Norman Finkelstein

Pushback of the Week, April 13, 2025

Norman Finkelstein

American political scientist and activist Norman Finkelstein, though the son of Polish Holocaust survivors, has never been afraid to speak his mind about Israel. At a February 2025 event sponsored by CAIR Florida (the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations), Finkelstein delivered fiery comments about Israel’s in-your-face brand of genocide:

“It’s absolutely mind-numbing. One genocidal statement after another genocidal statement after another genocidal statement after another, another, another, another! So here’s the thing: Israel, if you look at what they write in their newspapers, what they post on Facebook, what they tweet, what they say on public affairs radio and TV programs, they aren’t in the least hiding the fact that they’re committing genocide. They are proud of it. They are boasting about it. They relish it…. [A]cross the board, from one end of the political spectrum to the other, and from the top to the bottom, it’s a national project to for once and for all liquidate Gaza.”

Finkelstein has paid a professional price for his methodical deconstruction of the Israeli juggernaut, which began with his late 1980s Princeton doctoral dissertation on Zionism and subsequently continued in books like The Holocaust Industry (2000), Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (2003), Method and Madness (2015), and Gaza (2021). Describing his academic career as having gone “up in flames,” Finkelstein wryly observed in a 2020 interview with Jed Macosko at AcademicInfluence.com that college administrators didn’t want to deal with the “Finkelstein albatross,” and he himself found it impossible to “play the academic game.”

At the Yale Political Union (YPU) in January of this year, at the close of an affirmative speech on the resolution “The state of Israel is responsible for genocide,” Finkelstein concluded, “Israel’s response is not disproportionate, I would argue it is proportionate to its goal of destroying the civilian population of Gaza.”

We salute Finkelstein’s steadfast commitment to speaking uncomfortable truths. As Catherine and John Titus have often discussed on Money & Markets, “Gaza is a method” that is coming for all of us unless we push back.