Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [84]
“This is the first time the human-rights dimension of the Israel-Palestine conflict has moved center stage,” Finkelstein noted: It has temporarily displaced the fatuous peace process. It is the first time that human-rights reports have counted. There are literally, because I have read them, tens if not hundreds of thousands of pages of accumulation of human rights reports condemning Israel going back roughly to the first intifada [a Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule, 1987-1993] to the present. The human-rights organizations since the 1990s have been quite sharp in their criticism of Israel human-rights policy, but nobody ever reads the reports. They are never reported on, with maybe a couple of exceptions, in the mainstream media. The Goldstone report was the first time the findings of these human-rights organizations moved center stage. People stopped talking about the peace process and started talking about Israel’s human-rights record.
Finkelstein was cut off by the liberal class from the start of his career as an academic. He studied a 1984 book by Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial. The book was widely praised by Jewish intellectuals such as Barbara Tuchman, Saul Bellow, and Martin Peretz. But Finkelstein’s research showed that it was a hoax. From Time Immemorial made the mendacious claim that the land of Palestine was largely unpopulated when Jewish settlers arrived. Finkelstein’s research discredited a legal document, central to Peters’s book, which denied Palestinians rights to the land in Palestine. He soon found himself at war with the powerful Israeli lobby. But he refused to back down, continuing his scholarship, which demolished myths surrounding Israel and exposed Israel’s political and financial exploitation of the Nazi Holocaust. This work swiftly turned him into a pariah. He was pushed out of numerous universities, including New York University, Hunter College, and DePaul University in Chicago, although his review committee at DePaul had recommended him for tenure.
He has spent most of his academic career as an adjunct professor earning $15,000 to $18,000 annually. Yet his work, including Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, published in 1995, is one of the finest and most important by any scholar on Israeli relations with the Palestinians. His writing is driven by a relentless search for truth and his compassion for the Palestinians and their suffering. This compassion, he often says, comes from his experience as the son of Holocaust survivors. In the suffering of the Palestinians, he saw the suffering his mother and father endured in the Warsaw ghetto and later the Nazi death camps. Unlike many of his critics, Finkelstein understands the lessons of the Holocaust, and of war. He has applied them to the fight against the abuse and suffering of others, even if this abuse is being carried out by Israel.
Liberals are expected by the power elite to police their own. The Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz plays this role. He has used his position to mount campaigns against liberal dissidents such as Finkelstein and Middle East studies departments in universities such as Columbia. The use of prominent liberals to do the dirty work of the power elite is an old and effective tactic. In the late 1940s into the 1950s, the philosopher Sidney Hook, a former Trotskyist, enthusiastically supported the purging of communists from their posts in universities to avoid “playing into the hands of native reaction which would like to wipe out all liberal dissent.” Hook, who argued that leftists, communists, radicals, and those he termed “ritualist liberals” endanger freedom, understood that the power elite would only accept criticism that did not defy corporate structures and ideologies. It would never permit radical critics to achieve positions of prominence within liberal institutions. He feared that unless the liberal class acted as enforcers of proper doctrine it would collide with the power