Emptying Gaza (w/ Norman Finkelstein) | The Chris Hedges Report
2025-04-27T10:00:00Z
This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble. Israel, both materially and rhetorically, has made their intent to destroy the Palestinian people clear. One of the most renowned and courageous Middle East scholars, Norman Finkelstein, has as…
This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
Israel, both materially and rhetorically, has made their intent to destroy the Palestinian people clear. One of the most renowned and courageous Middle East scholars, Norman Finkelstein, has assiduously documented the Palestinian plight for decades and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. Finkelstein and Hedges assess the current state of the genocide in Palestine as well as how the media and the universities have all but abandonded their principles in servitude to the Zionist agenda.
Finkelstein makes clear the gravity of Israel’s unprecedented actions: “If you take any metric—number of UN workers killed, number of medics killed, number of journalists killed, proportion of civilians to combatants killed, proportion of children killed, proportion of women and children killed—if you take any metric, Israel for the 21st century is in a class all its own.”
Israel’s use of propaganda and strategically timed attacks—often lining up with other major world events so as to avoid media scrutiny—has muddied political outlook of the genocide into one of war and defense rather than ethnic cleansing. The American media has done its part to feed these narratives as well.
“What is going to prove that Hamas has been defeated?” Finkelstein asks. “I know what’s going to prove it: when there’s no one left in Gaza. That will be the proof.”
Host
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Transcript
Transcript
Chris Hedges
Israel has blocked all food and humanitarian aid into Gaza and cut off electricity, so that the last water desalination plant no longer functions. The Israeli military has seized half of the territory — Gaza is 25 miles long and four to five miles wide — and placed two-thirds of Gaza under displacement orders, rendered “no-go zones,” including the border town of Rafah, which is encircled by Israeli troops.
Defense Minister Israel Katz recently vowed that Israel will “intensify” the war against Hamas and use “all military and civilian pressure, including evacuation of the Gaza population south and implementing United States President [Donald] Trump’s voluntary migration plan for Gaza residents.” Since Israel’s unilateral ending of the ceasefire on March 18 — which was never honored by Israel — Israel has been carrying out relentless bombing and shelling against civilians, killing over 1,400 Palestinians and wounding over 3,600, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
An average of one hundred children are being killed daily according to the United Nations. Israel is, at the same time, accusing Egypt of treaty violations to lay what may be the groundwork for a mass expulsion of Palestinians into the Egyptian Sinai. Israel says it will not lift the total blockade until Hamas is “defeated” and the remaining 59 Israeli hostages are released.
But no one in Israel or Gaza expects Hamas, which has weathered the decimation of Gaza and sustained mass slaughter, to surrender or disappear. The question no longer is will the Palestinians be deported from Gaza, but when they will be pushed out and where they will go. Joining me to discuss the crisis in Gaza, Israel’s intentions in Gaza and its ramifications is the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein. Professor Finkelstein is the author of numerous books including The Rise and Fall of Palestine and Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom.
Let’s talk about what we’re seeing. It is absolutely horrendous. Everything has been cut off. And it appears clear from numerous statements by the Israeli leadership that they are quite intent on depopulating Gaza.
Norman Finkelstein
I think the goal of the assault on Gaza that began on October 8th, the goal or the objective is perfectly clear. There hasn’t been really much in the way of disguising it. And the goal is to once and for all solve the Gaza question.
And they were prepared to use any means within the limits or constraints imposed by the international community and in particular the United States. They were basically, there were three, as you might call it, modus operandi, and they flowed into each other. These aren’t hermetically sealed compartments. There was outright genocide, which was actually carried out with greater efficiency than Israel is normally credited for.
So to take just two examples, number one, and just so we can remain clearly focused, I’m now dealing with the outright genocidal aspect of Israel’s solution, final solution to the Gaza question. Between October 7th and October 31st, the very first month of the Israeli assault on Gaza, approximately 1,900 children were killed according to air wars, which is a reputable military assessment organization. So 1,900 children between October 7th and October 31st. If you take the very worst month of the situation in Syria, it was in 2016, the worst month, approximately 250 children were killed versus 1,900.
