palestine is a mirage. There is an international consensus that one must talk about partitioning Palestine and nothing else. There is no consensus about actual partition, and this isn't likely to change. Norman Finkelstein believes one can use moral persuasion to force the powers that be to act according to what they preach. I believe this is fantasy. Finkelstein believes that it is possible to build a successful mass social movement based on mainstream, generally depoliticized, middle-class Americans and Europeans driven by moral outrage that would compel governments to obey their own laws and follow they own principles. To achieve that, the most important thing activists should do is avoid saying anything that might offend or turn off the average New York Times reader. I think that is a losing and unworkable plan and there is no historical example of such a strategy ever working (but plenty of examples of real social movements pressured to adopt such self-defeating strategies, something Martin Luther King bitterly complained about while sitting in the Birmingham jail). Wide and effective social movements only coalesce on their own aspirations, and ruling classes yield to them only when their material interests are threatened in a significant way and then only when they have exhausted their other options. That is why, first of all, the primary public whose opinion matters is not New York Time readers but Palestinians. That is why also the second most important public is, again, not mainstream opinion, but Americans and Europeans and, even more so, people in the South, who are in various ways and for various reasons relating to their own conditions already more politicized than the mainstream.

I would wish those disagreements should be discussed openly and intelligently, because they are important, and there is a lot more to be said and having these discussions and debate is educational and strengthens the work of building movements for justice. Unfortunately, it is impossible for people in the Palestine solidarity movement to have an intelligent debate with Finkelstein. He drumbeats his talking points, studiously refuses to notice responses to them and resorts to smears and insults when challenged, coupled with an offensive certainty that nobody, and especially those who spend all their day doing it, has anything to teach him about how to organize politically. Finkelstein now thinks he has been "blacklisted" by some "guru" because of his controversial opinions. Apart from this being yet another example of his self-indulgence, it is twice wrong. First, because there is no "guru" with the capacity to blacklist him, the movement being extensively and even perhaps excessively decentralized, and second because--and I say this as someone who occasionally participates in making (local) decisions about inviting speakers--it is not his opinions it seems to me that make him unwelcome but his insufferable and condescending demeanor.

That's a shame, and there is an understandable desire by some to respond in kind. That is how we get to articles such as the one that prompted this post. But we shouldn't, for three reasons. First, because, it should be elementary, Finkelstein's way of responding to critics to his political left is a form of bullying, and there is no excuse for that. We don't need that kind of behavior in our our movements, and we shouldn't legitimize it on the principle that "he started it." Second, the purpose of bullying is to foreclose discussion. Finkelstein does it because he does not want to engage with anyone to his left. But having wide and open discussion about strategy is a good thing on its own and a benefit to activists. There have been thoughtful replies to Finkelstein's arguments (for example, here and here) and these replies sharpen our understanding and improve the work of advocacy on and solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. Smearing Finkelstein by underhanded comparisons with Dershowitz is, beyond being unseemly, a way to avoid discussions that are necessary and useful.

But the most important reason why this is wrong is that it reflects a failure to understand Finkelstein's performance as a political act. As he himself says, "it's politics." Namely, the purpose of rhetoric is not to tell the truth but primarily to gain power by building majorities. Finkelstein's smears are reserved for people he perceives to be on his left, namely, in terms of the broad hegemonic order, more marginal than he is. Those activists he perceives (according to his own words), rightly or wrongly, as close enough to the mainstream, such as Anna Baltzer, get a much nicer treatment. Thus, Finkelstein's attacks on BDS are a variant of the tried and true strategy of centrist "progressive" forces to monopolize the space of "legitimate," "realistic," opposition (think the Democratic Party, Move-On, the British Labour party, etc.) by portraying everything to their left as starry-eyed idealists, detached pie-in-the-sky radicals, Guru-following cultists, frighten-the-children spoilers, and--the worse offense--unrealistic. There is however a grain of truth in every legend: there are certainly in any camp we find ourselves in those who are exactly like that. I'm sure you've met some. The beauty of this strategy for marginalizing BDS and foreclosing the building of real effective international challenges to Israeli apartheid is that it relies on empowering precisely those voices, for whom Finkelstein's "betrayal" just goes to show the dangers of building large movements and why one should segregate oneself in echo chambers of ideological purity. But whereas supporters of the status quo gains something from excluding more radical voices, the latter gain nothing from excluding themselves (those who make a living running tiny left sects have of course a different calculus, which might explain their enthusiasm for Finkelstein).

Every movement for justice that grows will constantly face attempts to tame it, to marginalize, to divert it, and to co-opt it. One solution is to find a strategy that is guaranteed to eschew growth. The other is to accept the challenge and the risk, and to build the education capacity and the resilience that would hopefully allows surviving and growing through these attacks. For that to happen, debates should we welcome and wrongheaded views that appeal to honest supporters and potential supporters should be heard and countered with reason and not by counter-bullying, and attacks from the center should not become opportunities for retreating into the righteousness of making every debate into a mudslinging or bullying contest.

Palestinian prisoners' hunger strike - Amazing Grace

I found this by way of Norman Finkelstein's website:



Someone commented to an earlier post that Finkelstein is now with the mainstream.  If Finkelstein makes it to the mainstream I hope he takes news of the Palestinian prisoners' hunger strike with him.

Israel has been taking these hunger strikers down to the wire before honoring their basic rights, see Khadar Adnan and Hana al-Shalabi but since the world isn't watching who knows what muiht happen to, for example, Samer Issawi?

Norman Finkelstein seeks reconciliation....with Dershowitz

I looked at our tracker a couple of hours ago and noticed that we had got lots of hits from Norman Finkelstein's site.  It took me a little while to establish what this blog had to do with his headline:

ALAN DERSHOWITZ WARNS BAY AREA: FINKELSTEIN IS COMING! DON'T LET HIM SPEAK!

Hmm, poor old Norm, I thought, getting it in the neck again from the Dershmeister.  But below the headline is a copy of an email to the Palestine Solidarity Network:

Subject: [PSN] Finkelstein in SF in April

To: “palestine_solidarity_network” <palestine_solidarity_network@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday, February 22, 2013, 4:38 PM

Norman Finkelstein is planning to come to SF in April and is looking for speaking engagements. In light of the offensive and libelous claims he’s made about the Right of Return and about the BDS movement recently, I’d strongly advise against co-sponsoring events with him. Zionist sites have been quoting him extensively, so that hosting him would just give them more ammunition. If you didn’t follow this, read more here http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2012/07/norman-finkelstein-continues-to-spread.html  ; http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/finkelstein-renews-attack-bds-cult-calls-palestinians-who-pursue-their-rights. The main point is that this isn’t just constructive criticism, but baseless accusations based on hasbara points.

So that would explain the hits but where does he get off comparing his detractors to Dershowitz?  The email doesn't look like a demand that he not be allowed to speak.  It looks like a suggestion that he not speak with the support of Palestine Solidarity Network or in any venue they control.  And how many venues could that be?

Now we can all play this game of comparing two opponents of each other to each other, like say, comparing anti-zionists to Alan Dershowitz.  I'm always struck by the similarities between zionist arguments and antisemitic ones.  But this latest hissy fit by Norm suggests that, in spite of attempting to get his first videoed attack on BDS pulled, Finkelstein has no intention of rethinking his position.  And just to recap on that, his position is that the State of Israel exists on the basis of international law and therefore we cannot demand the enforcement of those aspects of international law which might lead to the abolition of the State of Israel or lead to an Israel without Jewish supremacy.  He further insists that since the abolition of Jewish supremacy in occupied Palestine/Israel cannot be achieved because the public (or maybe the most powerful governments in the world at the mo') don't like it, it is cult-like to try for this.  Furthermore, to bolster his argument he has misrepresented aspects of the BDS campaign and its activists.

