yelamdenu

Recently, Norman Finkelstein was banished from Israel because he supports Hezbollah’s resistance against Israel’s war and occupation against Lebanon.
I saw a comment negative of Norman Finkelstein that was posted on his website, and I took the liberty of replying to him, because I am interested in Finkelstein’s work and I think he’s a consistent thinker and a sincere opponent of Israel because of its human rights record. Finkelstein has taken upon him the scholarly task of analysing and correcting Israel’s propaganda, an activity his powerful enemies, among whom Alan Dershowitz, had him pay for in various ways.

One of Norman Finkelstein’s fields of analysis is the problem that whenever someone serious objects to Israel’s policies and violations of human rights, Israel’s supporters will sooner or later level charges of anti-Semitism, and/or will confront you with the Holocaust. The below email exchange is a perfect example of that.

This way, the State of Israel is immune to criticism. The most clever application of this technique is to claim that those who criticise Israel, are by that very act anti-Semites because the critics are "singling out" Israel, even though there are so many other conflicts in which perhaps even greater atrocities and violations of human rights happen. In other words, unless one either criticizes all the evildoers on the planet including Israel, or waits until the Israel-Palestine conflict is the only problem left on the face of the earth, no criticism of Israel is legitimate.

This technique is only valid if one forgets that Israel is very much a European phenomenon. It was founded by European Jews, in reaction to European phenomena, and it is nearly unconditionally supported by both the European Union and, more so, the United States, the latter having vetoed most of the possible ways to resolve the conflict. So for Europeans and Americans, it is especially legitimate to criticise Israel. After all, real friends tell you when you’re out for your own destruction, don’t they?