Now if you take the very worst year in this Syrian situation, approximately 1,900 children were killed, almost exactly the number of killed in Gaza between October 7th and October 31st. So often you hear the argument, well, if Israel was carrying out genocide, how come they haven’t killed the whole population, dropped the nuke or whatever?
Well, in fact, within the political constraints, their achievement is actually quite impressive. To take another example, the Israelis killed 300 times more children than have been killed in Ukraine proportionately.
If you take in all the factors, size of population, duration of conflict, and so forth, and you juxtapose the two, 300 times more children have been killed in Gaza. And as you know, Chris, if you take any metric—number of UN workers killed, number of medics killed, number of journalists killed, proportion of civilians to combatants killed, proportion of children killed, proportion of women and children killed—if you take any metric, Israel for the 21st century is in a class all its own.
And in fact, for some metrics, like the amount of tonnage of bombs dropped, it surpasses places like Dresden. I mean, we have to go back to World War II to find the right comparison. So we should not underestimate the extent or the effectiveness, the extent and efficacy of the genocidal element of Israel’s assault on Gaza.
The second element was the ethnic cleansing aspect, and that element was not as successful because there were no takers for it in the Arab world. Whether it will ultimately be the final solution remains to be seen.
And the third metric is the most important one, in my opinion. It’s what you might call the fait accompli metric. That is, make Gaza uninhabitable. And therefore, by hook or by crook, everybody save a handful of people. You’re familiar with the expression of, Mr. Netanyahu, we have to thin out the population of Gaza. And I think that’s the stage we’re in now, to leave no option, no alternative, except to leave.
Now, I would want to make a couple of additional remarks on that point. Number one, to the extent that Israel allowed for some humanitarian aid to enter, or was somewhat—some restraints were placed on, for example, its attacks on hospitals. Those were all dependent on international news coverage.
Now, Mr. Netanyahu, he knows the American scene, and he knows the American media. And there have been very good, very sophisticated political science studies done correlating Israel’s military actions with news coverage.
I can give you one which I had written about, but there are many examples. When Israel launched its ground invasion of Gaza in 2014, they launched the day after the Malaysian airliner was shot down, I guess over Ukraine, if my memory is correct.
They’re always looking, waiting for the cameras to move elsewhere. And that, in effect, is what accounts for what’s happening now. Because now it’s kind of like a bacchanalia of genocide. I’ve stopped watching it.
You probably know at this point more than me. But do you know why it’s happening now? It’s because all the newspapers, all the media is Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. And the Israelis know it.
This is their opportunity when all the media is focused on Trump. It’s not so much, incidentally, that he gave them the green light. That’s not why it’s happening. It’s because the media stopped covering it. It’s just Trump.
And so it’s an opportunity which I don’t believe the Israelis will let pass. Right now, the aim is, one, to make Gaza uninhabitable, and two, to break the will of the people so that they will start screaming.
You remember the famous line by Henry Kissinger during the [former Chilean president Salvador] Allende regime, “we’re going to make the economy scream.” And now the Israelis, their goal, their objective is to make the Gazans scream so as to put the pressure on the Arab world to open the gates.
But just bear in mind, you mentioned absolutely correctly for now a month and a week, I guess it is, there’s been no food, fuel, water, electricity admitted to gossip. Now you must remember, that’s exactly what Defense Minister [Yoav] Gallant said in the first week in October. We’re not going to admit any food, fuel, water, electricity. The only reason they were forced to back away from that, they started to back away on October 15th.
It was because of the international pressure, which then forced [Joe] Biden and [Antony] Blinken to tell Israel you have to accommodate to some degree international opinion. It was the same order and Biden and Blinken would have gone along with it were it not for the international coverage. Right now there’s no coverage so they can do whatever they want.
Chris Hedges
There are two aspects of this potential population transfer. One, the reports that both the United States and Israel has been speaking to Sudan, Somaliland, and Somalia. Somaliland is an offshoot which wants diplomatic recognition. All of these countries need money. Sudan has said that they will not accept Palestinians. And the other factor is that you have Israeli officials now attacking Egypt for breaking the Camp David Accords by building military infrastructure and moving troops up into the northern Sinai.