What would be interesting would be for Alan Dershowitz to come out strongly in support of Norman Finkelstein. This is unlikely because both of them have a lot of personal baggage bound up in their differences, but who knows what might happen?  Dershowitz supports Jewish supremacy.  Finkelstein acquiesces to it.  Both support the so-called two state solution. Are their positions really so far apart?

Finkelstein on Israel's recent defeat by Hamas and the Arab Spring

Many of us have felt let down by Norman Finkelstein recently what with his statements about BDS which didn't quite tally with the reality but he does seem to hit the spot with this piece on the New Left Project website titled Israel’s Latest Assault on Gaza - What Really Happened:

The official storyline is that Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defence on 14 November, 2012 because, in President Barack Obama’s words, it had “every right to defend itself.”

In this instance, Israel was allegedly defending itself against the 800 projectile attacks emanating from Gaza since January of this past year.

The facts, however, suggest otherwise.

From the start of the new year, one Israeli had been killed as a result of the Gazan attacks, while 78 Gazans had been killed by Israeli strikes.   The ruling power in Gaza, Hamas, was mostly committed to preventing attacks.  Indeed, Ahmed al-Jaabari, the Hamas leader whose assassination by Israel triggered the current round of fighting, was regarded by Israel as the chief enforcer of the periodic ceasefires, and was in the process of enforcing another such ceasefire just as he was liquidated.   

Hamas occasionally turned a blind eye, or joined in to prevent an escalation, when Israeli provocations resulted in retaliatory strikes by Hamas’s more militant Islamist rivals.  It recoiled at being cast as Israel’s collaborator in the image of the Palestinian Authority.

It has been speculated that Hamas was itching for a confrontation with Israel. 

But this past year Hamas has been on a roll.   Its ideological soulmate, the Muslim Brotherhood, ascended to power in Egypt.  The emir of Qatar journeyed to Gaza carrying the promise of $400 million in aid, while Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was scheduled to visit Gaza soon thereafter.   In the West Bank many Palestinians envied (rightly or wrongly) that Gazans fared better economically.  Meanwhile, Gaza’s Islamic University even managed to pull off an academic conference attended by renowned linguist Noam Chomsky.

Hamas’s star was slowly but surely rising, at the expense of the hapless Palestinian Authority.   The very last thing it needed at that moment was an inevitably destructive confrontation with Israel that could jeopardise these hard-won, steadily accreting gains. 

On the other side, many cynical Israelis speculated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the operation in order to boost his election prospects in January 2013.  

As a general rule, however, Israeli leaders do not unleash major military operations for electoral gain where significant State interests are at stake.   The fact that Defence Minister Ehud Barak dropped out of politics soon after the latest operation ended and his popular standing improved suggests that the forthcoming election was not a prime consideration for him.[1]

Why, then, did Israel attack?

In one sense, Israel was straightforward about its motive.  It kept saying, credibly, that it wanted to restore its “deterrence capacity”—i.e., the Arab/Muslim world’s fear of it.

The real question, however, is the nature of the threat it wanted to deter.

The latest assault on Gaza unfolded in the broader context of successive Israeli foreign policy failures.  

Netanyahu sought to rally the international community for an attack on Iran, but ended up looking the fool as he held up an Iranian nuclear device “smuggled” into the United Nations.   Hezbollah boasted that a drone launched by it had penetrated Israeli airspace, and then reserved the right to enter Israeli air space at its whim.  Now, its “terrorist” twin upstart in Gaza was gaining respectability as the Arab/Muslim world thumbed its collective nose at Israel on its doorstep.

The natives were getting restless.  It was time to take out the big club again and remind the locals who was in charge.

“At the heart of Operation Pillar of Defence,” the respected Crisis Group observed, “lay an effort to demonstrate that Hamas’s newfound confidence was altogether premature and that, the Islamist awakening notwithstanding, changes in the Middle East would not change much at all.”

Still, Israel needed a suitable pretext.  So, just as it knew that breaking the ceasefire in November 2008 by killing six Hamas militants would evoke a massive response, so it must have known that killing Jaabari would evoke a comparable response.

The actual Israeli assault, however, differed significantly from Operation Cast Lead (OCL) in 2008-9: it was qualitatively less murderous and destructive.  Many commentators have therefrom inferred that Israel used more precise weapons this time and, concomitantly, that Israel had “learnt the lessons” from OCL on how to avoid civilian casualties.

In fact, 99 percent of Israeli Air Force attacks during OCL hit targets accurately, while the goal of OCL was—in the words of the Goldstone Report, which was supported by scores of other human rights reports—to “punish, humiliate and terrorise” the Gazan civilian population.

If Israel’s latest rampage proved less lethal by comparison, it was because of unprecedented political constraints imposed on it:

• Turkey and Egypt made abundantly clear that they would not sit idly by if Israel launched a repeat performance of OCL.   From early on, both drew a red line at an Israeli ground assault.  Although now officially denied, it was reliably reported at the time that Obama, no doubt prodded by these key regional actors, counselled Israel not to invade.

• Israel had hanging over its head the Goldstone Report.  It managed to elude, the first time around, prosecution at the International Criminal Court and the exercise by several countries of universal jurisdiction for its war crimes and crimes against humanity.  But the second time it might not be so fortunate.

• Gaza was swarming with foreign reporters.   Before OCL, Israel had sealed Gaza shut from the outside world with the cooperation of Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt.   In the initial phase of the onslaught, Israel enjoyed a near-total monopoly on media coverage.   But now, journalists could freely enter Gaza and credibly report Israeli atrocities in real-time.

On account of this trio of factors, Israel mostly targeted sites that could be deemed “legitimate.”  True, some 70 Palestinian civilians were killed, but that could be chalked up to “collateral damage.”

The deaths and injuries of civilians during the Israeli assault, although far fewer than in previous rounds of the conflict, received in-depth and graphic news coverage.  When Israel tested the limits of military legitimacy, trouble loomed.  After it flattened civilian governmental structures in Gaza, the headline on the New York Times web site read, “Israel targets civilian buildings.”  A few hours later it metamorphosed into “government buildings” (no doubt after a call from the Israeli consulate).  Still, the writing was on the wall: Israeli conduct was being closely scrutinised by outsiders, so it had better tread carefully.   

The salient exceptions came during the final ceasefire negotiations when Israel resorted to its standard terrorist tactics in order to extract the best possible terms, and also targeted journalists in the event that the negotiations collapsed and it would have to, after all, launch the murderous ground invasion.

The armed resistance Hamas put up during the eight-day Israeli assault was largely symbolic.  Although Israel acclaimed the success of Iron Dome, it almost certainly did not save many and perhaps not any lives.  During OCL some 800 projectiles and mortar shells landing in Israel killed three Israeli civilians, while during the recent Israeli assault some 1,400 projectiles and mortar shells landing in Israel killed four Israeli civilians. 

It is unlikely that, in the main and allowing for the occasional exception, Hamas used much more technically advanced weapons in the latest round.  Through its army of informers and hi-tech aerial surveillance Israel would have been privy to large quantities of sophisticated Hamas weapons and would have destroyed these stashes before or during the first day of the attack.  It is also improbable that Netanyahu would have risked an attack just on the eve of an election if Hamas possessed weapons capable of inflicting significant civilian casualties.  A handful of Hamas projectiles reached deeper inside Israel than before but these lacked explosives; an Israeli official derisively described them as “pipes, basically.” 

If Israel ballyhooed Iron Dome, it was because its purported effectiveness was the only achievement to which Israel could point in the final reckoning. 

The climax of Israel’s assault came when it was unable to break the spirit of the people of Gaza.  On the one hand, it had exhausted all preplanned military targets and, on the other, it couldn’t target the civilian population.  Hamas had successfully adapted Hezbollah’s strategy of continually firing its projectiles, the psychological upshot of which was that Israel couldn’t declare its deterrence capacity had been restored, and thereby forcing on it a ground invasion. 

