Norman
Finkelstein vs. Gil Troy
On Jimmy Carter's Controversial Book
"Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid"
Written by Normal Finkestein and Gil Troy, Democracy Now!
Tuesday, 09 January 2007
Controversy continues over Jimmy
Carter's recent book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." In it, the former US
President criticizes Israel for what he calls the "continued control and
colonization of Palestinian land." Carter faults Israeli settlement expansion
for the failure of the peace process and is also highly critical of the US role
in the Middle East, particularly its history of using veto power on the UN
security council to block more than 40 UN resolutions critical of Israel. Carter
spoke about the book in Washington DC last November:
On Sunday, the New York Times published
a long-awaited and largely critical review of the book written by Times Deputy
Foreign Editor Ethan Bronner. Bronner dismissed charges of anti-semitism but he
characterized the book as "a distortion," and criticized what he called its
"narrow perspective."
The book has seen growing media
attention which began even before its publication in late November. Leading
Democrats quickly distanced themselves from the book and it was immediately
condemned by Jewish leaders and organizations around the country. Long-time
Carter Center Fellow Kenneth Stein resigned his position in protest of the book.
In a letter addressed to Carter and distributed to the media, he accused Carter
of omission, factual errors, and plagiarism.
Today - a debate on the book with two
leading scholars:
Gil Troy,
professor of American history at McGill University and author of several
books including "Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity, and the
Challenges of Today."
Norman Finkelstein,
professor of Political science at DePaul University in Chicago. His latest
book is "Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of
History." His latest article is titled
"The Ludicrous Attacks on Jimmy Carter's Book"
is posted on Counterpunch.org.
AMY GOODMAN: This is an
excerpt of President Carter speaking about his book in Washington, D.C. in
December.
JIMMY CARTER: Some
people have said the title is provocative, and I accept that categorization,
but I don't consider the word "provocative" to be a negative description,
because it's designed to provoke discussion and analysis and debate in a
country where debate and discussion is almost completely absent if it
involves any criticism at all of the policies of Israel. And I think the
book is very balanced.
Secondly, the words “Palestine:
Peace Not Apartheid” were carefully chosen by me. First of all, it's
Palestine, the area of Palestinians. It doesn't refer to Israel. I’ve never
and would imply that Israel is guilty of any form of apartheid in their own
country, because Arabs who live inside Israel have the same voting rights
and the same citizenship rights as do the Jews who live there.
And the next word is “peace.” And my
hope is that the publication of this book will not only precipitate debate,
as I’ve already mentioned, but also will rejuvenate an absolutely dormant or
absent peace process. For the last six years there's not been one single day
of good faith negotiations between Israelis and their neighbors, the
Palestinians. And this is absolutely a departure from what has happened
under all previous presidents since Israel became a nation. We’ve all
negotiated or attempted to negotiate peace agreements. That has been totally
absent now for six years. So “peace.”
And then the last two words, “not
apartheid.” The alternative to peace is apartheid, not inside Israel, to
repeat myself, but in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, the
Palestinian territory. And there, apartheid exists in its more despicable
forms, that Palestinians are deprived of basic human rights. Their land has
been occupied and then confiscated and then colonized by the Israeli
settlers. And they have now more than 205 settlements in the West Bank
itself. And what has happened is, over a period of years, the Israelis have
connected settlements with highways, and those highways make the West Bank
look like a honeycomb and maybe a spider web. You can envision it. And in
many cases, most cases, the Palestinians are prevented from using the
highways at all, and in many cases, even from crossing the highways.
AMY GOODMAN: Former
President Jimmy Carter speaking last month in Washington, D.C. On Sunday, the
New York Times published a long-awaited and largely critical review of
the book, written by New York Times Deputy Foreign Editor Ethan Bronner.
Bronner dismissed charges of anti-Semitism, but he characterized the book as "a
distortion," and criticized what he called its "narrow perspective."
The book has seen growing media
attention, which began even before its publication in early December. Leading
Democrats quickly distanced themselves from Carter’s book. It was immediately
condemned by Jewish leaders and organizations around the country. Longtime
Carter Center Fellow, Kenneth Stein, resigned his position in protest of the
book. In a letter addressed to Carter and distributed to the media, Stein
accused Carter of omission, factual errors, and plagiarism.
Today, we'll have a debate on the book.
Joining us from Montreal is Gil Troy. He’s a professor of American history at
McGill University and author of Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity,
and the Challenges of Today. Norman Finkelstein is here with me in our
firehouse studio. He's professor of political science at DePaul University. His
latest book is called Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and
the Abuse of History. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!