This is something the Egyptians deny. It’s Israel that, of course, has broken the Camp David by now occupying the Philadelphia corridor, which is supposed to be demilitarized. But it does appear that, if we’re watching this from the outside, that they are split as to where they’re going to go.
Are they going to be shipped to Africa? I’m not sure how they get there. I mean Syria has also been completely destroyed. Israel has carried out numerous airstrikes against what’s left of the Syrian military since the overthrow of [former Syrian president Bashar al-] Assad. But Gaza is not contiguous to Syria. They have to bust them there. Do you have any thoughts about…
Norman Finkelstein
No, no, I never pretend to [know] military type knowledge. What I would say is, I slightly— I didn’t disagree, I think however the wording is critical. Israel says it will not stop until Hamas is destroyed. I don’t believe it has anything to do with Hamas. I know I’m a minority in that opinion.
Okay, it’s a marginal factor. But this is not about Hamas. This is about the final solution to Gaza. You know and I know, until every last Gazan is gone Israel can keep saying we haven’t destroyed Hamas. Well, how can anyone prove whether or not Hamas has been defeated? There’s no measure for that. There’s no evidence for that. You could say, okay, the evidence would be when Israel stops taking casualties.
Well, guess what? On average, Israel has taken one casualty a day in Gaza. So, that’s not a huge number. For 18 months, about 400 Israelis have been killed.
So, what is going to prove that Hamas has been defeated? I know what’s going to prove it when there’s no one left in Gaza. That will be the proof. So, even using this language as if setting up that we’re going to use the standard of when Hamas is defeated, first of all, in my opinion, we can disagree on this, I don’t think there was anything to defeat. There was no war in Gaza.
It’s been 18 months. 18 months. Can you name a battle? Has any reporter, any journalist, reported a battle in Gaza? There’s been no battles. There’s been about one casualty a day. Probably half of those were friendly fire.
I think we just have to, in the course of what’s been happening in Gaza, there were basically two paradigms, if I can use that big word, two paradigms. One paradigm was this is an Israel-Hamas war. And of course the media ran with that because, well, you know, it’s a war and things happen in the war.
And then there was a second paradigm. That was the South African paradigm. This is not a war. It’s a genocide. And by calling it a war, you’re effectively obfuscating the most critical aspect of what’s happening. You’ll forgive me for repeating myself if I’ve said it before to you, but I remember there was a famous book, but you’re old enough to remember, by Lucy Dawidowicz. It was called The War Against the Jews. Now, Lucy Dawidowicz was a complete moron. She was just a hack. Her book was awful.
But there was a second paradigm. The second paradigm was by a serious historian. That was Raul Hilberg, okay, sociologist. What did he call his magnum opus? He called it The Destruction of European Jewry. It wasn’t a war.
It was a systematic destruction. And my mother, who was very sensitive to language, somehow she mastered English faster than I could, at a much faster pace than me, and she would always get indignant when anyone described as what she endured during World War II as a war.
She would always say, and I’ll just say it’s a point of personal, if I might use the word, gratification, how over and over again my mother’s insights were later validated by books I read by serious individuals. I could give you other examples if you’re interested, but for the moment right now, my mother would say very emphatically, “It was not a war. It was an extermination. We were like roaches. The exterminator shines the light on us here. We run there. Shines the light on us there. We run here. It was an extermination.”
And I think we have to be very careful, as it’s unfolding in real time, not to use the language of a war. Because once you start using that language, Israel wins 99% of the propaganda war. So, I don’t think it… you know, people say I’m defeatist on this. I’m not defeatist. And of course, if there were a resistance, no one would be happier than me.
But sometimes, a tiny parcel of land as you described it, the estimates are Israel has dropped more than four atomic bombs. The idea of a resistance in that situation, if you read the descriptions, before any of the Israeli troops move a centimeter, they obliterate everything ahead of them, everything to the side of them, everything is obliterated. How in those circumstances can you realistically speak about a resistance?