Israel could not launch such an invasion, however, without suffering significant combatant losses unless the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) blasted everyone and everything in and out of sight as it cleared a path into Gaza.   But, because of the novel circumstances—the regional realignment after the Arab Spring, and Turkey under Erdogan; the threat of a “mega-Goldstone,” as a veteran Israeli commentator put it; the presence of a foreign press corps embedded not in the IDF but among the people of Gaza—Israel couldn’t launch an OCL-style ground invasion.  

Israel was thus caught between a rock and a hard place.  It couldn’t subdue Hamas without a ground invasion, but it couldn’t launch a ground invasion without incurring a politically unacceptable price in IDF casualties and global opprobrium.  

It is possible to pinpoint the precise moment when the Israeli assault was over: Hamas leader Khalid Mishal’s taunt to Israel at a 19 November press conference, Go ahead, invade!

Netanyahu panicked.  His bluff was called, and Israel stood exposed, naked, before the whole world.   What happened next was a repeat of the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.  Unable to stop the Hezbollah rocket attacks but dreading the prospect of a ground invasion that meant tangling with the Party of God, Israel called in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to negotiate a ceasefire.  This time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was summoned to bail Israel out.  Not even the 21 November bus bombing in Tel Aviv—which, ceasefire or no ceasefire, would normally have elicited massive Israeli retaliation—shook Netanyahu from his determination to end the operation immediately, before Hamas resumed its taunting.

The terms of the final agreement marked a stunning defeat for Israel.  It called for a mutualceasefire, not one, as Israel demanded, unilaterally imposed on Hamas.  It also included language that implied the siege of Gaza would be lifted.  Notably, it did not include the condition that Hamas must cease its importation or production of weapons.  The reason why is not hard to find.  Under international law, peoples resisting foreign occupation have the right (or, as some international lawyers more cautiously phrase it, license) to use armed force.  Egypt, which brokered the ceasefire, was not about to accept a stipulation that conceded Hamas’s legal right.[2]

Israel no doubt hoped that the U.S. would use its political leverage to extract better ceasefire terms from Egypt.  But the Obama administration, placing American interests first and consequently wanting to bring the new Egypt under its wing, was not willing (assuming it could) to lord it over Egypt on Israel’s behalf.

If any doubt remained about who won and who lost in the latest round, it was quickly dispelled.  Israel launched the attack to restore Gaza’s fear of it.  But after the ceasefire and its terms were announced, Palestinians flooded the streets of Gaza in a celebratory mood as if at a wedding party.  In a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour, Hamas’s Mishal cut the figure and exuded the confidence of a world leader.  Meanwhile, at the Israeli press conference announcing the ceasefire, the ruling triumvirate—Netanyahu, Barak and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman—resembled grade-schoolers called down to the Principal’s Office, counting the seconds until the humiliation was over.

The ceasefire is likely to hold until and unless Israel can figure out how to militarily prevail given the new political environment.   The days of Cast Lead are over, while a Pillar of Defence-type operation will not bear the fruits of victory.  

It is unlikely, however, that Israel will fulfil the terms of the final agreement to lift the siege of Gaza.  During deliberations on whether to accept the ceasefire, Barak had already cynically dismissed the fine print, saying “A day after the ceasefire, no one will remember what is written in that draft.” 

It is equally improbable that Egypt will pressure the U.S. to enforce the ceasefire terms on Israel.  The respective interests of the new Egypt and Hamas mostly diverge, not converge.  Egypt desperately needs American subventions, and is currently negotiating a $5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, where Washington’s vote is decisive.  The popularity of President Mohammed Morsi’s government will ultimately hinge on what it delivers to Egyptians, not Gazans.   

In the meantime, U.S. political elites are lauding Morsi to high heaven, stroking his ego, and speculating on the “special relationship” he has cultivated with Obama.  Those familiar with the psychological manipulations of the U.S. when it comes to Arab leaders—in particular, contemptibly mediocre ones such as Anwar Sadat—will not be surprised by the current U.S. romancing of Morsi.

It is also unlikely that Turkey will exert itself on Hamas’s behalf.  Right now it is smarting from Obama’s rebuff of designating Egypt as prime interlocutor in brokering the ceasefire.  Turkey was reportedly disqualified because it labelled Israel a “terrorist state” during the assault, whereas Egypt “only” accused Israel of “acts of aggression, murder and bloodletting.”   

Still, aspiring to be the U.S.’s chief regional partner, and calculating that the road to Washington passes through Tel Aviv, Turkey has resumed negotiations with Israel to end the diplomatic impasse after Israel killed eight Turks aboard a humanitarian vessel headed for Gaza in 2010.   On the other hand, its recent operation has brought home to Israel that alienating both its historic allies in the region, Egypt and Turkey, is not prudent policy, so a face-saving reconciliation between Ankara and Tel Aviv (the Turkish government is formally demanding an apology, monetary compensation, and an end to the Gaza siege) is probably in the offing.

The long and the short of it is that, even in the new era that has opened up, definite limits exist on how much regional support the Palestinians can realistically hope to garner.

It appears that many Palestinians have concluded from the resounding defeat inflicted on Israel that only armed resistance can and will end the Israeli occupation.  In fact, however, Hamas’s armed resistance operated for the most part only at the level of perceptions—the projectiles heading towards Tel Aviv did unsettle the city’s residents—and it is unlikely that Palestinians can ever muster sufficient military might to compel an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. 

But Gaza’s steadfastness until the final hour of the Israeli assault did demonstrate the indomitablewill of the people of Palestine.  If this potential force can be harnessed in a campaign of mass civil resistance, and if the supporters of Palestinian rights worldwide do their job of mobilizing public opinion and changing government policy, then Israel can be forced to withdraw, and with fewer Palestinian lives lost than in an armed resistance.

This article benefited from many conversations with Palestinian political analyst Mouin Rabbani and from Jamie Stern-Weiner playing the devil’s advocate.

Norman Finkelstein is the author of many books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, most recently,Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End, and is currently working on a book with Mouin Rabbani on how to resolve the conflict.

---

[1] It has also been speculated that the governing coalition had to do something to placate popular indignation at the Hamas attacks.  But in fact, these attacks have barely registered on Israel’s political radar the past year, the focus being mostly on Iran and domestic issues.

[2] In a diplomatic side note to Netanyahu, Obama vaguely promised to “help Israel address its security needs, especially the issue of smuggling of weapons and explosives into Gaza.”

The man's obviously a tormented moody genius.

Norman Finkelstein continues to spread disinformation about BDS

Norman Finkelstein continues to spread disinformation about BDS. In a new interview, by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, Finkelstein repeated the accusation that "BDS is a cult," this time in a measured and composed way, not as an "outburst". Parenthetically, the interview itself, in its structure and the kind of questions asked and not asked, suggests that Finkelstein himself is fashioning his own persona as a cult leader. But let's get back to the specific accusation. Finkelstein claims that "[t]he movement is riddled with flagrant hypocrisy." He offers three examples:

a) a leader calls for the boycott of all Israeli universities while he himself studies at Tel Aviv University, (b) a leader claims that BDS doesn’t target individuals or an individual’s beliefs, only institutions, but he then calls for a ban on Daniel Barenboim, because Barenboim is a “Zionist,” c) BDS did not call for a ban on [the film] Five Broken Cameras although it was produced in conjunction with an official Israeli film society.

