[News] Foiling Another Palestinian "Peace Offensive"

[Anti-Imperialist News]

January 28, 2009


Behind the Bloodbath in Gaza


Foiling Another Palestinian "Peace Offensive"

By NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

Early speculation on the motive behind Israel’s 
slaughter in Gaza that began on 27 December 2008 
and continued till 18 January 2009 centered on 
the upcoming elections in Israel.  The jockeying 
for votes was no doubt a factor in this 
Sparta-like society consumed by “revenge and the 
thirst for blood,” where killing Arabs is a sure 
crowd-pleaser.  (Polls during the war showed that 
80-90 percent of Israeli Jews supported 
it.)   But as Israeli journalist Gideon Levy 
pointed out on Democracy Now!, “Israel went 
through a very similar war
two-and-a-half years 
ago [in Lebanon], when there were no 
elections.”   When crucial state interests are at 
stake, Israeli ruling elites seldom launch major 
operations for narrowly electoral gains.  It is 
true that Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s 
decision to bomb the Iraqi OSIRAK reactor in 1981 
was an electoral ploy, but the strategic stakes 
in the strike on Iraq were puny; contrary to 
widespread belief, Saddam Hussein had not 
embarked on a nuclear weapons program prior to 
the bombing.   The fundamental motives behind the 
latest Israeli attack on Gaza lie elsewhere: (1) 
in the need to restore Israel’s “deterrence 
capacity,” and (2) in the threat posed by a new 
Palestinian “peace offensive.”

Israel’s “larger concern” in the current 
offensive, New York Times Middle East 
correspondent Ethan Bronner reported, quoting 
Israeli sources, was to “re-establish Israeli 
deterrence,” because “its enemies are less afraid 
of it than they once were, or should 
be.”   Preserving its deterrence capacity has 
always loomed large in Israeli strategic 
doctrine.  Indeed, it was the main impetus behind 
Israel’s first-strike against Egypt in June 1967 
that resulted in Israel’s occupation of Gaza (and 
the West Bank).  To justify the onslaught on 
Gaza, Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote that 
“[m]any Israelis feel that the walls
are closing 
in
much as they felt in early June 
1967.”   Ordinary Israelis no doubt felt 
threatened in June 1967, but­as Morris surely 
knows­the Israeli leadership experienced no such 
trepidation.  After Israel threatened and laid 
plans to attack Syria, Egyptian President Gamal 
Abdel Nasser declared the Straits of Tiran closed 
to Israeli shipping, but Israel made almost no 
use of the Straits (apart from the passage of 
oil, of which Israel then had ample stocks) and, 
anyhow, Nasser did not in practice enforce the 
blockade, vessels passing freely through the 
Straits within days of his announcement.  In 
addition, multiple U.S. intelligence agencies had 
concluded that the Egyptians did not intend to 
attack Israel and that, in the improbable case 
that they did, alone or in concert with other 
Arab countries, Israel would­in President Lyndon 
Johnson’s words­“whip the hell out of them.”  The 
head of the Mossad told senior American officials 
on 1 June 1967 that “there were no differences 
between the U.S. and the Israelis on the military 
intelligence picture or its 
interpretation.”   The predicament for Israel was 
rather the growing perception in the Arab world, 
spurred by Nasser’s radical nationalism and 
climaxing in his defiant gestures in May 1967, 
that it would no longer have to follow Israeli 
orders.  Thus, Divisional Commander Ariel Sharon 
admonished those in the Israeli cabinet hesitant 
to launch a first-strike that Israel was losing 
its “deterrence capability
our main weapon­the 
fear of us.”   Israel unleashed the June 1967 war 
“to restore the credibility of Israeli 
deterrence” (Israeli strategic analyst Zeev Maoz).