Chris Hedges
Yes, and we should also be clear that Hamas does not have armor, artillery, an air force, navy, mechanized units, all of the accoutrements of a modern army that, of course, Israel is deploying against them. They have small arms, nothing else.
I want to ask, are there any impediments that you can foresee that would stop Israel from depopulating Gaza, any external impediments. Obviously, there are none internally in Israel.
Norman Finkelstein
Look, I think about that every day. I really do. You know you’re looking for that magic bullet. You’re looking for that miracle. I don’t see it. I had some hope for a period in the student encampments, and they were spreading with an unusual rapidity or celerity, and they were spreading around the world and having memories of the 1960s, you see a potential there.
I was surprised at the ease with which they were crushed. But on the other hand, it has to be borne in mind the price was very high that the students were expected to pay. First of all, the encampments began at the elite universities, where tuitions are in the stratosphere.
So if you get expelled, you’re losing $80,000 in tuition. Then in the encampments, I’m not saying the broad support, but the encampments which were the concentration of support, in most schools, even places like MIT, they were overwhelmingly non-white. And I would say, preponderantly, they were foreigners. And so they paid even a higher price, which is expulsion plus deportation.
And that was already looming in the spring. So when you consider the ruthlessness with which they were crushed, I guess it’s not altogether a surprise that when the new semester began this year, they had already vanished from sight. There were some internecine struggles, but that always happens when you lose masses of people.
You know, the ultras take over and it always gets a little bit squalid, but I don’t think it was the main factor. The main factor was brute force, a force majeure that was exerted on them. And then, you know, at some points during the actual conflict there was hope with the Hezbollah, that they could escalate the price Israel would pay.
That didn’t happen. Then people began to hope against hope that the Houthis can turn the tide. That didn’t happen. And as you can see from my recital, it became progressively more desperate to search for that magic bullet.
There was some hope from the International Court of Justice, which in general acquitted itself with honor when you consider the failure everywhere else. The fact that the judges in their overwhelming majority stood firm. And I think they did the best they could under the circumstances. It wasn’t enough.
But there was nothing to stop the killing machine. And once Trump was elected, I think it’s incorrect to say it was because he gave the green light. It was because the cameras were gone. If you open up the home page of the New York Times, which I’m sure you do, it’s just Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, line two, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, line three.
That’s all they needed. That’s all Israel needed. And now we can get on with the business. You remember when Gallant first gave the order, no food, fuel, water, electricity, that evoked an outcry and they were forced to retreat by October 15th and then there was a fuller retreat later, I think by October 27th if my memory is right. This time they weren’t forced to retreat.
Chris Hedges
I want to ask about the press because the New York Times ran a story on Monday about the universities and the way they characterized the protest was that they harassed Jewish students.
I don’t believe any Jewish students that I know of were arrested. I don’t think any were beaten. I don’t think any were sent to the hospital by being sprayed with a chemical on the steps of Low Library. But the press really laid the groundwork for what’s happening by mischaracterizing these encampments as essentially dens of Hamas supporters and antisemites. I know you were in the encampments as was I. It was completely untrue.
Norman Finkelstein
Well, now there is a new game being played that all the assault, this brazen, outrageous assault on academic freedom began with Mr. Trump. And so a large part of what happened is being deposited in George Orwell’s memory hole. It didn’t begin with Trump. We all have clear memories. They haven’t yet been rinsed clean by the powers that be.
They began when the Jewish supremacist billionaire class decided to do their share for the cause and they saw their share—already some of the Jewish supremacist billionaires had done their share like [former Meta COO] Sheryl Sandberg. So she made this, she channeled her Leni Riefenstahl [German/Nazi film director] and made this propaganda epic called Screams Before Silence, or as I’ve rechristened it, Scheiss Before Schlock, which purported that Hamas had weaponized rape as a weapon, had weaponized rape, mass rape.
And she released that I guess it was February 2024. It was like [The] Birth of a Nation. If she was channeling Leni Riefenstahl, because you know Sheryl Sandberg is a feminist, it’s precursor in the U.S. was Birth of a Nation, the same theme. We need white men to protect white womanhood from these feral, dark-skinned creatures.