None of these three examples represent any shred of hypocrisy.
1.
Finkelstein refers, strangely without mentioning the name, to Omar Barghouti, who is a citizen of Israel and a student at Tel Aviv University. One of the three demands of BDS is equality of Israel's citizens. BDS is not a call for segregation, and obviously opposes the variety of measures used by Israeli universities to make Palestinian students feel unwelcome at Israeli universities and to reduce their enrollment numbers. Access to higher education is a fundamental civil right. We are fighting, among other things, so that more Palestinians in 48 Palestine can go to universities and study without being harassed, isolated, silenced, etc. It would be plainly counter-productive for Palestinians to assist Israel in the denial of their rights by giving them up on their own initiative. Precisely because BDS is not a cult, but a movement organized on principles of rational strategy, that no such demand for students to boycott themselves exists.
Indeed, there is likewise no BDS call for Israeli Jewish students to avoid studying at Israeli universities. The BDS call against Israeli universities is a call for world institutions and academics, demanding that they sever institutional ties. Not only there are BDS adherents who are students at Israeli Universities, but there are some, like Koby Snitz and Anat Matar, who are professors there as well. To accuse students and professors of Israeli Universities of hypocrisy for supporting BDS is akin to demanding that workers picketing their employers must first quit their job in the name of "moral consistency." It is plain silly. Omar Barghouti is calling for other institution to boycott the university where he is a student on the basis of a certain demands. That is perfectly legitimate.
With this accusation Finkelstein is belatedly joining a smear campaign launched against Barghouti in 2009. At the time, PACBI issued a statement clarifying why this smear campaign was wrong on every count, noting that

PACBI has never called upon Palestinian citizens of Israel and those who are compelled to carry Israeli identification documents, like Palestinian residents of occupied Jerusalem, to refrain from studying or teaching at those Israeli institutions. That would have been an absurd position, given the complete lack of alternatives available. Successive Israeli governments, committed to suppressing Palestinian national identity in their pursuit of maintaining Israel’s character as a racist state, have made every effort possible to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian university inside Israel. The only choice left to Palestinian students and academics in Israel, then, is to go to an Israeli university or leave their homeland to pursue their studies or academic careers abroad -- often not possible due to financial or other compelling reasons. In fact, the Israeli authorities have consistently worked to strip Palestinians from occupied Jerusalem of their Israeli ID cards and thus their residency rights while they study abroad, thereby prohibiting them from returning.(PACBI statement) 

I find it hard to believe that Finkelstein is not aware of this statement, and either way, it is inexcusable that he ignores it.
2.
In 2010, PACBI issued an opinion that Bareboim's WEDO orchestra was boycottable. This was a controversial question, because the case of WEDO and the role it plays politically is both marginal and complex, and there were conflicting views about it. The argument against WEDO, whether one agrees with it or not, was not about Barenboim's opinions, or indeed about Barenboim at all, given that WEDO is an institution in which people other than Barenboim hold decision making positions. It was a question of whether WEDO as an institution meets the criteria of the cultural boycott that have been laid down over a year earlier. PACBI's position was that it did:
Based on quotes from the Orchestra's own programmatic statements, PACBI concluded that WEDO's

...self-definition turns occupation and colonial oppression into a mere "problem" or “barrier” to be discussed between "traditional rivals" who hope to settle their "differences" and build "bridges" of understanding through music and dialogue to encourage "listening to one another" and to set "a good example of democracy and civilized living."
By promoting this false symmetry or balance between the "two sides," WEDO is indeed promoting normalization. The Divan refuses to even recognize, let alone oppose, Israel's ethnic cleansing, occupation and system of racial discrimination as the root causes of the Arab-Israeli colonial conflict, sanitizing the very real oppressive reality on the ground with benign terms that are intended to project symmetry between oppressor and oppressed and moral parity between colonizer and colonized. This conforms to the definition of normalization, a term used across the Arab World, especially in Palestine, to describe joint Arab-Israeli projects that ignore or bypass the reality of oppression altogether, and/or fail to contribute to the struggle to end it, hence presenting to the world a deceptive image of "civilized" coexistence despite Israel's patently uncivilized colonization and apartheid system (PACBI statement).

However one's personal tolerance for political views than one deems offensive, a question of temperament, it is an undisputable fact that the PACBI boycott guidelines, on which the case against WEDO was made, do not cite Zionism, or any other held belief, as a ground for boycott. While Finkelstein feigns not to be aware of that, anybody with an internet browser can verify it.
Finkelstein's claim that Barenboim was boycotted for his "Zionism" repeats without attribution Mariam Said's accusation against PACBI. In claiming that the issue was Barenboim's Zionism, Said paraphrased a PACBI statement to the Qatari government that is not available in electronic form. Therefore, I cannot say whether Said's paraphrase has substance. It doesn't bother Finkelstein to cite an unsubstantiated accusation, that PACBI subsequently denied, as if it were established fact. However, two more general points are worth making in that context.
First, even if Zionism isn't the criterion for boycott, the question of where institutional agents stand politically is certainly within the scope of a relevant analysis. For understanding better the political context in which this debate took place and Barenboim's opinion were cited, I recommend reading Raymond Deane's article about WEDO as an institution. However, if indeed the original statement was not as clear on the grounds for boycott as PACBI's subsequent clarification, the only conclusion one could draw from that legitimately would be one that every activist knows from experience. political positions, arguments and principles do not come down from heaven in a perfect state, but are constantly clarified and developed in the process of struggle itself. It is precisely because BDS is a political movement and not a cult that this is true of it.
Second, among all those who profess some kind of adherence to the BDS call there are, inevitably, different tendencies and interpretations. Part of the evolution of every political formation is a certain conflict within cooperation over those tendencies and interpretations. There are BDS supporters like Mariam Said and Virginia Tilley who want relaxation of certain anti-normalization criteria. There are others who want boycott of all Israelis based on nationality. The 2006 case of the boycotting of Juliano Mer Khamis by some activists raised a storm and was instrumental in building cohesion over the BDS attitude on Israeli artists. Mediating such conflicts creatively while building essential unity is part of the function of leadership, and the credibility of leadership is in large measure dependent of its ability to solve these contradictions in ways that are acknowledged by all parties as conducive for the movement's shared goals. Of course, this does not always involve compromise. Sometimes, it also involves taking a clear stand against misguided attempts that would derail these goals if they were to gain the upper hand.
3.
The third accusation against PACBI, for failing to call for a boycott against the film Five Broken Cameras for being co-produced and co-directed with Israelis is the most bizarre. I haven't yet seen or studied the film, so what follows is preliminary. Obviously if an argument were advanced that a certain film should be boycotted, it would take some time to reach an informed decision, and Five Broken Cameras has barely been out. But on preliminary grounds, it seems quite obvious that the film is not boycottable for the exact same reason that WEDO is. The film is a work of resistance in itself, and a documentation of the resistance along the Apartheid Wall. Far from boycotting Israeli participation in Palestinian resistance, the BDS call "invite[s] conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace". The PACBI guidelines for cultural boycott specify this exception clearly:

All such events and projects that bring Palestinians and/or Arabs and Israelis together, unless the Israeli side is explicitly supportive of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and unless the project/event is framed within the explicit context of joint opposition to occupation and other forms of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, are strong candidates for boycott. (my emphasis)

Criticism can sometimes be harsh and uncompromising and yet valuable. Therefore, I wouldn't want to hold it against Finkelstein simply that he is very harsh. Yet I find it hard to belief that Finkelstein, who is known for reading everything and checking every un-dotted i and uncrossed t in what he reads, can be so egregiously unaware of the basic principles laid out by the people he criticizes. By this stage, I find it unavoidable to conclude that Finkelstein is engaged in a politically motivated campaign of disinformation aimed at destroying BDS, rather than any form of conscientious, informed criticism of it. Anyone who gives him a podium or interviews him without being prepared to challenge him when he is simply making stuff up is effectively helping such a disinformation campaign.

II
I picked on these accusations because they were the most malicious. There is a lot more in the interview that I disagree with, and I would like to briefly refer to two more points about BDS being "like a cult."

The movement functions in a cocoon world where the incantation of mantras – “BDS,” “One State” and “Israeli Apartheid” – has replaced a political analysis of what’s possible and likely to reach a broad public.