The expulsion of the Israeli occupying army by 
Hezbollah in May 2000 posed a major new challenge 
to Israel’s deterrence capacity.  The fact that 
Israel suffered a humiliating defeat, one 
celebrated throughout the Arab world, made 
another war well-nigh inevitable.  Israel almost 
immediately began planning for the next round, 
and in summer 2006 found a pretext when Hezbollah 
captured two Israeli soldiers (several others 
were killed in the firefight) and demanded in 
exchange the release of Lebanese prisoners held 
by Israel.  Although Israel unleashed the fury of 
its air force and geared up for a ground 
invasion, it suffered yet another ignominious 
defeat.  A respected American military analyst 
despite being partial to Israel nonetheless 
concluded, “the IAF, the arm of the Israel 
military that had once destroyed whole air forces 
in a few days, not only proved unable to stop 
Hezbollah rocket strikes but even to do enough 
damage to prevent Hezbollah’s rapid recovery”; 
that “once ground forces did cross into Lebanon
, 
they failed to overtake Hezbollah strongholds, 
even those close to the border”; that “in terms 
of Israel’s objectives, the kidnapped Israeli 
soldiers were neither rescued nor released; 
Hezbollah’s rocket fire was never 
suppressed,  not even its long-range fire
; and 
Israeli ground forces were badly shaken and 
bogged down by a well-equipped and capable foe”; 
and that “more troops and a massive ground 
invasion would indeed have produced a different 
outcome, but the notion that somehow that effort 
would have resulted in a more decisive victory 
over Hezbollah
has no basis in historical example 
or logic.”  The juxtaposition of several figures 
further highlights the magnitude of the setback: 
Israel deployed 30,000 troops as against 2,000 
regular Hezbollah fighters and 4,000 irregular 
Hezbollah and non-Hezbollah fighters; Israel 
delivered and fired 162,000 weapons whereas 
Hezbollah fired 5,000 weapons (4,000 rockets and 
projectiles at Israel and 1,000 antitank missiles 
inside Lebanon).   Moreover, “the vast majority 
of the fighters who defended villages such as 
Ayta ash Shab, Bint Jbeil, and Maroun al-Ras were 
not, in fact, regular Hezbollah fighters and in 
some cases were not even members of Hezbollah,” 
and “many of Hezbollah’s best and most skilled 
fighters never saw action, lying in wait along 
the Litani River with the expectation that the 
IDF assault would be much deeper and arrive much 
faster than it did.”   Yet another indication of 
Israel’s reversal of fortune was that, unlike any 
of its previous armed conflicts, in the final 
stages of the 2006 war it fought not in defiance 
of a U.N. ceasefire resolution but in the hope of 
a U.N. resolution to rescue it.

After the 2006 Lebanon war Israel was itching to 
take on Hezbollah again, but did not yet have a 
military option against it.  In mid-2008 Israel 
desperately sought to conscript the U.S. for an 
attack on Iran, which would also decapitate 
Hezbollah, and thereby humble the main 
challengers to its regional hegemony.  Israel and 
its quasi-official emissaries such as Benny 
Morris threatened that if the U.S. did not go 
along “then non-conventional weaponry will have 
to be used,” and “many innocent Iranians will 
die.”   To Israel’s chagrin and humiliation, the 
attack never materialized and Iran has gone its 
merry way, while the credibility of Israel’s 
capacity to terrorize slipped another notch.  It 
was high time to find a defenseless target to 
annihilate.  Enter Gaza, Israel’s favorite 
shooting gallery.  Even there the feebly armed 
Islamic movement Hamas had defiantly resisted 
Israeli diktat, in June 2008 even compelling Israel to agree to a ceasefire.

During the 2006 Lebanon war Israel flattened the 
southern suburb of Beirut known as the Dahiya, 
where Hezbollah commanded much popular 
support.  In the war’s aftermath Israeli military 
officers began referring to the “Dahiya 
strategy”: “We shall pulverize the 160 Shiite 
villages [in Lebanon] that have turned into 
Shiite army bases,” the IDF Northern Command 
Chief explained, “and we shall not show mercy 
when it comes to hitting the national 
infrastructure of a state that, in practice, is 
controlled by Hezbollah.”  In the event of 
hostilities, a reserve Colonel at the Israeli 
Institute for National Security Studies chimed 
in, Israel needs “to act immediately, decisively, 
and with force that is disproportionate
.Such a 
response aims at inflicting damage and meting out 
punishment to an extent that will demand long and 
expensive reconstruction processes.”  The new 
strategy was to be used against all of Israel’s 
regional adversaries who had waxed defiant­“the 
Palestinians in Gaza are all Khaled Mashaal, the 
Lebanese are all Nasrallah, and the Iranians are 
all Ahmadinejad”­but Gaza was the prime target 
for this blitzkrieg-cum-bloodbath strategy.  “Too 
bad it did not take hold immediately after the 
‘disengagement’ from Gaza and the first rocket 
barrages,” a respected Israeli columnist 
lamented.  “Had we immediately adopted the Dahiya 
strategy, we would have likely spared ourselves 
much trouble.”  After a Palestinian rocket 
attack, Israel’s Interior Minister urged in late 
September 2008, “the IDF should
decide on a 
neighborhood in Gaza and level it.”   And, 
insofar as the Dahiya strategy could not be 
inflicted just yet on Lebanon and Iran, it was 
predictably pre-tested in Gaza.

