[R-G] Finkelstein: Beyond Chutzpah - The Real Issue Is Israel's Human Rights Record

[Tim Murphy]

25 August 2005
New York City
www.normanfinkelstein.com


The Real Issue Is Israel's Human Rights Record:

A statement by Norman G. Finkelstein upon publication of Beyond Chutzpah


Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard University is currently best known for
his advocacy of the "most excruciating" torture against terrorist suspects
such as a "needle being shoved under the fingernails." The alleged purpose
of this torture is to extract a truthful confession but its real
consequence, as human rights organizations have pointed out, is to produce
whatever statements are necessary to end the suffering. For 15 months
Dershowitz has applied a variant of this truth-seeking technique -- less
physically painful but no less excruciating -- to prospective publishers of
Beyond Chutzpah, which offers a critical examination of Israel's human
rights record and Dershowitz's defense of it. Enlisting one of the most
powerful law firms in the country after his personal initiatives proved
unsuccessful, Dershowitz has repeatedly threatened to bankrupt highly
respected publishers with litigation if they didn't cancel publication of my
book. He could then proclaim that the cancellation confirmed the "truth"
that Beyond Chutzpah didn't meet scholarly standards.

Dershowitz justified these blackmail tactics on the ground that Beyond
Chutzpah libels him. Yet, when I first began to expose his gross scholarly
misconduct, Dershowitz publicly declared at UCLA (on 21 October 2003) that
he wouldn't respond with a libel action because he believed "so strongly in
the First Amendment and full freedom of speech." Ironically, just as he was
threatening my publishers with expensive and time-consuming lawsuits,
Dershowitz denounced Holocaust denier David Irving, who had sued Deborah
Lipstadt for libel, with these words: "Before Irving lost his case [against
Lipstadt], several publishers had refused to issue books critical of Irving,
out of fear of his bringing expensive and time-consuming lawsuits. That was
a chilling of free speech" (Afterword to Lipstadt's History on Trial; his
emphasis).

My publisher, University of California Press, was understandably at great
pains to fend off a potential lawsuit by Dershowitz; for an academic
publisher the associated costs would have been ruinous, to the point of
making certain victory meaningless. On occasion our relationship became
strained and at one point it appeared as if we had reached an impasse.
However, through the skillful mediation of Nation magazine senior editor
Roane Carey (who was the freelance editor of Beyond Chutzpah) and others, a
satisfactory compromise was reached that protected the interests of both
publisher and author, and, most importantly, preserved the integrity of the
book. I would like personally to extend my heartfelt thanks to all who
supported me and the press during this difficult period.

Unable to suppress publication of my book, Dershowitz has instead declared
victory on the ground that certain allegations about his scholarly
misconduct have been removed from the final text. Resorting to blackmail and
censorship is not normally reason for boasting. It's also difficult to
understand how the publication of a book copiously documenting that The Case
for Israel is among the most spectacular academic frauds ever published on
the Israel-Palestine conflict should be cause for his gloating.

More to the point, is it accurate to state that allegations of mine have
been removed? An appendix to Beyond Chutzpah irrefutably demonstrates that
Dershowitz not only massively lifted information and ideas from another
author, Joan Peters, without attribution, but that he did so from a book,
Peters's From Time Immemorial, universally dismissed as a fraud. It is left
to readers to decide whether Dershowitz committed plagiarism as defined by
Harvard University -- "passing off a source's information, ideas, or words
as your own by omitting to cite them." The appendix also explicitly recounts
my previous conclusion that Dershowitz didn't have "a clue of his book's
content" and that he was "manifestly ignorant of the content of his own
book" (Beyond Chutzpah, pp. 95, 254). Again, it is left to readers to draw
the only possible inference. In light of the comprehensive falsification of
sources in The Case for Israel that I have documented, Dershowitz might have
been better advised to disclaim authorship. As I stated to him on Democracy
Now!, "For your sake, I truly hope you did not write this book."