It would be indeed a problem if that were so. Yet this is no more than one biased outsider's impressionistic claim, backed with nothing. I'd rather be concrete with a counter example. BDS Switzerland, in which I am active, reached "a broad public" by two organized campaigns in the last year. In one, we got over 170 artists, including some of the most well known in the country, to join the cultural boycott on the basis of an explicit reference to the Right of Return. getting signatures was easier than expected and certainly does not back Finkelstein's claim that RoR is a non-starter with the public. In the second, we collected 12,000 signatures in front of supermarkets, calling the major chains to destock Israeli products. Our campaign pressured the largest local chain to begin labeling products as "produced in settlements." Although it was less than our full demand, it was an important achievement that raised and changed the tone of mainstream public debate. We constantly analyze the public arena in order to identify what is "politically possible." We never had a discussion of "one state," and we have no campaign advocating one state, regardless of our personal opinion regarding what is more or less desirable. While I won't vouch for the political maturity of every group that launches a BDS campaign, it is my personal impression that my experience of BDS is more widespread than Finkelstein's.
III
The last point is more abstract, but worthy of discussion because it feels like it has some theoretical and experiential plausibility. Finkelstein claims that

Self-proclaimed leaders of the BDS movement claim to speak in the name of “Palestinian civil society” or “the Palestinian people,” although they have no basis to make such a claim. They then use this fraudulent claim as a club to silence any opposition to their diktat;

The reason this seems to be valid is because political representation is a fraught, contested, and constructed process, often misrepresented in the media as well as the political culture in general as a straightforward and objective relation. Thus, in liberal democracies, we have a number of institutions that function as "representations" of the populace, primarily through elections. By this stage in history, many people are keenly aware of how problematic the representative claims of even legally organized representative functions such as parliaments, elected presidents, councils, etc. are. Yet it is hard to deny that officially elected "representatives," however compromised, do carry a certain level of legitimacy that their draw from "representing" a people, faction, district, etc., through institutionalized elections. Thus one the one hand, it has become fashionable among some to reject any representational claim and insist that people only "speak for themselves." On the other hand, the legitimacy of liberal democratic representation is often contrasted in the public discourse with the lack of legitimacy of radical challenges to the political system, protesters, occupations of public spaces, revolts, strikes, etc., who are not backed by elections. Together, these two widely shared ideas contribute to weigh against any form of effective popular resistance to power.
It is both this liberal institutional discourse, which is crumbling around us, and the individualistic, existential riposte, that Finkelstein invokes implicitly when he denies the BDS organizers in Palestine the right to speak in the name of the "Palestinian people." In contrast, I would suggest an alternative conception of representation. To be active politically, that is, to make an intervention in the public realm regarding a collective choice, is inherently to claim representative status of the concerned public, either directly, or through a proxy reference (X is representative and I support X). Arguments about political claims are inherently invalid unless they represent a public as a collection of people with certain concerns that unite them behind that claim. Thus, it would be both impossible and inadmissible for anyone to make a political argument about Palestine without such an argument citing some representational power. Indeed, Finkelstein himself cites representational power when he defends his views as both widely supported by Palestinians and objectively in their interests.
The status of a political function as representative is always contested . For the same reason that a political claim cannot be effective without representing a "people", the best counter claim against one is often the demolition of its claim to represent. An essential part therefore of making political claims is establishing representational power in practice. For popular challenges, such actions involve organizing people in a way that affirms the representational power of certain claims. Thus, for example, calling a strike builds representational power to the extent that people actually strike. In Switzerland, the act of collecting 12,000 signatures buttressed our claim that de-shelving Israeli products is not the personal affectation of a few activists but a broadly shared public request that our petition legitimately represented. Elections are a mechanism construed for institutionalizing such representative claims. However, far from guaranteeing representation, liberal elections invariably create conditions in which representational claims can be advanced fraudulently more easily. BDS is not a party vying for elections, and the leadership of the BDS movement does not claim to represent Palestinians in a governing function. This, however, especially in the context of the failure of liberal democracy more broadly worldwide, cannot suffice to deny the claim of representation unless one accepts either that representation is impossible or that governing through elections are the sine qua non of political legitimacy.
It seems to me that the representational claims of BDS are essentially twofold, that the three demands of the BDS call represent the historical demands of the Palestinian people and are widely supported by Palestinians, and that the strategy of boycott, including an anti-normalization stance, is widely popular and widely perceived as appropriate. The test of these claims is not whether PACBI was elected or not or about how many Palestinians are hypothetically willing, as Finkelstein believes, to give up the right of return. The test is in actual organizing in which support for these representational claims is established or contested in practice.
The 2005 BDS call, signed by over 170 organizations, including both Fatah and Hamas, is an example of a successful political organization that established precisely the claims of BDS to be representative of the Palestinian people. The success in organizing the cultural boycott, including the success in denying boycott breakers platforms in Ramallah and other places in the Occupies Territories, even and indeed precisely because such actions require mobilizing people and building popular and public pressure on the undecided, are further proof of BDS's legitimate representational claims. The absence of any Palestinian political force that calls for the renunciation of the Right of Return and the abandonment of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, as Finkelstein advocates, further buttresses the claim that the three BDS demands are indeed elements of national Palestinian consensus. It does not follow that there are no debates and disagreements. Debates about both goals and strategies have not ended, and the Boycott National Committee does not have the authority to settle these debates by declarative fiat. There are, for example, those who want a more relaxed boycott, and those, like Sari Nusseibeh, who are willing to give up the Right of Return. The question in such cases is not whether BDS is officially representing the Palestinian people, but which of the different positions has a better representational claim. This is, of course, a question to be decided by Palestinians themselves through political means, not by solidarity activists and outside intellectuals. Finkestein's argument is fallacious when he deduces from the contested nature of representation and the non elected position of the BDS leadership that the set of imposed demands and principles they advocate does not represent the Palestinian people. It does precisely to the extent that Palestinians have effectively and with wide consensus organized around them.
This is not to say that the status of Palestinian leadership is resolved. There seems to be a widely shared sense of the need to rebuild institutions in order to restore the level of cohesion and authority that was lost with the demise of the PLO through the Oslo process. In no way does the recognition of the need for better representational institutions justify the kind of blank dismissal advocated by Finkelstein. What Finkelstein advocates in practice is nothing other than undercutting and declawing of one of the most effective forms of Palestinian organizing within the scope of the Palestine liberation struggle in recent years. No conscientious person should allow herself to be seduced by that.

UPDATE: When you've read this, read this

This time he went too far - Virginia Tilley on Norman Finkelstein

I can't remember how I got this post from Virginia Tilley's blog but it only just occurred to me to paraphrase one of Finkelstein's book titles to describe his latest outburst against anti-zionism.  I have known for years that Finkelstein supports the two state solution but this time, whilst accusing others of disingenuousness, in his outburst against anti-zionists he drifts into some dubious formulations of his own.  I already linked to Lenin's Tomb's critique of Finkelstein. Gabriel Ash has some interesting comments under my post here on JSF.  But I think Virginia Tilley, author of The One State Solution gets the main arguments all in one place balancing criticism with what she believes Finkelstein got right:

A Response to Norman Finkelstein

Virginia Tilley

19 February 2012

Responding to bizarre statements always risks magnifying their exposure and importance. Hence I wouldn’t normally respond to Norman Finkelstein’s startling 32-minute video attack on the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, which was recently posted on YouTube to considerable fanfare by Zionist blogs. Some other good writers have taken him on, like Sean O'Neill, so I could leave it there. But having watched the whole video-taped interview as well as the 5-minute version that someone cobbled together of its “highlights”, I’m sufficiently irritated to respond. Partly I'm concerned to counter some fallacies he promotes that are floating around more widely, but I also feel obliged to challenge people who use the worst conceits of the academy—“it’s science!” “it’s law!”—to trash people’s work while abusing the real rigor and subtlety of academe. In fact, some of Finkelstein’s points are flat wrong, others partly wrong, some partly right and others flat right.  I’ll start with the wrong ones.

