March 5, 2012: Norman Finkelstein rips the BDS movement to shreds

By Michael Regenstreif

It’s that time of year again. Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) is scheduled to take place from March 5 to 9 at several Canadian campuses, including the University of Ottawa and Carleton University. The annual IAW events were first organized eight years ago in support of the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement against Israel. The claim that Israel is an apartheid society is a cornerstone of the BDS movement – and one that has been refuted often. See, for example, a Huffington Post column by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz for a cogent analysis. tinyurl.com/dershowitz-IAW

This year, the BDS movement is in a late-breaking uproar because American political science professor Norman G. Finkelstein sat down, February 9, with a pro-BDS interviewer at Imperial College in London and ripped the BDS movement to shreds.

Make no mistake: Finkelstein is no friend of the State of Israel. For the better part of three decades, Finkelstein has been the most prominent Jewish anti-Israel activist – with the possible exception of his mentor Noam Chomsky.

Denied tenure at DePaul University in 2007, Finkelstein has made a career of lecturing on behalf of anti-Israel groups around the world and by writing a string of anti-Israel books. A son of Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein’s best-known book is The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, in which he claims that Israel has exploited the Holocaust in achieving its aims.

In this surprising video – which you can see in its 31-minute entirety at vimeo.com/36854424 – Finkelstein exposes the BDS movement, which he repeatedly refers to as a “cult,” for its “silliness, childishness, and a lot of leftist posturing” that seeks to obfuscate its true goal: the elimination of the State of Israel.

According to Finkelstein, the BDS movement does not come out and state its true goal because it knows the public will not buy into a movement seeking the dismantling of Israel.

“No Israel. That’s what it’s really about. And you think you’re fooling anybody? You think you’re so clever that people can’t figure that out for themselves?

“No, they understand the arithmetic perfectly well. Are you going to reach a broad public which is going to hear the Israeli side [say] ‘They want to destroy us?’ No, you’re not. And, frankly, you know what, you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t reach a broad public because you’re dishonest. And I wouldn’t trust those people if I had to live in this state. I wouldn’t. It’s dishonesty.”

Finkelstein also rips the BDS movement for taking its marching orders and following the lead of “Palestinian civil society.”

Recalling earlier movements he’s been part of, Finkelstein said the anti-Vietnam War movement did not take its marching orders from Hanoi, and Latin American solidarity movements (in the Reagan era) did not take their orders from Nicaragua. They acted, he said, on their own initiative.

He went on to describe “Palestinian civil society” as a collection of mostly one-person NGOs in Ramallah completely incapable of mobilizing more than a few hundred Palestinians.

Toward the end of the interview, Finkelstein suggests that a solution to the conflict is possible. A solution, he said, that would not be perfect, but which would satisfy most Israelis and most Palestinians. Although he does not explicitly say so, the obvious conclusion is the two-state solution. And that flies in the face of what IAW and the BDS movement are all about.