Finkelstein’s doctoral thesis debunked a very influential forgery called “From Time Immemorial,” which fabricated data to show there were hardly any Palestinians in Palestine during the nineteenth century. Whatever your stance on the issue is, fabrications like that can be dangerously misleading, and Finkelstein exposed how the data was twisted, footnote after footnote. He wrote excellent rebuttals of some of Benny Morris’ more reactionary claims, showing how they were undermined by Morris’ own historical research. He has taken brave stances against many forms of injustice, and paid a high price.

(I want to note in parenthesis that while he does frequently mention that both his parents were Holocaust survivors, and does accept the validity of conventional histories of this event, there are some extremely irresponsible passages in his book on the “Holocaust Industry” which undermine survivors’ testimonies. But that deserves a separate discussion).

Recently Finkelstein has taken what many see as a disappointing stance regarding the right of return: citing his own experience after he was prevented from teaching in his academic institution, he advises Palestinians to “move on” and make more realistic demands:

“People get offended when I make the analogy – I’m going to make it tonight – I wish people would understand the point I’m making. I knew I had a right to return to DePaul. I knew I had that right, and I knew if I went to court for ten years, I would win. But then I have to make a judgment: Do I want to draw this out for ten years, or am I going to go for a settlement that’s going to give me less than my right to return, but it will give me something? And then I made my choice. I think it’s basically the same for the Palestinians. Do they have a legal right? Yes. But is it worth fighting this out through eternity, or do you cut your losses and move on?”

Feminism is the radical idea that women are people too. The right of return is the radical idea that if you’re born in a place, you get to live there – even if you’re an Arab! – and that you and your children are therefore not immigrants, but natives. Why would someone like Finkelstein be confusing people like that? Expecting people to give up their connection to their places of origin is no more “pragmatic” than telling women to settle for an inferior status in society.

Regardless of his personal quirks, what I think is going on here is something I’ve noticed among many Jews in the pro-Palestine movement, including myself. Even if we declare ourselves to be progressive, we still carry a lot of fear. There are ‘traditional’ Jewish fears of being a persecuted minority. There is the unavoidable nightmare of a new Holocaust, which we constantly project onto Arabs and Muslims. There are periods in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where we or our relatives experienced physical threat, such as the suicide bombings of the second Intifada. And of course there are the never-ending manipulated fears that Israeli leaders drum up to gain more votes, or more support for their latest expansionist policy.

What I’ve noticed is that a way a lot of us deal with these fears is by giving Palestinians advice: if only they play nice, sound less angry, tone down their demands, and generally be reasonable, we and people we know will be calm enough to accept them. Now, clearly our Palestinian allies can sometimes be wrong, and we do get to disagree with them if we are to be a real part of this movement. But I think the ubiquity of this tendency to advise goes beyond that. Finkelstein should have known better than to tell Palestinians to compromise on this very personal right: I think the real reason was his fear.

The right of return, if implemented fully, will involve a huge upheaval. It is understandable that people would be afraid to take such a step. As allies, it is our responsibility to work through these fears and not allow them to prevent Palestinians from living in their own home. Anyone born in Jerusalem has the right to live there, whatever religion or ethnicity they belong to – this much should be obvious. Anyone whose family has lived in Yaffa/Jaffa for centuries belongs there, not in exile. Israel should be welcoming back its Palestinian inhabitants, instead of constantly devising tricks to keep them out.

None of this has to come at the expense of the true legitimate rights of Israelis like me. As Edward Said explained, in a very inspiring essay:

“What we never concentrated on enough was the fact that to counteract Zionist exclusivism, we would have to provide a solution to the conflict that, in Mandela’s […] phrase, would assert our common humanity as Jews and Arabs. Most of us still cannot accept the idea that Israeli Jews are here to stay, that they will not go away, any more than Palestinians will go away. This is understandably very hard for Palestinians to accept, since they are still in the process of losing their land and being persecuted on a daily basis. But, with our irresponsible and unreflective suggestion in what we have said that they will be forced to leave (like the Crusades), we did not focus enough on ending the military occupation as a moral imperative or on providing a form for their security and self-determinism that did not abrogate ours. This, and not the preposterous hope that a volatile American president would give us a state, ought to have been the basis of a mass campaign everywhere. Two people in one land. Or, equality for all. Or, one person one vote. Or, a common humanity asserted in a binational state.”