First, it’s seriously irritating that Finkelstein goes on about international law in ways that reduce international law to a parody of itself. You can’t take some law and not all law, he says, as though law is a fixed box set. For one thing, he cherry-picks law with abandon himself, as I'll discuss later. But mainly, international law isn’t a frozen set of rules. Like any law, it’s a moving target. Rules and norms develop incrementally, and are interpreted and reinterpreted over time, as conditions and needs change. For example, when the United Nations voted for partitioning Palestine in 1947, apartheid in South Africa hadn’t yet been invented. Within a few more years, South Africa’s first apartheid laws were on the books, yet it was another decade before the UN began to react seriously against it and 1973 before the UN made apartheid a crime against humanity. Today, the prohibition of apartheid is codified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and what Israel is doing can be defined and denounced in terms that did not exist a half-century ago.

This is why Finkelstein botches international law in holding that, because “Israel is a state,” no one has a jot to say about the situation of Arab citizens inside Israel. Even when he talks about the 1947 partition resolution of the UN, Resolution 181, which recommended partitioning Mandate Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, he gets it wrong. He forgets that Resolution 181 specified plainly that neither state could discriminate on the basis of religion or race. When the General Assembly admitted Israel as a member of the UN in 1949, on the basis of this history, its members relied (gullibly) on Israel’s hints that it would not discriminate against Arabs inside the state. So Israel’s discriminatory laws flew in the face of international opinion even in 1949, let alone sixty-plus years later, when human rights law has gained so much more strength in prohibiting racial discrimination and apartheid. Today, no state anywhere in the world today has a “right” to discriminate among its citizens on the basis of race, religion, or ethnic or national origin. Israel has signed onto the international conventions which explicitly prohibit such discrimination and is bound by its obligations on this score.

So if Finkelstein and others try to rely on diplomatic recognition of Israel to argue that international law has nothing to say about discrimination against Arabs in Israel, they are flat wrong, because it is flatly prohibited. Yes, Israel is recognized as a state, but so is South Africa, and that didn’t stop the entire world from slamming apartheid as the racist abomination it was and insisting that the apartheid regime be dismantled.

Finkelstein is also flat wrong on another historical point: that the international legal framework for resolving the conflict has always been partition into two states. For evidence, he mentions that when Arafat—that legendary legal mind— proposed two states in 1989, he invoked the 1947 partition resolution as unfinished business of the conflict. Yes, Arafat did cite this, but his point was precisely to jump back over four decades during which the opposite was true. From 1947 to 1989, Israel flatly rejected creation of a Palestinian state anywhere in Mandate Palestine as an intolerable threat to Israel. The formal public position of the PLO from its creation until 1988 was also one state. Since 1967, Israel has made deadly clear—in rhetoric, laws, maps, settlement construction, military rule and anything else we might care to check—its intention is to keep all of Mandate Palestine under its supreme control. And in all that time, the UN Security Council said nothing about two states or even about Palestinian national rights. That’s precisely why the Oslo Accords manifested to naive international public as a “historic compromise”, blah blah.

Finkelstein calls for us to stick with this “historic compromise”. He dresses down the BDS movement for not doing so and for seeking instead, if implicitly, to “eliminate” or “abolish Israel”. We are all so sick of this language that I couldn’t normally find energy to write this sentence, except that he extends the point to delegitimizing the BDS organizers by saying that they “don’t want Israel to exist”. So let’s go through it one more time: this old Zionist chestnut makes open hash of international law by deliberately confusing two things—Israel as a modern territorial state and Israel as a Jewish state. Finkelstein’s critique of BDS doctrine is sort of right: yes, taken as a whole (as I agree with him we should take it), the comprehensive effect of the BDS agenda would “abolish Israel” as a Jewish state.


But is this logical implication—based entirely on international human rights law, by the way—illegitimate? I’d say, damn straight, Israel as a Jewish state must be abolished, just as white South Africa had to be “abolished”, and for the same reason—because ethnic states simply can’t exist without discrimination and oppression. But does this mean abolishing Israel as a modern territorial state? Of course not, just as South Africa was not “abolished” in this sense. So language about “eliminating Israel” is just pointless sophistry—scare-mongering, rhetorical sabotage—as Finkelstein well knows. Indeed, accepting his claim to senior experience of this conflict, we must assume he knows all about this manipulative language and his using it therefore can only mirror his accusations of hypocrisy back on himself.

Indeed, it is Finkelstein himself who avoids being honest—just saying straight out that he wants Israel to remain a Jewish state and won’t accept as "reasonable" any program that disagrees. Instead, he cites “international law” selectively and thinly as a cover for this. He also claims that the BDS movement contradicts “international law,” such as UN Security Council resolutions which call for creating two states. Yet here again, he cherry picks, and hoists himself on his own petard. He cites Resolution 1515 of 2003, which calls for two states, as “international law” yet then disparages Resolution 194, which calls for return of Palestinian refugees, as “indefensible”. Here more sophistry infuses his objection that mass return of millions of Palestinian refugees to Palestine would be entirely "unreasonable". For one thing, at least one study has found that the number of Palestinians actually wanting to return would be in the hundreds of thousands, not millions. But, in any case, defending the principle of Palestinian return hardly precludes sensible policies to manage the pragmatic realities of it, and activists firing questions from audiences in Finkelstein's talks (his example) hardly define the range of negotiation that must go into such questions. The very complexity of resolutions, diplomatic initiatives and contradictory clauses in the full history of the conflict precludes table-thumping about any one of them. All are necessarily subject to the diplomatic process, power politics, real politik, geographic constraints and evolving international views. Taking bits and pieces in isolation to call some “unreasonable” and others “international law” is meaningless.

It is indeed by viewing all this as a whole process, contradictions and all, that the “compromise” suggested by the Oslo Accords is revealed as a sham. Not least, Finkelstein ignores the glaring fact, hardly irrelevant to his claims about international consensus, that Israel itself has never agreed to a two–state solution. Aside from one sentence in a letter by Ariel Sharon, which was never formally endorsed by the Israeli Cabinet, Israel has never signed onto any document in any way that actually commits its government to create two states. Nor has it ever recognized the Palestinian people as a people or endorsed the Palestinian right to self-determination. The BDS movement might usefully address this farce and open discussions toward accepting that "Israel" now embraces all of Mandate Palestine and therefore must be reconceived as a secular-democratic state. But until that happens, the BDS movement can't be criticized for standing silent on a geographic version of Israel that Israel refuses to hold for itself. Here Finkelstein's citing the International Court of Justice on the question of where Israel's exists is only more cherry-picking: a mountain of international diplomacy confirms that Israel's final borders have not been set and the question remains a "final status" issue.

Finkelstein claims that BDS organisers will not admit to the true goals of BDS (the elimination of Israel) because they don’t want to split the movement. This isn’t a fact so much as an interpretation, but it’s easy to agree with him. He’s flat right that the three-tier goals of the BDS movement—end the occupation, return of refugees, equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel—would “eliminate Israel” as a Jewish state. I’ve pointed this out myself, and am convinced for several reasons that the BDS organizers are fully aware of it. And I too have been bothered by the elision, but on reasoning opposite to Finkelstein’s. I think that a strategic fuzziness on this point deprives the BDS movement of its greatest potential, which is the unassailable moral force gained by clearly rejecting discrimination in all its forms and fighting for creation of a non-racial state, as in South Africa.