Finally, I would like to comment on Dershowitz's repeated claim that I
stated that my late mother was a Nazi collaborator (kapo). In an article for
FrontPageMagazine.com ("Why is the University of California Press Publishing
Bigotry?," 5 July 2005), Dershowitz alleged that "[Finkelstein] suspects his
mother of having been a kapo ('really, how else would she have survived?' he
asks rhetorically)," while in a statement posted on his Harvard University
Law School webpage, Dershowitz wrote that "He suspects his own mother of
being a kapo and cooperating with the Nazis during the Holocaust"
(www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/Dershowitz/statement). A more elaborate version
of this claim appears in his new book The Case for Peace:

"Finkelstein even doubted his own mother's denial that she was a kapo,
asking whether her frequent statements that "the best didn't survive"
constituted "an indirect admission of guilt?" The most he was willing to do
was "assume" that his mother answered him "truthfully." But he questioned
even that assumption: "Still, if she didn't cross fundamental moral
boundaries, I glimpsed from her manner of pushing and shoving in order to
get to the head of a queue, which mortified me. . . . Really, how else would
she have survived?" "

My late mother was a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, Maidanek concentration
camp and two slave-labor camps. Every member of her family was exterminated.
After the war she was a key witness in an INS Nazi deportation hearing and
at the trial of Maidanek concentration camp guards in Germany (where I was
also present). She has been written up in many histories of these postwar
hearings. Here is the excerpt from my memoir that Dershowitz consulted to
reach his conclusion:

"Except for allusions to relentless pangs of hunger, my mother never spoke
about her personal torments during the war, which was just as well, since I
couldn't have borne them. Like Primo Levi, she often said that, being "too
delicate and refined, the best didn't survive." Was this an indirect
admission of guilt? Much later in life I finally summoned the nerve to ask
whether she had done anything of which she was ashamed. Calmly replying no,
she recalled having refused the privileged position of "block head" in the
camp. She especially resented the "dirty" question "How did you survive?"
with the insinuation that, to emerge alive from the camps, survivors must
have morally compromised themselves. Given how ferociously she cursed the
Jewish councils, ghetto police and kapos, I assume my mother answered me
truthfully. Although acknowledging that Jews initially joined the councils
from mixed motives, she said that "only scum," reaping the rewards of doing
the devil's work, still cooperated after it became clear that they were
merely cogs in the Nazi killing machine. When queried why she hadn't settled
in Israel after the war, my mother used to reply, only half in jest, that "I
had enough of Jewish leaders!" The Jewish ghetto police always had the
option, she said, of "throwing off their uniforms and joining the rest of
us" -- a point that Yitzak Zuckerman, a leader of the Warsaw ghetto
uprising, made in his memoir. (It was always gratifying to find my mother's
seemingly erratic or harsh judgments seconded in the reliable testimonial
literature.) Still shaking her head in disbelief, she would often recall
how, after Jews in the ghetto used the most primitive implements or even
bare hands to dig bunkers deep in the earth and conceal themselves, the
Jewish police would reveal these hideouts to the Germans, sending their
flesh-and-blood to the crematoria in order to save their own skins. One of
the first acts of the ghetto resistance was to kill an officer in the Jewish
police. On a sign posted next to his corpse -- my mother would recall with
vengeful glee -- read the epitaph: "Those who live like a dog die like a
dog." Still, if she didn't cross fundamental moral boundaries, I glimpsed
from her manner of pushing and shoving in order to get to the head of a
queue, which mortified me, how my mother must have fought Hobbes's war of
all against all many a time in the camps. Really, how else would she have
survived? (www.NormanFinkelstein.com, "Haunted House")"

Comparing the actual text with his presentation of it gives a hint of how
Dershowitz typically reports sources in his publications. I will forgo
comment on the moral character of an individual who defames a survivor of
the Nazi holocaust after her death.

Beyond Chutzpah is now on its way to bookstores. It is my sincere hope that
the repulsive sideshow created by Dershowitz will quickly be forgotten and
that the book's real purpose will now come into focus: Israel's horrendous
human rights record in the Occupied Territories and the misuse of
anti-Semitism to delegitimize criticism of it.