Let's begin with Professor Troy. Your
response to President Carter's book?
GIL TROY: He calls his
title “provocative.” I call it offensive. It’s offensive to South Africans,
because to use the word “apartheid,” which is about white supremacy and a
systematic approach of discrimination and racism, demeans the very difficult
struggle and the odious examples of South African oppression.
It's also offensive to Zionists and to
Jews and to anyone who supports the state of Israeli, because, while in his
remarks that we heard, Jimmy Carter makes a distinction between what goes on
inside Israel and in the territories, he did not do that in his book, which is
actually quite shoddy and quite erratic.
And I think, you know, it’s also a
disservice to the people of the world and good people who want peace, because if
you want to truly be a mediator, try to find the complexity, try to show the
complexity on both sides, the failures of both sides, rather than having this
one-sided approach, which basically throws water on any hopes for peace. It
actually throws gasoline on the fires in the Middle East.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor
Finkelstein?
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN:
Well, the question, it seems to me, is whether or not the term “apartheid” is
appropriate in this context. I'm not going to -- for the moment, I’m not going
to make an argument either way. The question I would raise is, if the term is,
as it’s often been said recently, if the term is anti-Semitic or contrary to the
interests of Jews, however you want to put it, how do you account for the fact
that so many mainstream figures and organizations in Israeli life themselves use
the term apartheid to characterize the Israeli occupation in the West Bank of
Gaza?
You take the case of B’Tselem, the
Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. In May
2002, they put out a report entitled "Land Grab." It’s a substantial report.
It’s not throwing around slogans and terms. The report’s about 150 pages, based
on quite in-depth research. They conclude in their report that Israel has
established a regime in the Occupied Territories, which is, as they put it,
reminiscent of the South African apartheid regime. This past year, B’Tselem put
out another report entitled "Forbidden Roads," on what they call the “Road
Regime” in the Occupied Territories. Again, they concluded that this is
reminiscent of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
You take the case of Ha’aretz,
Israel's leading newspaper, or most influential newspaper. And in their
editorials, they routinely refer to the apartheid-like regime in the Occupied
Territories.
So, for the moment, I would like to
focus on the question: why is it illegitimate to use the term? Why is it
anti-Semitic to use the term here, whereas in Israel just yesterday, Shulamit
Aloni, the former Cabinet Minister for Education under Rabin, she says,
“Everybody here knows it's apartheid,” so why is it illegitimate for a former
American president to use a term which is a commonplace? I'm not saying everyone
agrees it's apartheid in Israel, but it's certainly part of the mainstream
discourse. Why are you in the United States disqualified from participating in
what in Israel is part of the mainstream discourse?
AMY GOODMAN: Professor
Troy?
GIL TROY: First of all,
I didn't accuse the former president of anti-Semitism. I didn't accuse him of
not having the qualifications to jump into the debate. I think the term is
historically offensive and inaccurate. I said it’s offensive to South Africans.
I said it’s offensive to people who want peace in the Middle East. Just because
there are many Israeli leftists and many Israeli critics of Israeli policy who
use the term doesn't mean that it’s a legitimate term. As a historian, I can say
it’s a false historical analogy.
What I learn from that is that in the
United States and in Israel, unlike the country that Jimmy Carter pretends to
live in, there is a vigorous debate on the Israeli side, there is a vigorous
debate on the American side, there isn’t a vigorous debate on the Palestinian
side, which doesn't have the same kind of political culture. It actually has a
toxic political culture, where right now we've seen over 500 Palestinians
killing each other in an internecine civil war.
So, I'd like to focus on the question
that has been sidestepped of, is it an accurate and is it a helpful term, and I
say it's not, because let’s look at what apartheid was. Apartheid was a regime
started in the South Africans in the 1940s as an attempt -- and it started
actually with a kind of sexual revulsion on the part of whites against blacks to
truly degrade blacks. And the community of nations -- it took them decades, but
the community of nations justifiably said this is so odious that we want to kind
of vomit out -- and I use the term advisedly -- vomit out South Africa from the
community of nations, because they're so despicable.
When Israelis use the term, they're
being provocative, and they’re being incendiary, they’re being inaccurate. When
the former president of the United States and Nobel Peace Prize winner uses the
term, it’s even more destructive, because what he's doing is he’s giving it a
kind of legitimacy to a Zionist movement, which has already been libeled as
being racist, and it feeds -- and I see it on campus, where there’s quite a
vigorous criticism of Israel every day. They use the term “Israel apartheid.”