Finkelstein, by contrast, denounces the campaign’s silence on this point as deceptive, and failing to accept the inevitable. In doing so, he tramples all over principles of political activism as freely as he abuses international law. His first fallacy is to deride the BDS movement’s fogginess on its ultimate vision of one secular-democratic state as “childish” and “silly.” In this view, he is strangely naive, for a political scientist, about the politics of liberation movements. It’s a very old and time-honoured method in building mass movements to tread lightly around issues that divide people until consensus and trust build to the point where more difficult internal differences can be productively debated. The Zionist movement itself has done this from its earliest years, in skirting deep internal divisions about Judaism and Jewish social values, but we can spot the same manoeuvring in any liberation movement over the past few centuries. So it’s hardly "hypocritical" that the BDS leadership is treading gently by not confronting its constituency with divisive issues until the time has matured for some respectful internal debate about what “eliminating Israel” will actually mean to the future and well-being of the Jewish national home in Palestine. Perhaps it’s time for those discussions to be opened, but meanwhile it’s truly silly to call the delay “dishonest”. (Perhaps Finkelstein’s sensitivity on this score traces to Maoism, to which, by his own account, he was loyal for decades longer than most people. Once in a cult, always see cults?)

Finkelstein’s second fallacy about BDS is in disparaging its few “successes”. Here he fails to grasp the essential character of a BDS campaign. Although any such campaign naturally seeks and celebrates landmark victories, its true success is not measured by the number of companies pulling out of contracts but by the incremental growth of world public opinion. Let’s get this straight: the primary purpose of BDS is public education. This is mostly an intangible or qualitative matter, yet of immense importance, as Israel knows full well: hence Israeli state rhetoric these days barely mentions “terror” and focuses almost exclusively on “delegitimation”. I’d suggest it’s a far better indication of the BDS movement’s success that Israeli ambassadors, meeting in Israel over the New Year's break, reported that they had never before felt their diplomatic environments so chilly. Sean O'Neall has observed the same constraints confronting the stumbling Birthright Israel program, and other observers attest similarly.

Finkelstein’s third fallacy regarding activism is to protest that, if it’s honest about its “eliminate Israel” goals, the BDS will never reach a “mainstream public”. This objection about mainstream opinion, which he repeats several times, is bizarre on its face. Since when do human rights campaigns adjust their arguments to please mainstream opinion? Changing mainstream opinion is their very task. If activists took mainstream opinion as the proper guide to moral action, we would never have had the anti-slavery abolition movement, or the women’s suffrage movement, and apartheid would flourish in South Africa to this day. Indeed, we wouldn’t have most human rights campaigns. The toughest ones, which are often the greatest ones, must often start small and grow slowly.

Still, maybe Finkelstein is unintentionally helpful in drawing our attention to a seamier camp of human rights activism, by publicly positioning himself in it: some activists do tune their positions to what they think the majority wants to hear, eschewing stands that “lack support”. They may believe themselves pragmatic, but I call these folks “human rights entrepreneurs”, as they are essentially market-oriented. Like courtiers, they position themselves just behind the cutting edge, with a keen eye for trends, so they can surf a wave they didn’t actually have the courage or insight to create themselves. In other words, they are not guided by the moral principles of human rights but by how the rhetoric “sells”—how a human-rights posture gets them into the "club", invited to conferences and onto speaker circuits, and draws funds to their NGOs (although I make no assertion about Finkelstein on the money question). I don’t work that way, and I’d submit that the great human rights campaigns of human history have never built that way. They build on principle, and the greatest movements, like the campaigns to end slavery and apartheid, hammered away for decades through fog and darkness, eventually succeeding when moral authority and changing conditions finally synced. So were these all “cults” during those dark years? If so, call me a cultist.

I'm not saying Finkelstein is a money-grubber. On the contrary, he is clearly saying what he truly thinks, and, setting aside his unnecessarily rude and insulting language, I respect his independence of mind. But his position is still entrepreneurial in approaching human rights audiences as markets, in the guise of being pragmatic. If he remains dedicated to this approach, perhaps he can remember the power of marketing: persuading people that they want something. That’s how the ANC did it, anyway, eventually selling its idea of a shared state to what looked for many decades like unassailable white rejection.

In stark contrast to Finkelstein's argument, human rights campaigns must indeed assume, as a premise essential to their work, that public opinion—here, Jewish-Israeli opinion and Palestinian public opinion—is not fixed, but responds to persuasion, events and conditions. Especially, it responds to messages from the other side. A clarion call by the ANC for a shared state is what tipped South African apartheid leaders, once their world crumbled, to give up apartheid. When Palestinians decide collectively that their future is a reunited and shared Palestine, in which all citizens are equal in dignity and rights, the political chemistry of the entire conflict will change. By creating a “mainstream public” for themselves, they will ultimately create it for all.

This brings us to the question of leadership. One point I think Finkelstein did get right, and perhaps it was time to break ground by saying it. He decried the BDS Council for presuming to direct solidarity activities elsewhere. He mentions its squashing his own initiative in Gaza, which was a scandal, but also its claiming authority over initiatives by solidarity people anywhere in the world. I have to agree with him on this one: I’ve never seen anything like it, either—not with the Vietnamese, the ANC, Sandinistas, the Mayas, the PLO, East Timor, or any liberation movement I’ve ever supported or communicated with. The BDS Council is an able body of activists promoting an international campaign, but Finkelstein is right: it’s no more than an unelected, unrepresentative bunch of volunteers, and it has zip to say about what anybody else does, ever, anywhere, in support of the Palestinian people. Its only legitimate role is to serve as a resource, not an authority. Language I’ve heard by international activists on this score—that “proposals” for activity this or that must be “brought to the BDS Council” for “deliberation” and decisions about whether they should go forward—is gobsmacking and raises my political-alarm antennae. The same ugly impression was gained by AdamSchatz in the London Review of Books:

The idea of living with Jews—a central tenet of large sections of the Palestinian movement during the First Intifada—gave way to a vision of struggle against a faceless coloniser. When Israel began to build the wall, Palestinians retreated in pride and defiance behind a separation wall of their own. Many now refuse to associate even with those Israelis who are in sympathy with the Palestinian struggle. Amira Hass, the great left-wing Israeli journalist for Haaretz, who is based in Ramallah, was prevented from studying Arabic at Birzeit; Daniel Barenboim has been vilified by some leaders of the boycott movement on the grounds that the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Arab-Israeli youth orchestra he created with Edward Said, is promoting “normalisation” with the Zionist state. One BDS leader told me with eerie self-assurance that Said would have shut down the orchestra in line with BDS demands. There was even a debate within BDS about whether the Bilin protests ought to be boycotted because of the participation of Israeli Jews who might call themselves Zionists. ‘These people don’t go to Bilin, [Palestinian lawyer Diana] Buttu said. ‘They prefer to issue fatwas from their laptops, and if you question the logic behind the fatwas, you get called a traitor. [emphasis added]’

Who the flippin’ hell is the BDS Council to shut down the Barenboim orchestra, or turn away Amira Hass or anyone else from Birzeit University, or—god help us—presume to assert that Edward Said, of all people, would kow-tow to its puerile diktat? What random NGO coalition is authorized to silence dissent by denouncing people as traitors? This is not just arrogance but dangerous arrogance, ringing of proto-fascism—centralisation by authoritarian personalities, claiming doctrinal and strategic control over a liberation movement in the name of ideological purity with racist overtones, although they have no popular mandate whatever, not even the democratic figleaf provided by the (long-defunct) Palestine National Council. The dangers of this distortion must not be underestimated and further submission to its intimidation tactics is unwise. Perhaps Finkelstein has done the solidarity movement a service, after all, by throwing open a window for true Palestinian democrats to confront this tendency and nip it in the bud. Sometimes a bull in a china shop does create an opportunity to sweep out the place.  

By the way, The Jewish Chronicle had its glee over the Finkelstein outburst on its home page just recently though, whereas lumping him in with a ragbag of neo-nazi racists like Gilad Atzmon and the BNP's Nick Griffin back in November 2011 appeared on the front page of the print edition, the article headed, Finkelstein disowns 'silly' Israel boycott only appears on page 5 of the latest print edition. Clearly the zionists at the JC aren't quite as ready to embrace two states as they like to make out.

