“Understand We ‘re fighting a war we can’t win/ They hate us-we hate them We can’t win-no”
Black Flag, Police Story
Professor Norman Finkelstein is something of a contemporary cause celebre, serving as a touchstone for attitudes on various contentious issues centering on the Israel/Palestine conflict, Zionism and modern Jewish identity, issues which also raise important questions relating to free speech and the state of the modern day Academy
For a significant number of those at the left of the spectrum (at least where it comes to I/P), Professor Finkelstein’s chief significance and bearing is as a trenchant critic of modern day Imperialism, indeed, as one of the most outstanding scholars writing about the Middle East conflict today. He is regarded as an intellectual who has from the very beginning of his career paid a heavy toll for his integrity, for speaking out, rather vociferously, against injustice and challenging the contemptible lies and intellectual frauds churned out by propagandists such as Joan Peters and Alan Dershowitz. This was, it is claimed, most notably the case in 2007 when thanks to significant outside pressure led by Dershowitz, Finkelstein was refused tenure at DePaul university, both in defiance of the wishes the overwhelming majority of his faculty and in complete disregard to his standing both as a scholar and teacher .
From many of those at the other end of the political spectrum he draws nothing but withering contempt as a figure whose works exemplify the worst excesses of the virulent anti-Americanism and anti-Israel sentiment (in the latter case, really a thin cloak for anti-Semitism) afflicting campuses across America. Here Finkelstein becomes a self-hating Jew, a Noam Chomsky clone, happily willing to offer himself up as a mouthpiece to Islamist terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah, and to associate with renowned holocaust deniers, in spite of the fact that his parents were both holocaust survivors.
Yet whatever perspective one adopts, Professor Finkelstein never fails to provoke and challenge, whether it’s the complacency of those whose sympathies are with the Palestinians, or the blithe obliviousness to Palestinian suffering and often the downright racism of those on the other side.
On Monday the 10th of November, the day before Remembrance Day celebrations, Professor Finkelstein spoke before the packed Great Hall of the Trent building of Nottingham University, on the theme of Satyagraha, Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence, and its possible application to the Palestinian struggle to end Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Upon taking the podium, after having been introduced by Hicham Yezza, (an ex university employee whose recent victimisation by the authorities had been the subject of a major protest on campus), and quickly dispensing with a curt preamble, he promptly launched into the substantive part of his talk.
Professor Finkelstein began by reiterating a theme familiar to those who have heard him speak before, namely, the lack of controversy among the international community as represented by the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice, and the most prominent and respected human rights organisations, over the best way to resolve the current crisis in Israel/Palestine. This dearth of controversy, of course, stands in direct conflict to the understanding upon which most of the debate on I/P in America and the rest of the West takes place: that the crisis is simply intractable, and that given the intransigence of both sides (that is if the blame hasn’t been placed squarely at the feet of the Palestinians) the status quo with its massively disproportionate suffering on the part of the Palestinians is the best we can hope to achieve.
The best solution Professor Finkelstein argued was the one endorsed year after year by an overwhelming majority of the United Nations General assembly, by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and the one that underlay the rulings of the international Court of Justice on the conflict (on the basis of among other things the inadmissibility of gaining territory by warfare). This solution called for the end of Israel’s 40-year-odd occupation and its subsequent withdrawal to pre-67 borders, in addition to Jerusalem’s institution as capital of a viable Palestinian state. Indeed recognition of Israel and the assumption of full diplomatic ties on the basis of these terms has been ratified on several occasions by the Arab league, as well as by Hamas, who have repeatedly confirmed their acceptance of these terms.
The situation however merited the label “intractable” precisely because stacked against this broad general consensus, which Finkelstein crowned the “considered opinion of humankind”, stood the interests of both Israel and the US in maintaining the occupation as an extended siege with the intention to decisively break the Palestinian spirit and to therefore consolidate the Israeli grasp in the occupied territories, annexing once and for all land deemed by many in Israel to be part of its birthright.
After thus setting the scene and emphasising that this was the “time to strategise” he began the second part of his talk, a brief introduction to Gandhi’s doctrine of Satyagraha. What seemed to most attract Finkelstein about Satyagraha was that it empowered the individual to look to him or herself — indeed to his or her conscience — as the ultimate source of all salvation, and this would correspondingly turn people away from the temptation to delegate responsibility to one single messianic figure, a vessel for all one’s hopes and wishes. Gandhi had proclaimed that the Indians had had only themselves to blame for their enslavement by the British: and that therefore they could only liberate themselves through their own efforts.
For Gandhi if the oppressed themselves consciously undertook to engage in self-suffering, it would have the effect of profoundly moving the oppressor, and by so stirring the consciences of their persecutors they would have taken the most crucial step toward bringing about their liberation. Clearly what underlined and motivated Gandhi’s Satyagraha here was an unadulterated and unwavering faith in the inherent goodness of human beings and his refusal to write anyone off in their humanity, even Hitler.
Gandhi was convinced, according to Professor Finkelstein, that the default mode of human relations, on both the microcosmic level, i.e., the level of family and interpersonal relations, and the macrocosmic level, i.e., nation states, revealed an overwhelming tendency towards the resolution of conflict through peaceful nonviolent means and a studious avoidance of the resort to violence. This was unimpeachable evidence, for Gandhi, of the preeminence of the force of love; it is only through the “distorting lens of history” that we come to believe otherwise and to see the course of human development as a succession of wars and conflagrations. As Professor Finkelstein quoted (and this was a quote he would refer to several times):
“Little quarrels of millions of families in their daily lives disappear before the exercise of this force [of love/truth]. Hundreds of nations live in peace. History does not and cannot take note of this fact. History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul”.