And they don’t distinguish between the Territories and Israel. They look at it
as an illegitimate country. And Jimmy Carter, who has shown a capacity for
friendship of all kinds of dictators, from North Korea to China to Cuba, all of
the sudden seems to have quite a harsh perspective when it comes to Israel, and
I wonder why.
AMY GOODMAN: Norman
Finkelstein?
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I
agree that we shouldn't fixate on terms. We should look beneath the terms and
see whether they accurately represent the reality. And that’s what I think those
who have used that term have tried to do. So you take the case of B’Tselem. It
publishes a report, and it says Israel has constructed in the Occupied
Territories what it calls a “Road Regime,” with roads for Jews only. They go on
to say that Israel is --
AMY GOODMAN: Explain
that. What do you mean exactly?
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN:
Well, there are roads which connect the settlements in the Occupied Territories
with Israel. And those roads -- there's various kinds of laws and various
degrees -- it's a complex system. Those laws effectively mean that Jews are the
only ones who are allowed to use these roads connecting the Occupied Territories
to Israel, and Palestinians have to take these circuitous routes in order to get
from one part of the Occupied Territories to another.
In 2002, the B’Tselem report points to
the fact that the kinds of settlements and the kinds of laws in the Occupied
Territories resemble the apartheid system, in that there’s a different system of
laws for Palestinians, and there’s a different system of laws for Israelis.
So, it's not so important, in my
opinion, to fixate on the term. I agree, it can become sloganeering. But we
should look at the policies. We should look at what's going on.
Jimmy Carter has, in my opinion, a
compelling section of the book -- it’s chapter 16 -- which I would encourage
your listeners to look at, where it’s entitled “The Wall as a Prison.” And in
chapter 16 he goes through the wall that Israel is building in the Occupied
Territories. And I want to emphasize, because there's so much misinformation on
this topic in the United States. I suspect that Professor Troy is going to
immediately jump in and say it's not a wall, just as Ethan Bronner, the Deputy
Foreign Editor of the New York Times, notes parenthetically that the
edifice that Israel is building is only 4% a wall.
Well, these issues have been resolved
legally. The International Court of Justice in July 2004, when it adjudicated
the question of the wall that Israel is building in the Occupied Territories, at
the very beginning it says there has been some dispute about the language used.
Should we call it a fence? Should we call it a barrier? Should we call it a
wall? And the International Court of Justice, going through all the
possibilities exploring the linguistic resonances of all the terms, it concludes
we should call it a “wall.”
When Jimmy Carter uses that term, he is
using the term which has been agreed to by consensus in the International Court
of Justice. And I should add that Human Rights Watch, a mainstream human rights
organization, in its publications and in accordance with international law and
the International Court of Justice, uses the term “wall.”
And Jimmy Carter says what's happening
in the Occupied Territories is Israel’s confiscating about 10% of Palestinian
land inside the wall, and he says -- I thought it was a compelling point -- he
says Israel will not only control all the Palestinians within the wall, but
Israel has de facto also annexed the Jordan Valley, which means all the
Palestinians between the Jordan Valley and the wall will also be controlled by
Israel. They are creating -- and Jimmy Carter, I think, with a certain amount of
candor, he said, “I don't think it should be called a ‘separation fence.’ I
think it should be called an ‘imprisonment wall.’” I think that's accurate.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor
Troy?
GIL TROY: I would
actually have less of a problem if he called it an “imprisonment wall.” We could
debate “wall” or “fence,” but that actually is not my point. The reason why
“apartheid” is so problematic is because it feeds a broad campaign to
de-legitimize Israel to expel it from the United Nations, to make it an outlaw
state, when it's a democracy, and a flawed democracy, like America’s a flawed
democracy, like all countries are flawed.
I'm not going to focus on the question
of “wall” versus “fence.” I'm going to use the T-word: terrorism. It's not as
if, unlike in South Africa, Israel one day woke up and said, “Boy, how can we
torture the Palestinians?” Although if you read Jimmy Carter’s book, you would
get that impression, because he doesn’t give a full and honest and balanced
accounting of the Israeli side of the ledger.
What happened was that there was this
Oslo peace process, which he also tends to give short shrift to, and as a result
of that Oslo peace process, there was a very generous Israeli offer made at Camp
David, which Jimmy Carter also tends to skip over. And then, in September 2000,
the Palestinians launched an approach with lots of terrorism. Yasser Arafat --
and there’s proof that Yasser Arafat helped underwrite the terrorism, although
Jimmy Carter ignores that in the book, because he was good friends with Yasser
Arafat. And the terrorism was the issue.