This may not happen anytime soon. But if you are interested in being a good ally to Palestinians right now, it helps to think about this, because your fears can get in the way of providing good support, or of simply getting close to people. In the end, this isn’t only about politics – it’s about friendship: I think of the right of return as having my best Palestinian friends as neighbors in Israel too, for them to be around me whenever I miss them.

Dedicated to my comrades in Students for Justice in Palestine

I should have taken your email! People were all around us at the rally, shouting and singing, I really wanted to talk to someone but I didn’t notice how well you were listening, how you had patience to talk to me and read the flyer I was distributing. You had a red beard and skullcap, and a blue shirt with “Israeli Peace” on it. I wore the black shirt of Students for Justice in Palestine.

You read my flyer and asked me, “where it says in 1967 Israel occupied more territories populated by Palestinians, what do you mean by ‘more’? Are you saying Israel of 1948 was also conquered”?

I know what you are really asking: do “we people” recognize “your” right to exist, or… you know, want to throw you into the sea?

Dude, I’m an Israeli Jew, just like you! I don’t want to throw any Israelis into the sea, honestly. I’m a horrible swimmer and I have asthma, so although the sea in Tel Aviv is warmer than around here, I’d rather just look at the waves, maybe dip in my toes once in a while. Besides, the sea gets polluted: throwing people in could be dangerous!

But because I am Israeli, I know where you’re coming from. This question is one of our formulas, isn’t it? The ones we use when people tell us they were displaced in 1948, and we get really scared. You know them all by heart, don’t you? “These things happen in wars”; “If they had won they would have done the same”; “If they hadn’t rejected the partition plan in 1947, it wouldn’t have happened”; “the Arab states should have done more for them”, etc., etc.

I’ve tried not using those formulas and just listening to Palestinians telling me the place they are from, the place they can’t return to. I’ve tried looking at them straight in the eye when they say it, without responding. I feel so nervous it makes me sick in the stomach. I cringe. I feel like I’m going to explode.

Because when I look them in the eye, it stops being “us and “them”. For one moment, I wonder what if I was “them”. In Lydda, Yitzhak Rabin drove them out, firing shots above their heads; he tells the story in his memoirs. In Al-Majdal, which is Ashkelon today, they were loaded onto trucks after the fighting ended, and dumped on the other side of the border. In Jaffa they really were driven into the sea, under bombardment. Children were lost in the waves as their families fled to Gaza in fishing boats (did you know that? It was we who threw them into the sea, not the other way round!).  And then we took all of their property and they stayed refugees, for sixty years. For sixty years!

Now they are here, and here are their children, looking at me, straight in the eye. Do you see why we are so scared?

But they are just looking at me, actually they are smiling. You may not believe me, but I get regularly hugged by Palestinians. Not everyone hates us, Aryeh (I think you said that was your name?). I have Palestinian friends: they cook for me; they laugh at my jokes; we gossip; they burn discs for me; we get all mushy and cheesy with each other.

Yeah, don’t tell me: maybe my friends are nice, but how can I generalize? What about all the suicide bombers, all those photos of little babies dressed with weapons, don’t “they” teach their children to hate us? And then I could quote you some surveys about attitudes to Israel and willingness to compromise, and there we go, straight back to cliché-land.

Let’s go another way, and look at that fear again. A lot of it has got to do with this Right of Return thing. What do you imagine when you think of it? For a long time I was too scared to even try to picture it, but when I did, the first image that came up was from the Westerns I watched as a kid: the Indians swarming down the hills, shrieking, shooting arrows or whatever weapon people use nowadays: The attack of the barbarians.