The operative plan for the Gaza bloodbath can be 
gleaned from authoritative statements after the 
war got underway: “What we have to do is act 
systematically with the aim of punishing all the 
organizations that are firing the rockets and 
mortars, as well as the civilians who are 
enabling them to fire and hide” (reserve 
Major-General); “After this operation there will 
not be one Hamas building left standing in Gaza” 
(Deputy IDF Chief of Staff); “Anything affiliated 
with Hamas is a legitimate target” (IDF 
Spokesperson’s Office).   Whereas Israel killed a 
mere 55 Lebanese during the first two days of the 
2006 war, the Israeli media exulted at Israel’s 
“shock and awe” (Maariv) as it killed more than 
300 Palestinians in the first two days of the 
attack on Gaza.  Several days into the slaughter 
an informed Israeli strategic analyst observed, 
“The IDF, which planned to attack buildings and 
sites populated by hundreds of people, did not 
warn them in advance to leave, but intended to 
kill a great many of them, and 
succeeded.”   Morris could barely contain his 
pride at “Israel’s highly efficient air assault 
on Hamas.”   The Israeli columnist B. Michael was 
less impressed by the dispatch of helicopter 
gunships and jet planes “over a giant prison and 
firing at its people” ­for example, “70
traffic 
cops at their graduation ceremony, young men in 
desperate search of a livelihood who thought 
they’d found it in the police and instead found death from the skies.”

As Israel targeted schools, mosques, hospitals, 
ambulances, and U.N. sanctuaries, as it 
slaughtered and incinerated Gaza’s defenseless 
civilian population (one-third of the 1,200 
reported casualties were children), Israeli 
commentators gloated that “Gaza is to Lebanon as 
the second sitting for an exam is to the first­a 
second chance to get it right,” and that this 
time around Israel had “hurled [Gaza] back,” not 
20 years as it promised to do in Lebanon, but 
“into the 1940s.  Electricity is available only 
for a few hours a day”; that “Israel regained its 
deterrence capabilities” because “the war in Gaza 
has compensated for the shortcomings of the 
[2006] Second Lebanon War”; and that “There is no 
doubt that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is 
upset these days
.There will no longer be anyone 
in the Arab world who can claim that Israel is weak.”

New York Times foreign affairs expert Thomas 
Friedman joined in the chorus of 
hallelujahs.   Israel in fact won the 2006 
Lebanon war, according to Friedman, because it 
had inflicted “substantial property damage and 
collateral casualties on Lebanon at large,” 
thereby administering an “education” to 
Hezbollah: fearing the Lebanese people’s wrath, 
Hezbollah would “think three times next time” 
before defying Israel.  He expressed hope that 
Israel was likewise “trying to ‘educate’ Hamas by 
inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants 
and heavy pain on the Gaza population.”  To 
justify the targeting of Lebanese civilians and 
civilian infrastructure Friedman asserted that 
Israel had no other option because “Hezbollah 
created a very ‘flat’ military network
deeply 
embedded in the local towns and villages,” and 
that because “Hezbollah nested among civilians, 
the only long-term source of deterrence was to 
exact enough pain on the civilians
to restrain Hezbollah in the future.”
Leaving aside Friedman’s hollow coinages­what 
does “flat” mean?­and leaving aside that he 
alleged that the killing of civilians was 
unavoidable but also recommends targeting 
civilians as a “deterrence” strategy: is it even 
true that Hezbollah was “embedded in,” “nested 
among,” and “intertwined” with the Lebanese civilian population?