Both the Israeli left and the Israeli
right initially hated the idea of any kind of wall-fence-barrier, because the
Israeli right wanted to incorporate the Territories into Israel. The Israeli
left wanted to have this vision of everyone living together in what I would love
to see, in beautiful peace and harmony. Both of them had to kind of be forced by
serious suicide bombings by a systematic terrorist campaign, by a political
culture on the part of the Palestinians that was anti-Semitic -- that is
anti-Semitic, not Jimmy Carter -- that in the Palestinian mosques and on
Palestinian television was attacking not just Zionists, but Jews, and attacking
the West and celebrating 9/11 and was part of a broader Islamicist surge against
the United States, against Israel, against the West, that led to hundreds of
deaths of children, of men, of women.
That is the context in which the
wall-fence-barrier was built, and that is the context in which these last couple
of years, this six years of a lack of peace process, has occurred. And without
of acknowledgement of that, Jimmy Carter at one point says there are two
problems in the Middle East: the first is that some Israelis want to grab land,
and second is that some Palestinians react to that with violence. And that’s
very disingenuous.
The problem -- let's have someone stand
up and say it's a messy situation. There are rights and wrongs on both sides. I
would have been so much happier with the book if he had said the problem is,
yes, some Israelis want Palestinian land, and there's a complicated historical,
legal, strategic debate over that, and two, there are Palestinians who want to
destroy the Jewish state. How do we get out of that intention? Until we
acknowledge the problems on both sides, the weaknesses on both sides, the
failures on both sides, we're not going to get to the peace that Jimmy Carter
claims to achieve. And I think what he’s done is he's undermined his status as a
mediator, as an honest broker, by using this incendiary term and by coming out
with a book, which, frankly, is shoddy. He tends to quote Arafat, rather than
quoting Palestinian Hamas documents. He quotes Assad, the president of Syria,
allowing him to kind of give a spin on events, rather than giving facts. And
that's the problem with this propagandistic work.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Gil
Troy and Norman Finkelstein, we're going to come back to this debate on Jimmy
Carter's book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We're
having a debate on Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,
with Gil Troy, professor of American history at McGill University in Montreal.
Among his books, Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity, and the
Challenges of Today. Norman Finkelstein joins us here in our New York
firehouse studio. He’s a professor of political science at DePaul University in
Chicago. His latest book is Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism
and the Abuse of History.
In Ethan Bronner’s review, long awaited,
that came out yesterday in the New York Times Book Review, he says,
“This book has something of a Rip van Winkle feel to it, as if little had
changed since Carter diagnosed the problem in the 1970s. All would be well
today, he suggests, if his advice then had been followed. Forget Al Qaeda (the
name does not appear in this book), the nuclear ambitions of Iran and the rise
of the Taliban in Afghanistan. If Israel had ‘refrained from colonizing the West
Bank,’ he asserts, there would have been ‘a comprehensive and lasting peace.’”
Bronner is talking about Carter, of course. And he goes on to say, “The debate
about the Israeli occupation ‘will shape the future of Israel; it may also
determine the prospects for peace in the Middle East — and perhaps the world,’”
quoting Jimmy Carter. And Bronner says, “This is an awfully narrow perspective.”
Before I get your response, Professor
Finkelstein, I wanted to go for a minute to Brent Scowcroft. He was speaking
yesterday on This Week With George Stephanopoulos." Stephanopoulos had
asked him about the significance of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Of course,
Brent Scowcroft is the former National Security Advisor for President Bush, Sr.
BRENT SCOWCROFT:
What it would do is change the psychological climate of the region. What we
have is a number of different issues all coming together. And the region is
in great turmoil. And there's a great sense in the region of historical
injustice on the part of the Muslims. And this would change that. This would
see us as participating and helping in a problem which is central to the
region, which has been a gnawing sore for Muslims for 50 years.
AMY GOODMAN: That was
President Bush, Sr.'s former National Security Advisor, Lieutenant General Brent
Scowcroft. Professor Finkelstein?
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN:
I'll get to that point in half a moment. Let me just address the questions that
were raised by Professor Troy. On the question of Camp David and the offer, I
don't think for Democracy Now! audiences we have to go over that ground, because
when Shlomo Ben-Ami was here --
AMY GOODMAN: The former
Foreign Minister of Israel.
