Norman Finkelstein on Gaza, the Palestine solidarity movement, BDS, Hezbollah and more

A wide-ranging interview with Norman Finkelstein on the prospects for Palestinian statehood, Israel’s goals in Gaza, the Palestine solidarity movement, Hezbollah and more.

Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist, activist, professor, author and expert on the Israel-Palestine conflict. His parents were survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. I interviewed him along with my friend and fellow freelance writer Irfan Chowdhury (whose Substack newsletter can be read here).

The interview is quite broad, and covers topics such as the prospects for Palestinian statehood, Israel’s goals in Gaza, the Palestine solidarity movement, Hezbollah and more. The full interview is divided into six parts and can be viewed below:

The transcript of the interview can be read below:

The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Trump’s presidential term has ended. What is the current political state of affairs in Israel-Palestine, four years later? And what do you expect from a Biden presidency?

I don't like to be an obituarist, and I take no satisfaction in saying this, but the Palestine cause is dead. Causes live and die. I'm not saying it's dead forever, I find it improbable. It's passed to a period that's left it morally and spiritually bereft, empty. It's not the first time this has happened: after the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948, there was not much said about the Palestinian cause until after the 1967 War, when the Palestinian guerrilla movement emerged. From 1950 to 1967, the Palestine cause was used and exploited by some people like Nasser to bolster his Pan-Arab pretensions, but as a living cause of the people, not as a puppet to be manipulated by regional powers, it was pretty much moribund. It emerges again after 1967, and has a pretty long run until after the 1982 Lebanon War. After the Lebanon War, the Palestinian leadership goes into exile, and the cause, again, seems dead.

The cause emerges again in 1987 mainly with the First intifada. From the First intifada there are ebbs and flows: there was the disaster of Oslo, followed by a second attempt at resistance in the early 2000s, which was called, incorrectly in my opinion, the Second Intifada. Now, that period is over. The Oslo agreements of 1993 had two main impacts: first, it put in place a collaborationist regime, a kind of Bantustan leadership. Second, the Palestinian people have soured and have grown cynical of politics. Their experience had shown them that for all of their sacrifices, heroism, and courage, all they got was a rotten collaborationist regime. When I say politics, I don't mean an isolated act of resistance, I mean a large mass movement in resistance to the occupation.

On top of that there is the regional factor, which had basically two components: number one, the Arab World has polarized around the Iran camp vs the Saudi camp. The Saudi camp, constituted by parasitic regimes which have no concept of work, and never made any intellectual or cultural contributions, were no match for Iran. Iran has a rich civilization, it has a lot of very smart people. Thus, the Saudis became more desperate for some outside power to pull their chestnuts out of the fire, and as they went from one debacle to the next (the debacle in Yemen, the debacle in Syria), they decided to invest in the US and Israel. So there is no regional support for the Palestinians. The second factor is that the Middle East imploded. That meant that the Palestinian cause as a unique humanitarian situation no longer loomed large. Now there is Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, the whole region was and is a humanitarian catastrophe, and the suffering of Palestine, with the partial exception of Gaza—I say partial because I don't think the situation in Gaza is worse than Yemen right now—the humanitarian resonance of the Palestine crisis has significantly diminished.

Also, because the Palestinian cause lost all of its International stature, the Arab World was at ease in publicly abandoning it, there was no pressure anymore. Palestine obviously never had any material power, such as natural resources or an army, but it had an enormous amount of what you might call symbolic power. In the 1960s and 1970s, Arab regimes were genuinely afraid of the Palestinians, because if they wronged the Palestinians, they risked affecting their legitimacy domestically, as the Palestinian cause had a lot of resonance with what is called the Arab street. That's all gone. Therefore, the Arab regimes could openly align with the West and Israel, without losing any moral or political capital in the process. There were no demonstrations or outrage when the UAE and Bahrain initiated relations with Israel. If you add up all those factors, there's no cause left. Of course there is still suffering, but there's no political cause, and one has to make a distinction between a humanitarian crisis, which is real, and a political cause, which is no longer real.  This kind of answers the other two questions: what will the Biden administration do? Probably nothing. Israel will be given a free hand to do what it pleases, and there won't be any international repercussions for what Israel does. This is where I think things stand.