You will perhaps know that Birth of a Nation was the first film ever shown in the White House and Sheryl Sandberg’s Scheiss Before Schlock was also shown in the Biden White House. So she was the first one to enter the ranks for the cause. And then come the spring, Bill Ackman, who’s married to, he has a trophy wife from Israel. She was in the Israeli Air Force.
Barry Sternlicht at Brown University, Robert Kraft at Columbia University, they reached for the blackmail weapon. It was very straightforward. It was not done behind closed doors. Either you crush the encampments or you’re not getting our alumni money. And then began a saga which is unprecedented in American history.
We’ve had repressive eras, for sure. There was the era around World War I, the Red Scare, and that was the era, you’d be probably interested to know, that the AAUP was born, the American Association of University Professors, which then wrote the famous “Principles of Academic Freedom”.
And that was because the robber barons, or the billionaire class now, the robber barons back then, were putting pressure on universities to fire professors, just a few, it wasn’t a large number, a few professors who were showing some solidarity with the union movement during that era. And then the second big, of course, assault on academic freedom came with the McCarthy era.
But if you look back, there is nothing like what happened in the spring of this past year. Not one, not two, three Ivy League presidents were dispatched, were ousted. Claudine Gay at Harvard, [Elizabeth] Magill at Pennsylvania, and [Minouche] Shafik at Columbia. Three Ivy League presidents, and bear in mind, two of the three were women of color.
So they had all the protections of woke ideology and all three and there wasn’t a word of criticism. You know, they tried to mask…
Chris Hedges
Well, I just want to—they did not denounce the genocide. They just didn’t grovel enough.
Norman Finkelstein
They didn’t grovel enough. And Claudine Gay, actually, she was completely correct when she said before the House Committee, she said this question of a slogan like, “the river to the sea,” she said it does pose a civil liberties issue. Even if it was directly genocidal, it would still pose a civil liberties issue.
Because everybody forgot what our own history on freedom of speech is. You, of course, know that in our country, you’re allowed to advocate the violent overthrow of the government. That’s a right that the Supreme Court validated, only if it comes right up against conduct does it become permissible to prohibit it.
But short of that, actually I’ve read the Supreme Court decisions. I think they’re quite well reasoned. I was impressed by the reasoning. Because I, myself, I’m a person of the left, as you know. So I’m wondering why would a bourgeois state allow you to advocate the violent overthrow of a government? That doesn’t seem to sit well with my understanding of capitalism and the bourgeois class and everything.
And then when you read the Supreme Court decisions how they’re reasoned, they were reasoned basically as follows, that even though we disagree with the violent overthrow of the government, say the justices, they may have some interesting criticisms of what’s wrong with our society or our system of governance or our economic system.
So even though we don’t agree with advocating the violent overthrow of the government, we would lose something valuable if we suppressed the speech. And it was on those grounds that they justified the violent overthrow of the government.
Now, many people in this country, I’m not criticizing them, I’m not agreeing with them, but many people in this country are very patriotic. And they revere the American flag. But our Supreme Court ruled during the Vietnam War that it was a form of expressive speech to burn the flag.
So when Claudine Gay said, she was asked a question, if somebody was saying something outright genocidal against Jews, what would you say? And she said it was a complicated question. And that’s factually correct. I mean, I think most of these people sitting on these committees would be shocked at what the Supreme Court has ruled in our jurisprudence on the subject of freedom of speech.
You might recall, there was a funny one I liked. A fellow walked into court wearing a shirt saying, “fuck the draft”. And the judge didn’t like that. Well, guess what? That was upheld. And now here’s the most interesting one, Chris, because you’re old enough to remember these things. Most of the young people have not a clue. They’re always shocked when they go through this history.
You must remember that the signature of the Freedom of Speech or First Amendment case in the 1980s was the Skokie, Illinois [case]. Whether the American Nazi Party had the right to assemble and march through a community of Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois.
And lo and behold, the Illinois courts ruled they had that right. Now compare, because the standard now is if students feel unsafe, unwanted, or uncomfortable, that’s grounds to suppress speech. Well, Chris, how do you think survivors of the Nazi Holocaust felt?