Here’s what Human Rights Watch concluded after an 
exhaustive investigation: “we found strong 
evidence that Hezbollah stored most of its 
rockets in bunkers and weapon storage facilities 
located in uninhabited fields and valleys, that 
in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters 
left populated civilian areas as soon as the 
fighting started, and that Hezbollah fired the 
vast majority of its rockets from pre-prepared 
positions outside villages.”  And again, “in all 
but a few of the cases of civilian deaths we 
investigated, Hezbollah fighters had not mixed 
with the civilian population or taken other 
actions to contribute to the targeting of a 
particular home or vehicle by Israeli 
forces.”  Indeed, “Israel’s own firing patterns 
in Lebanon support the conclusion that Hezbollah 
fired large numbers of its rockets from tobacco 
fields, banana, olive and citrus groves, and more 
remote, unpopulated valleys.”

A U.S. Army War College study based largely on 
interviews with Israeli participants in the 
Lebanon war similarly found that “the key 
battlefields in the land campaign south of the 
Litani River were mostly devoid of civilians, and 
IDF participants consistently report little or no 
meaningful intermingling of Hezbollah fighters 
and noncombatants.  Nor is there any systematic 
reporting of Hezbollah using civilians in the 
combat zone as shields.”  On a related note, the 
authors report that “the great majority of 
Hezbollah’s fighters wore uniforms.  In fact, 
their equipment and clothing were remarkably 
similar to many state militaries’­desert or green 
fatigues, helmets, web vests, body armor, dog tags, and rank insignia.”
Friedman further asserted that, “rather than 
confronting Israel’s Army head-on,” Hezbollah 
fired rockets at Israel’s civilian population to 
provoke Israeli retaliatory strikes, inevitably 
killing Lebanese civilians and “inflaming the 
Arab-Muslim street.”  Yet, numerous studies have 
shown, and Israeli officials themselves conceded 
that, during its guerrilla war against the 
Israeli occupying army, Hezbollah only targeted 
Israeli civilians after Israel targeted Lebanese 
civilians.  In conformity with past practice 
Hezbollah started firing rockets toward Israeli 
civilian concentrations during the 2006 war only 
after Israel inflicted heavy casualties on 
Lebanese civilians, while Hezbollah leader Sayyed 
Hassan Nasrallah avowed that it would target 
Israeli civilians “as long as the enemy 
undertakes its aggression without limits or red lines.”

If Israel targeted the Lebanese civilian 
population and infrastructure during the 2006 
war, it was not because it had no choice, and not 
because Hezbollah had provoked it, but because 
terrorizing the civilian population was a 
relatively cost-free method of “education,” much 
to be preferred over fighting a real foe and 
suffering heavy casualties, although Hezbollah’s 
unexpectedly fierce resistance prevented Israel 
from achieving a victory on the battlefield.  In 
the case of Gaza it was able both to “educate” 
the population and achieve a military victory 
because­in the words of Gideon Levy­the “fighting in Gaza” was
“war deluxe.” Compared with previous wars, it is 
child’s play­pilots bombing unimpeded as if on 
practice runs, tank and artillery soldiers 
shelling houses and civilians from their armored 
vehicles, combat engineering troops destroying 
entire streets in their ominous protected 
vehicles without facing serious opposition. A 
large, broad army is fighting against a helpless 
population and a weak, ragged organization that 
has fled the conflict zones and is barely putting up a fight.

The justification put forth by Friedman in the 
pages of the Times for targeting civilians and 
civilian infrastructure amounted to apologetics 
for state terrorism.   It might be recalled that 
although Hitler had stripped Nazi propagandist 
Julius Streicher of all his political power by 
1940, and his newspaper Der St?rmer had a 
circulation of only some 15,000 during the war, 
the International Tribunal at Nuremberg 
nonetheless sentenced him to death for his murderous incitement.