Throughout the talk Professor Finkelstein was adamant that it was not his aim to romanticise Gandhi by glossing over his faults nor did he want to contribute to the Hollywood falsification of history by indulging in the fantasy that Gandhi was a strict and uncompromising proponent of pacifism. Professor Finkelstein noted that Gandhi could be inconsistent in many respects when it came to his advocacy of nonviolence. For example, during World War I he had been active in encouraging the recruitment of Indian soldiers in the Allied cause and he had also supported the British Army during the Boer war.
In addition, Professor Finkelstein emphasised, it was also the case that Gandhi’s philosophy of Satyagraha did not simply entail that those suffering under oppression blankly refuse to answer attacks on their persons with a response in kind; Gandhi qualified his nonviolence by acknowledging the right, under the commonly understood canons of morality and under certain circumstances, of violent self-defence. In Gandhi’s eyes, cowardice was a grievous, indeed a monumental, sin, and nonviolence should under no circumstances be a cover and excuse for cowardliness and lack of resolve; therefore he would have been eager to make this qualification. In fact nonviolence, properly understood, could only be the resort of the bravest and most fearless — and thus it was also an affirmation of life, rather than a cowardly rejection of it. So it was that Satyagraha was only advocated as a path for those who possessed sufficient reserves of moral courage, otherwise morality dictated the use of force.
Professor Finkelstein was quick to note that Gandhi would, no doubt, have had quarrel with his nonreligious, rationalist reading of Satyagraha, in which faith in a higher power was, if anything, merely optional, for Gandhi had been unyielding in his insistence that religion and faith were an integral part of Satyagraha and that his doctrine could not be understood without an appeal to the irrational. Nevertheless Professor Finkelstein held that even when shorn of its religious and metaphysical underpinnings, Satyagraha remained an exceptionally effective template for protest and action against injustice.
All this paved the way for the essential insight which was, as Professor Finkelstein postulated, that there was indeed an intimate relation between means and ends, so that any end pursued through violence, or any movement which pursued its aims through violence, would invariably become deeply and irrevocably tainted by the resort to coercion and aggression. This insight was especially pertinent to the situation in Palestine, where the prior decades of terrorism undertaken by several Palestinian factions have led to considerable setbacks for the Palestinian cause. And for the final part of his talk, Professor Finkelstein developed, to the limited extent that the remainder of his brief time allowed, this idea of harnessing Gandhi’s philosophy in service of the Palestinian cause.
He prefaced this part of his talk with the caveat that no one had the right to tell the Palestinians — as many a commentator has been fond of instructing them from a standpoint of exalted moral certitude and from a safe physical distance away from the action — that it was their duty to renounce violence. The Palestinians had, as Gandhi had clearly taught, the moral justification to resort to violence to defend themselves, as indeed they were entitled to such under international law, as long as civilians were not targeted.
Nonviolence, in Gandhi’s eyes was effective only insofar as it served to awaken the consciences of those directly responsible for persecution and oppression, or at least the consciences of those whose influence was sufficient to bring an end to it — so that self-suffering worked by rousing that which was most nobly human in people. But here Professor Finkelstein made an extremely astute observation, namely that since the efficacy of self suffering and the practice of nonviolence was contingent on the sympathy it roused, any cause whose ultimate aims were antipathetic or morally questionable to a great many people would find Gandhi’s tactics of little avail. For example, it would be hard to see a hunger strike by antiabortion, pro-life groups making much headway in the current climate.
As Professor Finkelstein had explained at the very onset of his talk, virtually the whole international community had taken the side of the Palestinians,at least where the injustice of the current Israeli occupation was concerned; therefore in order to ensure the effectiveness of a strategy of Gandhian nonviolence — in a situation in which its application could potentially mark a turning point — the Palestinians had to do all they could to not alienate all of those who were sympathetic to their cause, this worldwide ground swell of support and empathy which was so clearly present as well as the backing of the whole machinery of international law This had several implications, one of the chief being that Palestinians and their supporters must focus all their efforts on the aim of ending the occupation, and establishing a viable Palestinian state — since it was precisely in this matter that the worldwide support (popular, moral, and legal) existed. There was no such support for a one state solution, for the proposed dismantling of the “Zionist state entity”, etc no way in which acts of nonviolence and self-sacrifice guided by these these sentiments would attract anything but the most meagre sympathy, would be anything but a useless dissipation of energies and resources.
Therefore as Professor Finkelstein argued it was incumbent on us in the West, those of us who supported the Palestinian cause, to work under this single banner and to invest our energies in promoting awareness of the fact that a simple, straightforward, and just solution was possible. The Palestinians working against this backdrop of heightened sympathy, and whose willingness to put their own bodies on the line is already well attested, would then be able to use non-violence and self-sacrifice to devastating effect against the bombardment of anti-Palestinian propaganda which would inevitably ensue. Israel’s own continued survival and indeed its prosperity is itself so heavily a product of how it is perceived, of an active program of promotion of Israel — right from the birth of the country, with the successful Israeli push to popularise the Balfour Declaration as Israel’s official “birth certificate” — little wonder so much effort goes into hasbara . Yet as Professor Finkelstein had convincingly argued hasbara along with hefty doeses of moral courage and self sacrifice was also the Palestinians’ best hope at creating the conditions that would lead to statehood.
