The bill of particulars includes illegal killings, torture, and house demolitions. It has been drawn up by
Norman G. Finkelstein and appears in full in yesterday’s
Counterpunch. The author of
The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering,* whose father survived Auschwitz and mother survived Majdanek, Finkelstein concludes his brief by noting that a “nonviolent tactic the purpose of which is to achieve a just and lasting settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict cannot legitimately be called anti-Semitic. Indeed, the real enemies of Jews are those who debase the memory of Jewish suffering by equating principled opposition to Israel's illegal and immoral policies with anti-Semitism.”
The mass media generally praise the “nonviolent tactic” Finkelstein refers to, i.e., the boycott, especially when commemorating certain political struggles in American history (e.g., during the recent Federal holiday), but smear boycotters with the “neo-Nazi” brush whenever their target is Israel.**
Finkelstein's latest book,
Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, debunks Alan Dershowitz’s
The Case for Israel. See his
site for information on all his publications.
Notes
*On that book, Raul Hilberg (
The Destruction of the European Jews) commented: “When I read Finkelstein's book,
The Holocaust Industry, at the time of its appearance, I was in the middle of my own investigations of these matters, and I came to the conclusion that he was on the right track. I refer now to the part of the book that deals with the claims against the Swiss banks, and the other claims pertaining to forced labor. I would now say in retrospect that he was actually conservative, moderate and that his conclusions are trustworthy. He is a well-trained political scientist, has the ability to do the research, did it carefully, and has come up with the right results. I am by no means the only one who, in the coming months or years, will totally agree with Finkelstein's breakthrough." From the CBC’s 2002
interview with Professor Hilberg.
**Murray Rothbard, in defending the ethics of the boycott on libertarian grounds, writes that “the important thing about the boycott is that it is purely voluntary, an act of attempted persuasion, and therefore that it is a perfectly legal and licit instrument of action. . . . Whether we wish any particular boycott well or ill depends on our moral values and on our attitudes toward the concrete goal or activity. But a boycott is legitimate per se. If we feel a given boycott to be morally reprehensible, then it is within the rights of those who feel this way to organize a counter-boycott to persuade the consumers otherwise, or to boycott the boycotters.”
The Ethics of Liberty