Beyond restoring its deterrence capacity, 
Israel’s main goal in the Gaza slaughter was to 
fend off the latest threat posed by Palestinian 
moderation.  For the past three decades the 
international community has consistently 
supported a settlement of the Israel-Palestine 
conflict that calls for two states based on a 
full Israeli withdrawal to its June 1967 border, 
and a “just resolution” of the refugee question 
based on the right of return and 
compensation.  The vote on the annual U.N. 
General Assembly resolution, “Peaceful Settlement 
of the Question of Palestine,” supporting these 
terms for resolving the conflict in 2008 was 164 
in favor, 7 against (Israel, United States, 
Australia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, 
Palau), and 3 abstentions.  At the regional level 
the Arab League in March 2002 unanimously put 
forth a peace initiative on this basis, which it 
has subsequently reaffirmed.  In recent times 
Hamas has repeatedly signaled its own acceptance 
of such a settlement.  For example, in March 2008 
Khalid Mishal, head of Hamas’s Political Bureau, stated in an interview:

There is an opportunity to deal with this 
conflict in a manner different than Israel and, 
behind it, the U.S. is dealing with it 
today.  There is an opportunity to achieve a 
Palestinian national consensus on a political 
program based on the 1967 borders, and this is an 
exceptional circumstance, in which most 
Palestinian forces, including Hamas, accept a 
state on the 1967 borders
.There is also an Arab 
consensus on this demand, and this is a historic 
situation.  But no one is taking advantage of 
this opportunity.  No one is moving to cooperate 
with this opportunity.  Even this minimum that 
has been accepted by the Palestinians and the 
Arabs has been rejected by Israel and by the U.S.

Israel is fully cognizant that the Hamas Charter 
is not an insurmountable obstacle to a two-state 
settlement on the June 1967 border.  “[T]he Hamas 
leadership has recognized that its ideological 
goal is not attainable and will not be in the 
foreseeable future,” a former Mossad head 
recently observed. “[T]hey are ready and willing 
to see the establishment of a Palestinian state 
in the temporary borders of 1967
.They know that 
the moment a Palestinian state is established 
with their cooperation, they will be obligated to 
change the rules of the game: They will have to 
adopt a path that could lead them far from their 
original ideological goals.”

In addition, Hamas was “careful to maintain the 
ceasefire” it entered into with Israel in June 
2008, according to an official Israeli 
publication, despite Israel’s reneging on the 
crucial component of the truce that it ease the 
economic siege of Gaza.  “The lull was 
sporadically violated by rocket and mortar shell 
fire, carried out by rogue terrorist 
organizations,” the source continues. “At the 
same time, the [Hamas] movement tried to enforce 
the terms of the arrangement on the other 
terrorist organizations and to prevent them from 
violating it.”   Moreover, Hamas was “interested 
in renewing the relative calm with Israel” (Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin).

The Islamic movement could thus be trusted to 
stand by its word, making it a credible 
negotiating partner, while its apparent ability 
to extract concessions from Israel, unlike the 
hapless Palestinian Authority doing Israel’s 
bidding but getting no returns, enhanced Hamas’s 
stature among Palestinians.  For Israel these 
developments constituted a veritable 
disaster.  It could no longer justify shunning 
Hamas, and it would be only a matter of time 
before international pressure in particular from 
the Europeans would be exerted on it to 
negotiate.  The prospect of an incoming U.S. 
administration negotiating with Iran and Hamas, 
and moving closer to the international consensus 
for settling the Israel-Palestine conflict, which 
some U.S. policymakers now advocate, would have 
further highlighted Israel’s intransigence.  In 
an alternative scenario, speculated on by 
Nasrallah, the incoming American administration 
plans to convene an international peace 
conference of “Americans, Israelis, Europeans and 
so-called Arab moderates” to impose a 
settlement.  The one obstacle is “Palestinian 
resistance and the Hamas government in Gaza,” and 
“getting rid of this stumbling block is
the true goal of the war.”

In either case, Israel needed to provoke Hamas 
into breaking the truce, and then radicalize or 
destroy it, thereby eliminating it as a 
legitimate negotiating partner.  It is not the 
first time Israel confronted such a diabolical 
threat­an Arab League peace initiative, 
Palestinian support for a two-state settlement 
and a Palestinian ceasefire­and not the first 
time it embarked on provocation and war to overcome it.

