[News] The case for Norman Finkelstein

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The case for Norman Finkelstein

Matthew Abraham, The Electronic Intifada, 15 June 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article7029.shtml



On Friday, 8 June, DePaul University President Dennis Holtschneider 
announced that he had decided to uphold the university's tenure and 
promotion board's ruling denying outspoken political science 
professor Norman Finkelstein tenure. In a press release, the 
president is quoted as saying that academic freedom "is alive and 
well at DePaul University." Not surprisingly, the announcement of 
Finkelstein's tenure denial has spawned a national discussion. 
Academics everywhere have been forced to ponder the implications for 
the future of academic freedom in the United States, especially those 
who dare to criticise US and Israeli policy in the Middle East.

Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, has been relentless in 
exposing what he calls "The Holocaust Industry": the institutions and 
organizations that have used the holocaust (the actual historical 
event) to justify Israel's criminal assault upon the Palestinian 
population and international law. Among these organisations, he 
includes the World Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, the 
American Jewish Committee, and a host of other fellow travelers. 
There is no doubt that Finkelstein's work has stoked controversy. But 
that shouldn't detract from what makes his tenure treatment so 
worrying: Finkelstein is undoubtedly a path-breaking and serious scholar.

Raul Hilberg, the leading scholar on the Nazi holocaust, has called 
Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry "a breakthrough" and states that 
Finkelstein "was on the right track" in his documentation of how the 
World Jewish Congress, with the aid of the Clinton administration, 
extorted billions of dollars from Swiss banks in the name of 
Holocaust survivors, only to pocket the money for Jewish 
organisations. And, although The Holocaust Industry is Finkelstein's 
most frequently cited book in defamatory attempts to cast him as a 
"Holocaust denier" and a "denier of justice to Holocaust survivors", 
Image and Reality in the Israel-Palestine Conflict -- a thorough 
criticism of the central political and philosophical tenets informing 
Zionism -- is his most scholarly and substantial work. But 
Finkelstein's detractors avoid discussion of Image and Reality for 
exactly that reason: it is considered a first-rate piece of scholarship.

Finkelstein argues that most US commentators obscure or avoid the 
clear historical and diplomatic record in examining the 
Israel-Palestine conflict by ignoring or downplaying international 
law, fooling the US public into believing that Israel's occupation is 
just, necessary, and lawful. One such example is the failure of the 
2000 Camp David talks -- a failure that has been attributed, at least 
in elite circles within the United States, to Yasser Arafat's 
intransigence. In actuality, what Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak offered 
Arafat was something no Palestinian leader could accept: a Bantustan 
state reminiscent of the African national territories.

Finkelstein's latest exposure of US and Israeli apologetics for state 
violence was of famed Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who was 
at the centre of Finkelstein's analysis in Beyond Chutzpah: The 
Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. In August 2003, 
Dershowitz published The Case for Israel, which Finkelstein uses as a 
foil in Beyond Chutzpah, demonstrating that Dershowitz misrepresents 
key diplomatic, legal and historical aspects of the conflict. 
Dershowitz attempted to block publication of Beyond Chutzpah by 
inundating the University of California Press with threatening 
letters from the major New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine, and 
Moore throughout the spring and summer of 2005, stating he would sue 
the press if it did not ensure that every claim Finkelstein made 
about Dershowitz was factually correct. Beyond Chutzpah was vetted by 
six experts of the Israel-Palestine conflict and several libel 
attorneys. When he could not prevail upon the press or the University 
of California's Board of Reagents, Dershowitz asked Governor Arnold 
Schwarzenegger to intervene. Schwarzenegger refused to do so on 
grounds of academic freedom. Finkelstein wasn't so lucky at DePaul.

But, by all accounts, Finkelstein far exceeds DePaul's teaching and 
publication requirements; indeed, he has the teaching and publication 
record for full professorship. His tenured colleagues in the 
political science department voted 9-3 in favour of his tenure and 
promotion to associate professor. (And the three professors who voted 
against Finkelstein's tenure are not experts on the Israel-Palestine 
conflict or the holocaust.) The college's personnel committee 
unanimously upheld the department's recommendation in a 5-0 vote.

In a memo dated March 22, Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences Charles 
Suchar withheld support of Finkelstein's tenure application and 
agreed with the authors of the minority report, arguing that 
Finkelstein's tendency to engage in demeaning and reputation-damaging 
attacks compromised the quality of his scholarship. The dean invoked 
"Vincentian Personalism" as a tenure criterion, and reported to the 
university's board that Finkelstein has an "apparent penchant of 
reducing an argument and oppositional views to the inevitable 
personal and reputation damaging attack, demeaning those with whom he 
disagrees." Surprisingly, these concerns had never been raised about 
Finkelstein's work previously by DePaul's administration.

To thank for these new concerns we have Alan Dershowitz, who 
distributed an "information packet" to the faculty and waged a 
one-man war against Finkelstein. Throughout the months of April and 
May, Dershowitz availed himself of the pages of the New Republic, 
FrontPage magazine and even the Wall Street Journal to attack a 
world-renowned scholar and one of DePaul University's most 
accomplished teachers. Dershowitz has maintained that the Finkelstein 
case is not about academic freedom but about academic standards. 
DePaul administrators ended up rationalising the tenure denial along 
similar lines. That Finkelstein's opponents have succeeded should 
give pause to anyone concerned about academic freedom in the United States.

Matthew Abraham is an assistant professor of English at DePaul 
University and is guest editor of a special issue of Cultural 
Critique on the life and legacy of Edward Said entitled "Edward Said 
and After: Toward a New Humanism" and his work has appeared in 
<http://www.jcrt.org/>The Journal of Culture and Religious Theory and 
<http://www.logosjournal.com/>Logos: A Journal of Culture and Ideas.

This commentary was originally published by The Guardian's Comment is 
Free and is republished with the author's permission.




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