UPDATE: I've paid more attention to the comments than I did to Virginia Tilley's article. Here's Gabriel Ash's comment to this post:

Tilley has its good points however, she seems to have a beef with PACBI, that seems as personal and as inappropriate as Finkelstein's. First, the Gaza March was not "squashed" by the BNC, and the shame is on Tilley for using this language. Some members of the BNC, speaking for themselves, criticized some aspects of it, constructively and politely, and most of the organizers accepted the validity of the criticism, except NF, who publicly tried to undermine the march while leaving the organizing committee. It is sad to see that Tilley supports NF's behavior and find faults with the very fact that Palestinian public intellectuals would dare comment on what they see as shortcomings of a solidarity campaign. It feels like a case of academics sticking together in defending the right to behave irresponsibly and without accountability, their professional sin. 

Second, preventing Amira Hass from learning at Bir Zeit, if it happened (and I was told it happened before BDS anyway), has nothing to do with BDS as such action is quite explicitly against the PACBI academic and cultural boycott guidelines. Obviously, there have been boycotts of Israelis before, including as part of the Arab boycott, and Tilley has as much right as anybody to suggest that that such boycotts are not helpful. In fact, I agree. But Tilley uses this event to smear activists who obviously had nothing to do with it. It seems that both NF and Tilley have found in the Palestinian initiators of the BDS call a scapegoat for every Palestinian who takes a political position they disapprove of. One wonders what is the motivation for this. Is the very presence of assertive Palestinians in the movements making them uncomfortable? 

Regarding The exchange between PACBI and the Diwan Orchestra, I think PACBI is right. The Diwan Orchestra does normalize the occupation, not because it brings Israelis and Palestinians together, but because it refuses to make any political statements when it does it. While the orchestra does little damage on its own, and is certainly not in the same league as, say, Elbit, I can say from experience that artists and especially aparatchiks in the cultural field use Barenboim's name as a fig leaf that allows them to argue that they "promote peace" and "fight against the occupation" when all they do is promoting Israeli propaganda. And if the orchestra doesn't want to be used in this way, it is certainly not taking any stand against it. Adam Schatz claim that Barenboim was "vilified" is indeed an example of what he condemns.

Finally, she is right that the BNC should not be in a position to decide how solidarity activists do their work in other countries. But neither she, nor NF, give any evidence that the BNC dictates solidarity. Tilley gives an example of Western activists asking for guidance with what might be uncharitably described as an excess of deference. If Western activists lose sight of their own autonomy, she should criticize them, not the BNC. But it is also worth remembering that part of the prehistory of the BDS call was Western activists complaining to Palestinians over the absence of guidance and a coherent strategy that can serve as a pole for organizing solidarity. The BDS council is, as Tilley suggests, a very important resource to solidarity activists. Providing needed guidance can easily slip into issuing orders, just as autonomy can easily slip into Western patronizing of Palestinians. The relation between the two sides has to be kept through dialogue in the right zone, and criticism of it for getting out of that zone is useful when it is done with care and respect, exactly the kind of care and respect that is found in the letter of those Palestinian intellectuals who criticized the Gaza March, and is absent from both NF's and Tilley's interventions. 

UPDATE 2: Here's further comment from David Landy:

This is a disappointing article by Virginia Tilley. Her points about Norman and THE LAW are well made – similar to Lenin’shttp://leninology.blogspot.co... in fact, and not too far away from Max Ajl who has offered the best commentary on this affair here http://mrzine.monthlyreview.or... (Myself, when listening to Finkelstein’s repeated invocation of the majesty of the law, I was reminded of the Kafka short story in The Trial where a man is kept waiting his whole life before the outer gates of the law, a gate he can never enter, a gate created just for him. And in the course of that wasted life he is reduced from pleading with the gatekeeper of The Law to pleading with the fleas in the gatekeeper’s beard.  The fate, I suppose, of those who put all their faith in The Law) 

However, Virginia’s attack on PACBI and the BNC is disturbing. Gabriel accurately explains how unjustified the attack is and I’ve nothing to add there. But why does Virginia Tilley, a long-term advocate of Palestinian rights (and the one-state solution), make such an attack? I think it is because PACBI are trying to create a leadership role for themselves in the movement. However, unlike Virginia Tilley I don’t find this problematic, but necessary. With the fighting between Hamas and Fatah, and their lack of popular legitimacy, a huge leadership gap has opened up – one which had the power to paralyse Palestinian solidarity in other countries. This is because the question arises as to what foundational authority the activism of those who don’t worship before the alter of The Law (human rights or international) rely on. The Palestinian people? But who represents them, if not their elected representatives? 

Here is where the BNC comes in, representing Palestinian civil society, giving the solidarity movement both the authority/legitimacy to act, as well the direction in which to act. Without doubt this ad hoc arrangement can be criticized; it is a terribly imperfect solution to the problem of Palestinian representation. The BNC, in short, doesn’t replace the PLO. Nor, as far as I’m aware, is any BNC member arguing that it should. It is, hopefully, a temporary solution. And as a leadership of sorts, it has adopted the role of urging solidarity organisations down certain routes, arguing against other routes (notably against a depoliticisation of the struggle, a reduction of it to humanitarian arguments, with Palestinians as victims to be rescued). 

As I’ve said, I’ve no problem with this, partly because I agree with their analysis, but more because I believe the way they are starting to provide leadership and making the solidarity movement more coherent to be absolutely vital – giving justification and direction to our work. Without doubt they are doing so from a position of shaky authority themselves, which is a problem. But to argue, as Virginia Tilley does, that the Sandanistas or PLO or ANC didn’t try to claim similar authority (or in fact, far more authority) over solidarity movements and direct their actions is gobsmackingly false. This is my problem with her article, not that she expresses problems with the BNC – and I don’t know if they stem from personal arguments as Gabriel says, or political disagreements. But that she extends her criticism from questioning their tactics to questioning their legitimacy as a ‘random NGO coalition’ who should just shut up about whatever the international solidarity movement does. This is deeply unhelpful, arguing for an inchoate movement. 

This condemnation of the BNC may derive from the black and white way she seems to see the struggle. Divisions are continually made in the article between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. For instance, she divides between’ good’ human rights campaigners who aspire towards the condition of marketing executives, and ‘bad’ ones whose greatest ambition is to be beggars towards those in power. In reality, all groups trying to change the world need to trim their sails somewhat, and there are more gradations in how people address power and the public than this Manichean division. 

However, where my attitude changed from disagreement to annoyance at these slapdash categorizations was when she caricatured those who support the boycott 100% as keyboard warriors – sneering that ‘these people don’t go to Bilin’. Contrasting boycott action with the direct action of the weekly demos at Bil’in is an unacceptable and false division, one which condemns boycott and fetishises this direct action in a way that is unhelpful to its goals.  That she needed to drag in a Palestinian voice to give this opinion some spurious authority only underlines its weakness. 

I would agree, most friends in the movement would agree that some tactical flexibility is needed in the boycott campaign – indeed in their so-called ‘fatwa’ against the WEDO orchestra (http://jewssansfrontieres.blog..., PACBI also recognises this. (It is ironic but unsurprising that those who are most dogmatic on this front, in my experience, are those who have experienced Israeli brutality face-to-face, or in other words those who have been involved in direct actions.) There is nothing wrong with calling for flexibility and arguing with more dogmatic people, there is something very wrong in labelling those who are less flexible than us proto-fascists. 

The one thing that is to be said for Virginia Tilley’s article, like Norman Finkelstein’s original intervention, is that it might encourage open debate about the goals, leadership and future of the movement. However this discussion, if it is to succeed, cannot proceed by invoking caricatures in the way that her article does.