But maybe imagine something different: a plane landing in Ben-Gurion airport with some “new immigrants” from the refugee camps in Lebanon. This really pompous politician is out to greet them, smiling from ear to ear. The first refugee comes down the steps and shakes people’s hands. The politician uses some fancy clichés, welcoming them to their homeland. These cute kids, third graders, are standing in line, with huge bouquets of flowers, too big for them to hold, pointing at the refugees who just got off the plane, looking a bit dazed by the strong sunlight and the humidity. And then some representative from the Ministry of the Interior goes up and gets their details. She’ll be calling them tomorrow about arrangements, where to go to from the hostel, when they can learn Hebrew, she’ll give them the contact information of the organizations that have volunteered to help them. And welcome back home, by the way.

There, isn’t that a nicer image than the previous one? But you think I’m totally crazy, don’t you? Don’t I realize the implications? What about the demographic balance? What about the Jewish nature of the state? What about all we have built over the last sixty years? Don’t Jews need a safe haven? And our right for self-determination?

So the options you are giving me, Aryeh, are these: we could get to keep our right for self-determination, our safe haven, my favorite bookshop-cafe in Rabin square in Tel Aviv, the songs my mother likes to hear on the radio on the holidays, our wonderful Hebrew slang, our “dugri” directness and our weather (well, maybe not our weather, at least not in August). But then I need to look my Palestinian friends in the eye and tell them: no matter how much you miss your homeland, you are never going back. Not you, not your parents, not your children, not your grandchildren, nor your grandchildren’s grandchildren. We got to miss the Holy Land for two thousand years, but you’re not Jewish, so you will never ever be allowed to return.

Or, we could completely destroy Israel, raze everything to the ground. Bring bulldozers, knock down all the beautiful buildings of Tel Aviv University, the mounds of grass, the corner outside the Arts building where students and teachers smoke weed together, the little frame-shaped sculpture that overlooks the sea, the café outside the university with the hot Moroccan shakshuka, we can knock down all of these and turn the university back into Sheikh Muwwanis, and let the refugees live in the village that was there before.

And you’re saying these are the only two possibilities. Seriously? Is that the best we Jews can come up with? We, the People of the Book? With Einstein and all our Nobel prize winners? With our Ladino love songs and marvelous Yiddish curses? With all of our films, winning prizes at every festival? Our thousands of years of poetry, from the Song of Songs to Amichai and Yonah Volach? The agricultural innovations we export to the whole world? Are you seriously suggesting that these two miserable options are the best we can think of? Why, I find that almost offensive. Aren’t we a little bit smarter than that?

Do I have a solution? I do have some ideas, but what I really want is to get people talking. I want to hear Palestinians telling us what they miss most, where they would like to live, what they would want it to be like. And we could tell them what is important to us, what we have learned over the last sixty years. It’s like two flatmates about to move in together – where shall we put the couch? What time do you get up in the morning? Oh no! Do you snore? Don’t waste all of that hot water in the shower! Those are the conversations we need to be having.

Now you really think I’m nuts, don’t you? We could be talking millions of people here, it’s a huge upheaval, where will we put them all?

The short answer is – we’ve done it before. Every time a wave of Jewish immigrants came to Israel, people said it would never work, there would be no room, everyone will starve. But we managed, somehow. This is no different. In fact, we’re stronger and more experienced now.

And the longer answer is that the reason this seems unimaginable is simply because of our fear. That fear has deep roots: Jews and Israelis have definitely been attacked and hurt, time and time again. It’s through this fear that we tend to think we are dealing with some kind of virus that must be kept in isolation. But Palestinians are human beings, and they deserve to be treated that way. We really could try and do that for a change, instead of forcing them to the other side of the border, setting up walls and checkpoints and prisons, and pretending any of that is a solution.

To truly overcome fear, reading this letter won’t be enough. What you need to do is to hang out with some of my Palestinian friends, see them celebrating Hanukka and Passover with us, stuff grapeleaves with them, all of that mushiness I was referring to earlier. You have no idea how much fun it is: let me know when you’re coming. Trust me, you’ll enjoy it! Just give it a try.