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: The
former Foreign Minister of Israel and one of the negotiators at Camp David. He
said, “Frankly, were I a Palestinian, I would not have accepted the offer at
Camp David,” and exactly for the reasons that Carter outlines in the book,
namely, Palestinians were asked to make such monumental concessions that no
Palestinian leader could in good conscience, let alone as a representative of
the Palestinians, accept such an offer. That was the position of Arafat. It's
also the position to which Shlomo Ben-Ami agreed.
On the question of terrorism, as
Professor Troy calls it, the big “T-word,” I think there's a certain confusion
about what was the sequence of events. The Second Intifada begins September 28,
2000. Between September 28, 2000, and March 2003 [sic - 2001], there wasn’t one
Palestinian terrorist attack. The suicide bombings began five months after the
beginning of the Second Intifada. Why did it begin? Well, on the first month of
the Intifada, the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed was 20-to-1. And if
you read Shlomo Ben-Ami’s book, he states there that had Israel not so
overreacted to the Palestinian protests, which were overwhelmingly nonviolent in
the first months, the huge explosion that subsequently occurred probably would
not have happened. But those first five months, when Israel was killing 20 times
as many Palestinians, overwhelmingly nonviolent protesters, to each Israeli
killed, that part has been completely effaced from the historical record.
Now, it's true suicide bombings began,
and one possible way to avert them -- not the only one, but one possibility --
was to build a wall. Well, but there's an option. If you want to prevent suicide
bombings against your country, just like if you want to prevent a neighbor from
intruding on your property, you build a fence or a wall, but you build it along
the border, the internationally recognized border. Israel didn't do that. It
used the suicide bombings as a pretext to confiscate 10% of Palestinian land. If
they wanted to build a wall on their border, the International Court said that's
not a problem. What they said was -- the International Court of Justice, when it
condemned the wall, it said this wall is taking a sinuous path, which is
incorporating the Israeli settlements. That's what made the wall illegal.
Now, Professor Troy says he would prefer
if coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict by Carter and others would assign
responsibility to both sides. But the problem is, if you look at the
international consensus for resolving the conflict, the burden of responsibility
for the failure to resolve the conflict falls on the side of Israel and the
United States. Carter is very clear on that -- in my opinion, entirely accurate.
He says the main problem is Israel refuses to recognize international law. The
law is absolutely clear. It’s inadmissible to acquire territory by war. Israel
acquired the West Bank and Gaza in the course of the 1967 War. The International
Court of Justice said, under the UN Charter, Article 2, it's inadmissible to
acquire territory by war. Israel has to withdraw to its internationally
recognized June ’67 borders. It refuses. That's the obstacle.
A simple illustration. Every year, the
United Nations General Assembly votes on a resolution entitled “Peaceful
resolution of the Palestine conflict.” Every year, the vote is the same. The
whole world on one side -- the whole world on one side -- and on the other side,
the United States, Israel, and usually Palau, Nauru, Tuvalu, the Marshall
Islands and Micronesia. It’s usually six dissenting votes. And that's it. The
problem, I think, is not that the world is -- not that the coverage is biased.
The problem is, the reality is biased.
I was reading a book today, to get to
your last point you mention, by Zeev Maoz, a mainstream Israeli military
historian, smart fellow, and it’s a good book and called Defending the Holy
State. He says in a hundred years from now people are going to be very perplexed
by this conflict, because, he says, compared to other conflicts, this is not a
particularly complicated one. And it really isn't. There has been a resolution,
a settlement on the table for 30 years. And Israel and the United States have
blocked it. That's the problem. And Carter, to his credit, forthrightly says it.
One side is blocking the settlement.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted
to get back to Professor Troy. Israel has announced that it's going to now build
new settlements in the West Bank. Do you think peace is possible with continued
settlements there?
GIL TROY: I think peace
is possible with a recognition of the pain on both sides and with serious
attempts at compromise. We historians like to say that what's your favorite text
-- context, to claim, for example, that suicide bombings started in 2003, when
they actually started by Hamas and others during the Oslo peace process in the
1990s. There were suicide bombings in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem. It's a much
more complicated story.
You know, when I look at all conflicts
in history, it's so easy to caricature. It’s so easy to say, oh, the Israelis
are the bad guys. And to rely on the United Nations as an honest broker in this
is highly problematic, given that it is the same United Nations that has been so
biased against Israel they had a big attempt to revitalize its ugly “Zionism is
racism” slur from the 1970s in the early 2000 period.
