Product Description

First published in 1995, this highly acclaimed study scrutinizes popular and scholarly representations of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It begins with a novel theoretical interpretation of Zionism, and then moves on to critically engage the influential studies of Joan Peters, Benny Morris, and Anita Shapira. Carefully rehearsing the documentary record, Finkelstein also challenges the dominant images of the June 1967 and October 1973 Arab-Israeli wars. In a comprehensive new introduction, he provides the most succinct overview available in the English language of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, while in several new chapters he juxtaposes Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories against South African apartheid, and demolishes the scholarly pretensions of Michael Oren's recent bestseller on the June 1967 war.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #156571 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
"Norman Finkelstein is one of the most radical and hard-hitting critics of the official Zionist version of the Arab-Israeli conflict and of the historians who support this version. ... a major contribution to the study of the Arab-Israeli conflict which deserves to be widely read, especially in the United States." -- Avi Shlaim, St. Antony's College, Oxford University "Anyone interested in seeing justice brought to the Middle East must read this book." -- Charles Glass, former ABC Middle East correspondent "... this thouroughly documented book is guaranteed to stimulate and provoke. It will be required reading in the continuing war of the historians." -- William Quandt, Foreign Affairs "... the most revealing study of the historical background of the conflict and the current peace agreement." -- Noam Chomsky, The Guardian "... a thought provoking work which calls into question many of the accepted 'truths' associated with the Israeli-Palestine conflict." -- Middle East Journal "... both an impressive analysis of Zionist ideology and a searing but scholarly indictment of Israel's treatment of the Arabs since 1948." -- London Review of Books

About the Author
Norman G. Finkelstein currently teaches Political Theory and History at DePaul University in Chicago. He is author of The Holocaust Industry, The Rise and Fall of Palestine, and (with Ruth Bettina Birn) of A Nation on Trial, named a notable book for 1998 by the New York Times Book Review.

Customer Reviews

A brilliantly written, thought provoking scholarly book.
Dr. Norman Finkelstein has written a brilliant and scholarly expose of the Israel-Palestine conflict. He is not a dispassionate historian/scholar nor does he pretend to be. He dedicates the book to his parents, survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi extermination camps: "May I never forget or forgive what was done to them." Finkelstein's keen intellect is breathtaking. His painstaking research which supports the evidence how the "reality" of the causes of the conflict is vastly different than the "image" presented to us by the media is a marvel to behold. My favorite chapters in the book are chapters 2 and 4. In Chapter 2, he discusses Joan Peters book "From Time Immemorial" and masterfully exposes it as a hoax. The crux of Peters' thesis was that "Palestine was, literally, 'uninhabited' on the eve of the Zionist colonization; and that if the Arab population did not materialize, literally, ex nihilo in Palestine, it did surreptitiously enter to exploit the economic opportunities that the Jews created when they made the 'desert bloom'." By that logic, most Palestinians were not even there in 1948 to be expelled from their homes. The fact that such a threadbare hoax can be published in this country is not surprising. But the fact that this book received accolades from journalists and scholars alike, from such luminaries as Daniel Pipes, Sidney Zion, Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz, and Nobel peace prize laureate Elie Wiesel, speaks volumes about the American commissar culture. After the book went through several printings and was exposed as an utter fraud in Britain, it finally prompted Anthony Lewis to write a column for The New York Times aptly entitled "There Were No Indians." Perhaps the most illuminating part of the book is Chapter 4 entitled "Settlement, Not Conquest." Finkelstein's dissection of how the historical rhetoric and justifications for conquest are strikingly similar -- "from the British in North America to the Dutch in South Africa, from the Nazis in Eastern Europe, to the Zionists in Palestine" -- is both enlightening and comical. Finally, it is noteworthy to mention Finkelstein's poignant observation for those of us who want to see justice done to the Palestinians and to all people who are suffering as a direct result of America's diplomatic and military support to the darkest and most oppressive regimes around the globe: "The plea of 'not knowing' cannot in good faith be entered at history's bar. Those who want to know can know the truth; at all events, enough of it to draw the just conclusions." To buttress his point, he quotes Albert Speer's mea culpa at Nuremberg: "Whether I knew or did not know, or how much or little I knew, is totally unimportant when I consider the horrors I OUGHT to have known about and what conclusions would have been natural ones to draw from the little I did know . . ." Thus, Finkelstein concludes: "Indeed, the [ordinary] Germans could point in extenuation to the severity of penalties for speaking out against the crimes of state. What excuse do we have?" Perhaps, we may want to do some genuine soul-searching as we ponder that question.

Exception - Lucid, hard-hitting. An essential read
This book is a meticulous exposition of the multitude of propaganda theories that have been peddled as truth, and are now accepted as the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is concise and very well researched. An essential read for anyone who is interested in the history of this conflict.

Its point of view is nothing but respect for the truth
Somebody, I forget exactly who, pointed out that Norman Finkelstein's books about the Arab-Israeli conflict are not actually works of Middle Eastern history but books about American history. This is essentially true, in that Finkelstein does not write narrative history or even critical history; he is essentially a scholarly critic of American opinion on the conflict, and the general tendency of his work is to point out the gap between what American writers have tended to say about the conflict and what the historical record actually shows. So, the meat of this book is his relentless, meticulous and devastating demolition job on Joan Peters' book "From Time Immemorial", a work that no professional historian is now willing to cite but which still has a loyal and uncritical readership out there among people who think that the Israeli government can do no wrong.

It can be seen, therefore, that criticising Finkelstein for having an "agenda" is beside the point. It's never very to the point anyway, since everybody who writes a book about anything whatever has an agenda, in that they have something that they want to say about the subject. Finkelstein's agenda is simply open for anyone to see. This book also contains his relatively brief and offhand dismissal of Michael Oren's "Six Days of June", which is interesting partly because that book is often cited as an "objective" history of the Six Day War, and Finkelstein doesn't find it difficult to prove that it is nothing of the sort, being heavily biased in favour of the Israeli side.

He performs an essential public service, and has been vilified and slandered for doing so. Finkelstein remains one of those fiercely independent thinkers who are the backbone of any secular culture; when there are no more guys like him, who are prepared to insist on telling the plain truth no matter how much it costs to him personally (and it has cost him a great deal, in terms of advancement in his actual career as an academic), then you live in a society where there are no effectively more public intellectuals, merely timeservers and lickspittles. My own country, Ireland, has reached that condition.