In the mid-1970s the PLO mainstream began 
supporting a two-state settlement on the June 
1967 border.  In addition, the PLO, headquartered 
in Lebanon, was strictly adhering to a truce with 
Israel that had been negotiated in July 
1981.   In August 1981 Saudi Arabia unveiled, and 
the Arab League subsequently approved, a peace 
plan based on the two-state settlement.   Israel 
reacted in September 1981 by stepping up 
preparations to destroy the PLO.   In his 
analysis of the buildup to the 1982 Lebanon war, 
Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv reported 
that Yasser Arafat was contemplating a historic 
compromise with the “Zionist state,” whereas “all 
Israeli cabinets since 1967” as well as “leading 
mainstream doves” opposed a Palestinian 
state.  Fearing diplomatic pressures, Israel 
maneuvered to sabotage the two-state 
settlement.  It conducted punitive military raids 
“deliberately out of proportion” against 
“Palestinian and Lebanese civilians” in order to 
weaken “PLO moderates,” strengthen the hand of 
Arafat’s “radical rivals,” and guarantee the 
PLO’s “inflexibility.”  However, Israel 
eventually had to choose between a pair of stark 
options: “a political move leading to a historic 
compromise with the PLO, or preemptive military action against it.”

To fend off Arafat’s “peace offensive”­Yaniv’s 
telling phrase­Israel embarked on military action 
in June 1982. The Israeli invasion “had been 
preceded by more than a year of effective 
ceasefire with the PLO,” but after murderous 
Israeli provocations, the last of which left as 
many as 200 civilians dead (including 60 
occupants of a Palestinian children’s hospital), 
the PLO finally retaliated, causing a single 
Israeli casualty.   Although Israel used the 
PLO’s resumption of attacks as the pretext for 
its invasion, Yaniv concluded that the “raison 
d’être of the entire operation” was “destroying 
the PLO as a political force capable of claiming 
a Palestinian state on the West Bank.”   It 
deserves passing notice that in his new history 
of the “peace process,” Martin Indyk, former U.S. 
ambassador to Israel, provides this capsule 
summary of the sequence of events just narrated: 
“In 1982, Arafat’s terrorist activities 
eventually provoked the Israeli government of 
Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon into a full-scale invasion of Lebanon.”

Fast forward to 2008.  Israeli Foreign Minister 
Tzipi Livni stated in early December 2008 that 
although Israel wanted to create a temporary 
period of calm with Hamas, an extended truce 
“harms the Israeli strategic goal, empowers 
Hamas, and gives the impression that Israel 
recognizes the movement.”   Translation: a 
protracted ceasefire that enhanced Hamas’s 
credibility would have undermined Israel’s 
strategic goal of retaining control of the West 
Bank.  As far back as March 2007 Israel had 
decided on attacking Hamas, and only negotiated 
the June truce because “the Israeli army needed 
time to prepare.”   Once all the pieces were in 
place, Israel only lacked a pretext.  On 4 
November, while the American media were riveted 
on election day, Israel broke the ceasefire by 
killing seven Palestinian militants, on the 
flimsy excuse that Hamas was digging a tunnel to 
abduct Israeli soldiers, and knowing full well 
that its operation would provoke Hamas into 
hitting back.  “Last week’s ‘ticking tunnel,’ dug 
ostensibly to facilitate the abduction of Israeli 
soldiers,” Haaretz reported in mid-November

was not a clear and present danger: Its existence 
was always known and its use could have been 
prevented on the Israeli side, or at least the 
soldiers stationed beside it removed from harm’s 
way.  It is impossible to claim that those who 
decided to blow up the tunnel were simply being 
thoughtless.  The military establishment was 
aware of the immediate implications of the 
measure, as well as of the fact that the policy 
of “controlled entry” into a narrow area of the 
Strip leads to the same place: an end to the 
lull.  That is policy­not a tactical decision by a commander on the ground.

After Hamas predictably resumed its rocket 
attacks “[i]n retaliation” (Israeli Intelligence 
and Terrorism Information Center), Israel could 
embark on yet another murderous invasion in order 
to foil yet another Palestinian peace offensive.

Norman Finkelstein is author of five books, 
including 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859844421/counterpunchmaga>Image 
and Reality of the Israel-Palestine 
Conflict,<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520245989/counterpunchmaga> 
Beyond Chutzpah and 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/185984488X/counterpunchmaga>The 
Holocaust Industry, which have been translated 
into more than 40 foreign editions. He is the son 
of Holocaust survivors. This article is an edited 
extract of the views of Finkelstein given at 
<http://www.democracynow.org/>DemocracyNow.org. 
His website is <http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/>www.NormanFinkelstein.com




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