These are not easy words for me to say. I've dedicated almost all of my adult life to the Palestinian cause, so it's a sobering fact that it’s gone. I don't believe it's over, I think the Palestinian cause will probably re-emerge in probably 10 years or 20 years, when I'm gone, and it will re-emerge as a civil rights movement, like in South Africa. I think the two-state phase is over, because in the minds of the Palestinians, two-states will always be associated with the disaster of Oslo, which led to the disintegration of the Palestinian cause, so I think it will be very hard to revive an interest in two-states after Oslo. The struggle in the future will probably take the form of a civil rights movement along the lines of South Africa. The difference, of course, is that South Africa was strategically very important to the West and was impossible to ignore. Palestine, on the other hand, might be reduced to the status of Kashmir, Tibet, or Western Sahara, namely causes which are easily forgotten, and that aren't able to achieve any kind of public recognition.

When you say that the Palestinian cause is essentially dead partly because the Arab regimes are openly aligning with Israel, and because, as you say, there are so many humanitarian catastrophes all over the region, meaning that Palestine no longer has so much resonance, would you say that the Palestinian cause still has the support of the Iran-Hezbollah axis, which now expanded to include militias in Iraq and Yemen, which at least rhetorically support Palestine?

Well, so long as you qualify it by saying “rhetorically speaking”. I don’t like to be naïve about political leaders, but I actually believe in Sayeed Nasrallah (leader of Hezbollah). He’s an extremely smart guy, he’s deadly serious, and it strikes me that in his own moral capacity he’s sincere. So, when he expresses support for the Palestinian cause, I think it’s authentic. However, will it ever translate into real, political power? My view is that it won’t. By political power, I mean being able to influence the outcome of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Also, the Lebanese want out of wars, they’ve had enough wars. You have to consider Lebanon as a whole, not just the Palestinian refugees or the Shia Lebanese who support Hezbollah; as a whole, I don’t see a lot of support, so I don’t think it will be a factor. Iran doesn’t feel popular pressure to support the Palestinians, and the Iranian people don’t really care about Palestine. It will be very tough now for the Palestinians to not only break with their own past, but also to get international support.

In the West Bank, it seems like Israel has a clearly defined end-game, which is to incorporate valuable land into the Greater Israel it is constructing, while keeping out the Palestinian population and imprisoning them in separated cantons. In Gaza, however, it doesn’t seem like Israel has any clearly defined end-game, because it doesn’t actually want to formally annex any part of Gaza. In your book ‘Method and Madness’, you discuss how Israel attacks Gaza every time it needs to restore its deterrence capacity, which essentially means the Arab world’s fear of Israel. In your view, is Israel’s end-game in Gaza simply to use the population as an eternal punching bag every time it needs to restore its deterrence capacity?

Right now, Israel’s goal is simply to prevail, to show that force works. They want to unseat Hamas, and put in power a reliable regime like the one they’ve established in the West Bank. Once Hamas concedes, and they put in power someone like Dahlan (former corrupt leader of Fatah), Gaza will resume to be what it always was. It’s not impossible that it might serve the same purpose as it did after the 1967 War. At its peak, there were, I think, about 120 000 Gazans working in Israel, and, relatively speaking, Gazans prospered. Gazans had grown accustomed to working very hard, and they’re very clever, from necessity. You can give a Gazan a tin can, and inside of a month they’ll figure out how to turn the tin can into a Rolls Royce. Necessity forces them. So even though they were paid and treated miserably, and lived a horrible existence, they fared better materially, relatively speaking. Now, Israel doesn’t need their labour anymore, because it brings people from South Asia, but it’s possible that Gaza goes back to be what Marx called the reserve army of labour for Israel.

But it’s hard to predict these things. Israel’s main goal now is to defeat Hamas, and show that Israel is in charge, and that it tolerates no opposition from Arabs. You have to crawl grovel, and genuflect before the Jewish Übermenschen, the supermen. The Arabs are the Untermenschen, the subhumans, and they have only one role in life, and that’s to be slaves. It’s the same mindset of the Nazis, of the South Africans during the apartheid era, of American whites during the Jim Crow era, the same sort of masterclass mentality.

You’ve previously criticised elements of the Palestine solidarity movement in the West and even some Palestinian activists themselves in both the West Bank and in the diaspora for ignoring the plight of people in Gaza, especially during the Great March of Return. What do you think explains this indifference to Gaza?