Do you think they felt comfortable? Do you think they felt welcome? Do you think they felt wanted when the Nazi Party marched through Skokie, Illinois? But our court said that was protected speech.
Because of, in my opinion, the disaster that befell our political left when the woke politics and cancel culture set in, all of that history was erased. And so it was easy. It was handing it to the other side on a silver platter for the Jewish billionaire class to say, we’re withholding our monies because Jewish students feel unsafe, unwanted, and unwelcome, and uncomfortable, however you want to put it.
So the reality, I speak honestly, not afraid of the truth. I have a wonderful friend, she lives out in North Carolina. She went for a solidarity with the Palestinians event, I guess a couple of days ago. And she wrote me and she said they were chanting the, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” And she said frankly, I didn’t feel comfortable with it.
And I don’t like that slogan. I’ve said that on many occasions. I don’t like that slogan. But on the other hand, there are a lot of slogans I don’t like. You know? And I have to learn to live with them.
Of course, if it comes from “my people”, my comrades and so forth, I try to reason and explain why I think it’s a wrong slogan. But people have that right. That right is protected. And therefore, if you felt unwelcome, uncomfortable, unwanted, it’s too bad.
Chris Hedges
Also, this isn’t about antisemitism.
Norman Finkelstein
It has nothing to do with antisemitism.
Chris Hedges
It has to do with shutting down the left and deforming universities into centers that cater to the power structure completely, including taking departments at Columbia and putting them, which is just something out of fascist Germany, putting them under government control.
Norman Finkelstein
Look, Chris, I want to, you know we’re both roughly of the same age cohort, and I want to have a serious conversation about this. I am against any government intervention or interference. I have come to accept the principles of academic freedom, even as they never protected me.
But I still accept the principles as correct. Your peers are the only individuals competent to judge your competence in your discipline. We don’t let arbitrary people decide who teaches physics. We don’t let them decide who teaches chemistry, biology, mathematics on the basic principle that only your peers possess that kind of competence.
And on reflection, that seems to me a perfectly sensible standard. So I am, even though I didn’t benefit from that protection, actually, I think my peers were the first ones who would judge me not competent. As against the general population, I would probably do better with the role of the dice.
Chris Hedges
Well, I just want to interject because your peers recommended you for tenure at DePaul and then in overturning procedural procedures because of pressure from [Alan] Dershowitz and all of these…
Norman Finkelstein
Yeah. That’s totally correct and in my occasional bitterness, I shouldn’t lose sight of that fact. So the fact is you are correct and I’m never afraid to say I’m wrong. The academic freedom held up for me. That’s correct. Except at a level where it was outside interference. So I’m against any outside interference.
But having said that, there was a problem in the humanities. There was a problem in the liberal arts. There was a problem with people carrying on with very exiguous intellectual capacity, carrying on like apparatchiks. Now, I would challenge you, maybe for a future conversation.
Choose a university at random, choose any university at random, and go look at its course offerings in the English department. Look at the course offerings.
Chris Hedges
It’s all textual criticism, it’s [Jacques] Derrida and all this stuff.
Norman Finkelstein
It’s textual criticism, but also in the course offerings, not in comparative [literature], but just in English. You know, where once upon a time you read [William] Shakespeare and you read [Charles] Dickens and you read [Jane] Austen and you read and you read.
Now, if I were to tell you what you read, I would be getting accused of any manner of sin. So I’m not going to even name the titles. You go and look. You know, I had this conversation a few days ago with Briahna Joy Gray because it irks me, it irks me that the same liberal elites who champion this woke culture, they send their kids to schools where they read the classics.
And then when one of my students from say City University, a public university, if he or she manages by some miracle to get into a top grade law school or professional school, they don’t know if they’re coming or going. Because their peers are citing Shakespeare and are citing Plato and are citing Aristotle and I won’t tell you what they read in my college.
I know this for a fact because I’ve mentored several students who I tried to steer on a firm foundation because they’re very bright and they’re going places. And we go through the course catalogs together. You know, in my time, and it’s not that long ago, it’s long ago, but not that long ago, in 100 level, 100 level courses in English, it would be Shakespeare’s histories, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Shakespeare’s comedies, three different courses.