So I’d rather say this. Israel has tried
-- you know, it's a complicated situation. Israel and the Palestinians are in
many ways intertwined with each other. There's an intimacy between many Israelis
and Palestinians that we don't see when we sit here in television studios and
debate what's going on. And there's also, obviously, a lot of hatred. There’s
extremism on the Palestinian side. There’s, as I said, a political culture which
is highly problematic and truly vicious and ugly, where they kill each other, as
well as Jews, and celebrate those deaths.
So, how do you break out of that? Israel
has tried. Israel tried with the Oslo peace process, for all it’s flawed. And
that, by the way -- to go to General Scowcroft’s point, in the 1990s, Bill
Clinton was spending a lot of time -- Yasser Arafat was supposedly the most
welcomed foreign guest, the foreign guest who had the most visits to the Clinton
White House. America put tremendous prestige on the line to try to get this
so-called simple solution. And it fell apart. It fell apart because of failures
on both sides. Let’s acknowledge that, rather than saying one side is the bad
guy, one side is the good guy.
And to claim -- and that, of course,
during the 1990s, was the period that al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were issuing
their fatwas, not so much about Jews and Palestinians and Zionists and Israel,
but about American troops in Saudi Arabia and about this broader desire to undo
the great historical crime of Spain getting rid of the Muslims 500 years ago. I
mean, there are more complicated and bigger issues going on. And to reduce
everything, as Jimmy Carter does, to reduce everything, as part of this
conversation is doing, to this unidimensional perspective that if Israelis stop
building settlements, then, you know, somehow peace would reign in the land and
peace would reign in the world, it's just not true.
Israel tried, let’s say, in Gaza in 2005
with its disengagement, by pulling back. This was an opportunity for the
Palestinians. This was a test for the Palestinians. I’ve been to Gaza, and I’ve
seen the beautiful beachfronts they have, and obviously there are a lot of
problems in Gaza. There was no attempt at development. American Jewish
philanthropists raised $14 million to buy out Israeli agricultural initiatives
and pass it over to the Palestinians. Those farms were trashed. There were
attempts. There have been attempts. Israelis don't trust. They don’t trust
because the United Nations gangs up on them. They don't trust because the
International Court passes its decision on the fence-wall-barrier, without
talking about terrorism. There’s a feeling it’s not balanced.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor
Troy, we only have two minutes, and I wanted to ask each of you the issue of
having this debate at all in this country. President Carter was invited to speak
at Brandeis University. Then the invitation was withdrawn, unless he agreed to
have a debate with Alan Dershowitz. Your book, Beyond Chutzpah, Professor
Finkelstein, is also very much about what Dershowitz has to say about Israel in
his book, The Case for Peace. Your response on this issue?
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I
think that’s an important question, maybe the most important: how to normalize
debate in the United States about this topic. I don't mean that everybody has to
agree with me. The question is, how do you open up a forum so people can
exchange reviews on the topic? I'll quickly give you three examples or a couple
of examples.
AMY GOODMAN: We have
one minute.
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN:
Take the example, a couple of weeks ago, Anderson Cooper's producer called me,
said they wanted to do a segment on me, having to do with the Middle East,
because he was in the Arab world. I said, “Don't waste your time. It's never
going to get on the air. I know how it works.” They said, “No, no. We're sending
down a camera crew.” They sent down a camera crew, sent down the producer,
interviewed me for two-and-a-half hours, from 10:00 a.m. to 12:30. I said, “It's
never going to get on. I know.” Well, she said, “No, no, no. We invested the
money.” Long story short, it was killed. It was supposed to be on that night.
Take the case of Carter. OK, a serious
debate. But why is it Brandeis University has half a dozen -- half a dozen --
centers for the study of the Middle East, Arab-Israeli conflict, and so forth --
Jehuda Reinharz himself is a historian on Zionism. I’ve read his biography of
Weizmann. Why is it, of all the qualified people they could have drawn on to
debate Jimmy Carter, they bring a clown from Harvard? It's just not serious.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor
Troy, ten seconds on the issue of a debate.
GIL TROY: Both sides
feel that they're not being heard. That means that actually both sides are, to a
certain extent, being heard.
AMY GOODMAN:
We're going to have to leave it there, but I encourage people to email us at
mail@democracynow.org to
talk about your thoughts and what you would like to see pursued. Professor
Finkelstein of DePaul University, his book is called Beyond Chutzpah; Professor
Gil Troy of American history at McGill University in Montreal, thank you for
joining us. His book is called Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity, and
the Challenges of Today.