Well, I think there are several factors. One has to be clear-headed about these things. You have to admit that Israel’s strategy in Oslo worked perfectly: they put in power a collaborationist regime, turning the PLO into their tool. The second aspect of the strategy was to divide the West Bank from Gaza, and it worked, as they’re now two separate entities. If you go back to the First Intifada in 1987, it started in Gaza, and within days, it spread to the West Bank. Because Gaza and the West Bank, although they were geographically separated, they formed a spiritual whole. There was no reaction in the West Bank to the Great March of Return in 2018-2019, nobody cared. The fact that there was no reaction among the Palestine Solidarity Movement clearly showed that the Israeli strategy had succeeded. They had separated Gaza from the West Bank.

You have to remember most of the Palestine activists are secularists, they’re very Western-oriented. Most of them work for some NGO, they think resistance consists of tweeting on a website in Ramallah, so they’re very alienated from Gaza, which is still, so to speak, shrouded in religion, tradition and convention. They’ve internalized a lot of the Israeli\Western values and mindset, so they don’t care about Gaza. During Operation Cast Lead in 2008\2009, there were a couple of demonstrations in support of Gaza. Some say there was Israeli repression, and there was, but it wasn’t the main factor. It’s an excuse. Palestinians in the West Bank resisted the Israeli army during the First Intifada. If they wanted to, they could have resisted and expressed support for Gaza. During Operation Protective Edge, there was nothing in the West Bank, like during the Great March of Return. Given these facts, it’s not altogether surprising that the so-called Solidarity Movement didn’t react.

 As you know, I’m of the opinion that most of the BDS solidarity movement is a fiction created by Israel and its supporters. BDS never had any impact on Israel. None at all. Israel inflated it, just as it did with the Hamas so-called rockets. More people died during the 4th of July independence day celebrations in the United States from fireworks than in Israel from Hamas rockets. Israel destroyed 18000 homes in Gaza, the Hamas “rockets” destroyed one house, probably because it hit the boiler by accident. But Israel inflated the threat of the Hamas rockets as a pretext for destroying Gaza. The same thing happened with BDS. Israel understood it could use BDS and claim that the Palestine solidarity movement is trying to destroy Israel, and they then claimed that all criticism of Israel, from anywhere across the spectrum, came from BDS. They conflated all criticism of Israel with BDS, inflated BDS beyond imagination and claimed that lurking behind any criticism of Israel was BDS, and since BDS refused to take a position on Israel, it could plausibly be said that BDS wants to destroy Israel, so all criticism of Israel became antisemitic. And I have to say, Israel’s strategy was very successful.

BDS goes around saying things like “look at how important we are”, “if Israel is spending all this money in trying to stop us, it must mean we’re very effective”, etc., boasting about their successes, while the Israeli juggernaut is destroying all possible resistance in the West to its occupation. Now, let me be clear: I’m not saying Israel wouldn’t have gone on the offensive without BDS way, they were on a roll. But the BDS made it easy for Israel.

 I have a bit of personal experience with what you described, in terms of Israel using BDS to delegitimize all opposition to the occupation. When I was doing my undergrad at the University of Nottingham, some people in the Israeli Society would basically argue when we were advocating for boycotting settlement goods, so products which are exclusively produced in the illegal settlements in the West Bank, they would say that we were BDS.

That’s absolutely correct. That’s what they did. They conflated any opposition of Israeli policy with BDS, managing to delegitimize all opposition to Israel. That’s the legacy of BDS. Their leadership are power hungry imbeciles. I’m not afraid to say that, and I’m not going to be psychologically manipulated by people who have oversized egos. I’m immune to the guilt tripping, I’m not going to be intimidated. I paid a price for saying these things: after BDS decided I was the enemy, I went from 40 speaking engagements a year to zero, because they controlled all the social justice activists for Palestine on campuses.

They didn’t destroy the Palestinian cause, I want to be careful about my words. The cause was destroyed in Palestine, it went downhill from Oslo onwards. But the BDS facilitated the destruction of Palestine solidarity movement in the US. That’s Omar Barghouti’s (leader of the BDS) only legacy. If you read the press releases of the BDS, they keep talking about their victories. Omar Barghouti still thinks BDS is victorious because Israel keeps attacking it, so it must be doing something right. He still calculates all the disasters that have befallen not only the Palestinian people but also the Palestine solidarity movement as victories. One wonders what a defeat would look like, if these are all victories.