The first school’s lessons usually involve the deployment of military force. A typical example is the Israeli Chief of Staff, who used the setting of Auschwitz to promote his government’s campaign to equate Iran and Nazi Germany, by falsely claiming the Iranians called for the physical destruction of the Israeli population.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/979478.html

(in fact, Ahmadinejad said he hoped the current Israeli regime would disappear, just like the Soviet regime and that of the Shah – without wishing for the Soviet peoples and his own Iranian nation to be exterminated http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/rumor-of-the-century/ I am no fan of this dictator, but there is no need to exaggerate his words). The current Prime Minister, Netanyahu, recently stated quite bluntly “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany” http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/787766.html

Such Nazi comparisons have often been used in the past to justify military operations: for instance, when the IDF bombed Beirut, killing PLO fighters and several thousand civilians during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Prime Minister Begin wrote to President Reagan that the destruction of Arafat’s headquarters felt to him like he was destroying Hitler’s bunker. http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/11/11/arafat/index3.html

I find the universal interpretation much more appealing: never forget to show solidarity. Here, the famous words of the theologian Niemöller come to mind:

“In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then… they came for me… And by that time there was no one left to speak up”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came…

However, recently I’ve been thinking about a third interpretation, concerning the dangers of extreme self-righteousness. I read and re-read the text of the speech given by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, in Poznan, Poland, on October 4, 1943.  The address, of which there is a surviving recording, was given to his SS officers, and it seems to have been aimed at raising their motivation. Exterminating so many people was apparently difficult to cope with psychologically: Christopher Browning, in his wonderful “Ordinary Men”, recounts how sorry the members of the exterminating units felt for themselves decades later, because of the hard job they were expected to fulfill.

So Himmler wants to raise his listeners’ spirits. He tells them that many Nazi party members speak of extermination as if it is “a small matter”. But “none of them has seen it, has endured it”, unlike his audience: “most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when there are 500, or when there are 1000″. Actually exterminating people is much harder than it sounds, but Himmler has words of encouragement: his subordinates “have seen this through, and – with the exception of human weaknesses […] have remained decent”.

How do you exterminate decently? “We have taken away the riches that they had, and I have given a strict order [… to deliver] these riches completely to the Reich, to the State. We have taken nothing from them for ourselves. A few, who have offended against this, will be [judged] in accordance with an order, that I gave at the beginning: He who takes even one Mark of this is a dead man […]We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who wanted to kill us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves with even one fur, with one Mark, with one cigarette, with one watch, with anything. That we do not have. Because at the end of this, we don’t want, because we exterminated the bacillus, to become sick and die from the same bacillus”.

http://www.holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/speech-text.shtml

Incredible as it sounds, the Nazis felt the need to morally justify their actions to themselves as they were systematically murdering millions of men, women and children. To do this, and to distinguish themselves from the “bacillus” (germs) they were eliminating, Himmler came up with a criterion that, to him, really proved his subordinates’ basic decency: they may be busy piling up bodies, but at least they weren’t looting them. They showed honorable self-restraint throughout this ordeal, so difficult for them to perform.

Many sides in the Israeli-Arab conflict “Nazify” their opponents: I find these comparisons exaggerated and highly dangerous, and as I wrote, they are too often a prelude to more violence. I believe the Jewish Holocaust should only be compared to other cases of organized extermination. One variety is a bureaucratic apparatus implementing a systematic plan to wipe an entire group off the face of the earth within a limited timeframe (examples include the Armenian genocide of 1915, and Rwanda in 1994). Another is repeated attacks of colonial armies on indigenous populations over a longer period, which are frequent and violent enough to lead to full-blown extermination – as happened in Northern California in the 1850s and 1860s, or in Tasmania in the 1820s and 1830s. Without detracting from their seriousness, I don’t think we have any evidence to support framing current events in the Middle East in this specific way.

But I think the Poznan speech can serve us as a yardstick, as a warning: this is how far self-righteousness can go. People can undertake a vast project of killing off an entire people, and still convince themselves they are morally superior. Read this text:  it is really worth your consideration.

http://www.holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/speech-text.shtml