That was 100 level. And then of course it becomes more sophisticated, 200 and 300 level. Now, in a choice of as many as 100 courses, you might get one course in Shakespeare, maybe one. One.
British literature, one course, a survey course out of a hundred. So you’re thinking, then what are the other 99? Well, I say Chris Hedges, brace yourself. So why do I say all this? They need a house cleaning. They do. I want it to come from inside. But Trump and company, it was served to them on a silver platter.
Because nobody likes those classes. I talk to the students. You can’t disagree. There’s a party line. And woe to you if you are a male and you’re taking a course that includes female authors. No, I’m serious. You can’t open your mouth.
Chris Hedges
No, I know. I’m with you on that and you know, I spent eight years in a university and that’s all I did, including Greek and Latin. I know at Princeton they’ve banned Richard Wright. You know, Black Boy is one of the great works of 20th century literature. That’s another show.
Norm, I want to talk just to end here about your book, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, because what you do in that book is document not only the detailed reports, the Goldstone report and others that exhaustively detail the war crimes. You have a chapter on the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish ship that was attacked by Israeli commandos, Operation Cast Lead.
So all of this stuff was documented. All of these were including, of course, Lebanon, the Israeli incursion into Lebanon, the bombing of West Beirut, et cetera, et cetera. It’s all been documented and has had no effect.
And you write about the Goldstone report, but you also in the book write about figures like Hillary Clinton who are proud of obstructing any effort to act on those reports. And I think that that’s an important point because it totally paved the way for the genocide. And I wonder if you could, as we end, talk about that.
Norman Finkelstein
Yes, I think that, I don’t blame Richard Goldstone because I think he was blackmailed.
Chris Hedges
Well, because he recanted the… He wrote a column for the Washington Post that said, if he knew now what he had known then, he would have written the report. But this guy was under tremendous, tremendous pressure. They really went after him because he was Jewish and a Zionist. But he was honest.
Norman Finkelstein
Well, he was honest. It was an interesting story. I’ll tell it to you very quickly because time doesn’t allow. Richard Goldstone was Jewish. He was a Zionist. He was connected with many institutions in Israel. And when he was asked to head the Commission of Inquiry, he said, I really couldn’t say no because they told me I could write the terms of reference.
So whatever I wanted to investigate, they were agreeable to. So he said, how could you say no in those circumstances? And then he went, it was a four person commission, Christine Chinkin, not so important, I know the guys.
In any event, he wrote a very devastating report. It was, I think, something under the order of 400 pages. It was a mammoth report. And it was very wide-ranging. It limited itself to Operation Cast Lead, August 26 to January 17. It looked at the history of the occupation. It looked at the West Bank. It was very comprehensive, and it was a totally devastating report. Totally devastating.
Just as a footnote to that, whenever one people say, well, Hamas blocked this and Hamas blocked that and Hamas blocked that, Hamas always cooperated with the international commissions even though they were totally brutal to Hamas. They all found Hamas guilty of war crimes. Hamas never cared. Because they figured if we can get something out of these commissions, let them do what they want with us.
We’ll let it go. They always cooperated. It was always Israel that refused to cooperate with the International Commissions of Inquiry. And it’s not true the Commissions of Inquiry were soft on Hamas. Absolutely not. They were pretty ruthless with Hamas. In any event, he writes the report and he comes under devastating attack.
Of course Alan Dershowitz is always over the top and he compared Richard Goldstone to Dr. [Josef] Mengele. Okay that was typical Dershowitz but actually the other attacks weren’t much better. He didn’t fare much better Richard Goldstone. And then he basically retracted that report on April 1st, 2011. Initially I thought it was an April Fools joke.
I couldn’t believe it. I had written a lot on Goldstone at that point and I read the report at least four or five times because it was a gold mine. And he claimed he got new information that forced him to retract. And John Dugard, who’s also a South African jurist, and for your listeners, he was the person who led the delegation. He was a senior counsel at the International Court of Justice during the genocide case.