To partly defend BDS, I do think there’s an aspect of it that is beneficial, which is the cultural side. When for example a famous pop singer says they’re not going to perform in Israel, I think it could have a positive education role, as that pop star might have millions of followers and if they announce they’re not going to perform in Israel because of the human rights abuses, it could lead her followers to research the conflict and learn more about it, so I do think that side of it has a positive educational role, although I agree with your broader criticisms of BDS. Do you think this aspect could be positive?

Let’s take the South African international anti-apartheid sanctions movement. I’ve read up on it very carefully, and I lived through that period. That movement was very serious. They looked for the weak links in the South African empire, and then adapted their strategy based on what their economists who were studying it were telling them about the effectiveness of their strategy. There was an enormous amount of very high scholarly quality analysis, on what to target, and on how effective the targeting was.

Of all of the various components of the anti-apartheid sanctions movement, the least significant was the cultural boycott, with the exception of the sports boycott, which had some impact. But in general, the cultural boycott was the most problematic. And it was most problematic for a simple reason: you have to have a connection between your tactic and your goal. Targeting exports of arms to South Africa clearly had a relationship with the goal. Targeting the oil as well, as it was used to grease the war machine. Same for targeting economic investment, as it was aimed at bringing the big industry and capitalist class in South Africa to kneel. With culture, it’s always a grey area. That was always the weak link in the South African anti-apartheid strategy.

Also, BDS was completely unserious. They had one economist, Shir Hever, a nice guy, his heart’s in the right place, but his analysis was very weak. And they focused on the weakest prong, the cultural aspect, the one that’s the most problematic. They never had economists trying to scientifically study the Israeli economy and look at what should be targeted. It was completely unserious. When you look at the South African anti-apartheid sanctions movement, they periodically sat down, and did the math: is the strategy working, or is it not working? They then retooled the strategy to get it right. They took the sanctions movement very seriously, and I was kind of amazed at the degree of scholarly analysis, precision and sophistication. Do you see any of that in BDS? Did you see any analysis of how the Israeli economy works? Zero. All I heard were slogans. How can you win like that?

I was coming into this interview thinking that you still supported a two-state settlement, which I think you viewed as the only realistic outcome that can be achieved within current political conditions, so I was quite surprised when you said at the beginning your views have changed on this.

I don’t want to be pedantic about it, but I think language is important. I never supported anything. I remain what I was when I was your age, a communist, and communists believe in a world without borders. The question is not what I support or what I believe, the question is what is politically feasible at a particular moment in time. I didn’t think one-state had any political support. I looked in to the ICJ (International Court of Justice), I looked at human rights organizations, I looked at statements by governments in the UN, I looked at public opinion. Was there any support for dismantling the State of Israel? I didn’t see any, there was none. Politics is not about posing in front of a camera, wanting to look like Che Guevara. Politics is about trying to improve the lives of people, trying to make the world a better place. To make the world a better place, you have to take into account where the world is at, and see what you can change, you can’t impose your reality or beliefs on the world. I didn’t see any basis for one state, and I still don’t see it.

As I said, I think that 10 or 20 years have to elapse, until the dust settles, and a new, less cynical and  less defeated generation comes into being, that fights for the normal aspirations of all human beings in the modern world, that is, personal dignity and equality of personhood, and at some point that will translate into a struggle for civil rights. Hopefully Israel will begin to get diminished returns from its exploitation of the Nazi holocaust, and a new generation will find the moral confidence to put Israel in its place about using the Nazi holocaust as a weapon to deny Palestinians their rights. So far, it hasn’t, and Israel is still able to effectively play the Holocaust card. In 10 or 20 years’ time, when the Holocaust will be a century into the past, it seems reasonable to believe that Israel will not be able to use the Holocaust card as effectively. At that point, the struggle for civil rights might gain ground, like in South Africa.

I am reading a passage from the exchange we had in 2016, in which you said that “the idea of a “Jewish” state in the post-Holocaust world commands a lot of international legitimacy”. I’m wondering if you think that even in 10 or 20 years’ time it is realistic to think that the very nature of Israel, which is to maintain a strong Jewish majority, could change, and that Israel could accept it changing.