And John Dugard has a very distinguished career. He was the barrister for the Nelson Mandela family when Nelson Mandela was in jail. He was the barrister for Bishop [Desmond] Tutu. And above and beyond all else, he’s just a very decent guy.
One of those rare birds, a consistent liberal. I am a radical, he’s a liberal, but my heart warms in his sight. Any case, Dugard, among other things, was a special rapporteur on the occupied territories of the UN. And when Richard Goldstone recanted, Dugard wrote, I think it was in the British periodical, he wrote, there is nothing new, Mr. Goldstone. Nothing new has been revealed since you published that report. I know it. Because he published, simultaneously, a report for the Arab League. He was their chief investigator.
And fair is fair. Goldstone’s was more comprehensive, but Dugard’s was more knowledgeable on the law. Dugard is top notch, top of the shelf. In any event, he said there was nothing new, and then he ended by saying, why Richard Goldstone retracted will go with him to his grave. We’ll never know.
Chris Hedges
Well, Israel is notorious for blackmail, but I want to get into that. I want to get into that moment because I think you cite it as a pivotal moment by which perhaps Israel could have been held to account and it wasn’t. After that, it was just a free-for-all.
Norman Finkelstein
Yeah, it was, people now forgot or they’re too young to remember. There was a huge outpouring against Israel during Operation Cast Lead. There were hundreds of thousands of people on the street.
Chris Hedges
We should just say what Operation Cast Lead [was]. This was an assault in Gaza.
Norman Finkelstein
It was one of Israel’s periodic killing sprees in Gaza. Yeah, this was 2008 to [200]9. It ended January 17, 2009, and it’s not without interest why. It ended on that date because Obama was going to be inaugurated on January 20. And since this was his anointment, he didn’t want any distraction by Gaza. So he just called Netanyahu, it wasn’t Netanyahu, it was Olmert.
He just called Ehud Olmert and he said, time to stop. I don’t want my occasion to be distracted from. My train of thought just went.
Chris Hedges
Well, just why that was such a pivotal moment.
Norman Finkelstein
There was a huge outpouring of outrage at what Israel was doing. You might recall at that point, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was having trouble visiting the UK because claims were what’s called under international law universal jurisdiction, they wanted to prosecute her.
And soldiers were having trouble traveling. So it seemed as if there was some possibility. And when Goldstone retracted, as I said, I believe it was blackmail. I personally doubt it was him, but he has a daughter who lives in Israel, and you could imagine if you look for dirt on anyone, you’re going to find it, and if you don’t find it on them by some miracle, the person has a clean slate. There is your relatives, you know.
And then at that point, Israel was really never again seriously threatened. There have been all sorts of machinations. I believe that the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, the ICC, Fatou Bensouda, I believe she was blackmailed by Israel. I wrote a book on that subject which sold fewer copies than the fingers on your right hand. And the ones that I sold were the ones I purchased. It was a closed circle.
I believe the current vice president of the International Court of Justice, Julia Sebutinde, I believe she’s being blackmailed by Israel. I believe that the former president of the court, Joan Donoghue, who was presiding over the genocide case, I believe that she, for careerist reasons, tried to sabotage the ICJ ruling on a plausible genocide in Gaza.
So there’s still a lot of dirt. It’s the subject of a forthcoming book of mine entitled Gaza’s Grave Diggers: An Inquiry Into…
My memory. I’ve not been sleeping for weeks, I’ve just been nonstop working. And I’m nonstop working on the book that I have… an inquiry into something in high places. So I think there’s still a lot of machinations going on in the international community. But in general, I think they actually… They weren’t bad.
I mean, if you remember the days of [Former Secretary-General of the United Nations] Ban Ki-moon and you compare him with [António] Guterres, Guterres has been making very… you know, like just the other day, the gates of hell have been, the four gates of hell… he’s been good. The whole UN hierarchy, I think, fair is fair. I think they were okay. And I thought the ICJ, they did the most they could under the circumstances. So, it just wasn’t enough.
Chris Hedges
All right, we’re going to stop there. Thanks, Norm. I want to thank Thomas [Hedges], Diego [Ramos], Max [Jones] and Sofia [Menemenlis], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
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