Your questions is smart, I agree with you that those are the critical questions. I was careful with what I said when I used the phrase “post-Holocaust world”. Will the Nazi holocaust loom as large a hundred years after it happened? I’m not so sure. Will the Nazi holocaust have the kind of ideological and political power that it exerts now? I can’t predict. But what you said is exactly right. In the post-Nazi holocaust world, the idea of a Jewish State commands legitimacy. Israel has made the Holocaust into a powerful political weapon, you can’t get around that.

And do you think there’s any chance that instead of a civil rights struggle, there could be a resurgence of the two-state solution on the table at some point?

No, I think that in order for a movement to succeed, it has to inspire, and two-states will no longer inspire the Palestinians. I think the memories of what happened from the high hopes of the First Intifada, the declaration of statehood in 1988, to today, when you have a gang of the most wretched, despicable, corrupt collaborators, are too negative. I find it hard to believe that it will reemerge. Palestinians just want their rights, they don’t care if it’s in one-state, two-states, or six states.

You’ve said that Israel’s occupation has been, so far, mostly “cost-free”. Pressure on Israel could, potentially, either come from Israeli citizens pressuring their government, US citizens pressuring the US government, and from Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. What do you think is the current state of public opinion and consciousness in Israel, the US, and Palestine, on the Israel-Palestine conflict? And what are the prospects for creating the political conditions to put pressure on Israel?

I’m not an expert on Israel, I never really studied Israeli society very much, and I haven’t been there since 2004. But it’s pretty obvious that there’s no Left in Israel. Israel is an unusual place, it’s an alt-right State with no opposition. If you look at other alt-right states like Brazil under Bolsonaro, for example, there’s an opposition. In Modi’s India there’s an opposition. In Israel there’s none. Israel has a right, a far right, and an ultra right. That’s its political spectrum. There’s no centre, and there’s no Left. It’s similar to South Africa in the apartheid years, or the American South during the Jim Crow era.

The reason Netanyahu keeps getting reelected is because, fundamentally, Israelis see themselves in Netanyahu: an obnoxious, loudmouth, racist, arrogant, Jewish supremacist. That’s the Israelis, the population, and out of narcissistic impulse thy keep voting for him, no matter how many scandals there are. If you ever read Haaretz, the opposition newspaper, it’s quite funny: every two months their columnists are predicting that Netanyahu is finished, that this scandal or that scandal will bring him down, but he keeps getting reelected. The Israelis love Netanyahu. There’s no chance of any change beginning in Israel.

In the US, it’s hopeless because young people have no future in the US. There are no jobs, no prospects. Any Left movement in the US is going to focus on the domestic economic situation, and foreign policy issues will become trivial, aside from climate change, so I don’t see any possibility for change coming from the US. I’ve already spoken about the Palestinians, which are obviously the critical factor. Speaking as a resolute atheist, I like to say that God helps those who help themselves. Palestinians have to be the ones making the most sacrifice. The impetus has to be there.

I have a friend in south Lebanon, who told me that he and others of his generation (the younger generation) want Hezbollah to avenge the crimes that Israel has committed against the Lebanese and Palestinians. Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, previously stated in a speech in 2010: “We don’t want war [with Israel] but we crave it”. There does seem to be a latent desire in south Lebanon for some kind of final showdown with Israel, and Israel also has an interest in knocking out Hezbollah in order to restore its deterrence capacity. Do you think the region is headed towards that kind of apocalyptic scenario, or is the balance of terror on both sides enough to prevent a conflict?

I can’t predict that. I can understand the feelings of the Lebanese in the South and of the Palestinians. On the other hand, that kind of war, at minimum, would wreak such havoc and destruction you wouldn’t want to imagine it, and at maximum, it would so spiral out of control that the whole of humanity could be in danger. It’s very easy to see how: Israel bombing Lebanon, Hezbollah targeting Israel’s nuclear reactor, Israel then using atomic weapons, Iran coming in, the US then coming in and everything spins out of control. I understand the feelings of revenge, and I remember a Hezbollah official saying to me that eventually there has to be a reckoning between them and Israel. But then, could a balance of terror be such that it will hold back everybody? As I said, I can understand the feeling of revenge, and I can imagine how I would feel if I were living in South Lebanon, and had this monster State at my border, but I hope rationality will prevail, as thing could easily spin out of control.