I Accuse! – Letting Israel Off the Hook

In his previous book, the monumental Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom (2018), Norman Finkelstein depicted the Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara, on the night of May 31, 2010, as an integral part of the recent story of Israeli atrocities against Gaza, ranging from Operation Cast Lead in 2008 to Operation Protective Edge in 2014 – massacres committed against an imprisoned population already suffering from a humanitarian crisis caused by a blockade imposed in 2007.

Finkelstein described the victims of the assault on the Mavi Marmara – ten murdered, scores injured — as “the first casualties of the interment of the Goldstone Report” on Operation Cast Lead – referring to the backpedalling from that Report by the human rights community, including Goldstone himself, that had taken place even before his recantation on April 1, 2011.

In its turn, Finkelstein claims in his Conclusion to I Accuse!, the refusal of Fatou Bensouda, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC ) — who evidently feared the vilification campaign experienced by Goldstone — to launch a full investigation into the Flotilla Incident “paved the way” for the atrocities committed against peaceful civilian demonstrators in the Great March of Return that began in the spring of 2018.

It is precisely because the Prosecutor (as Bensouda is referred to in the book) does NOT situate the Flotilla Incident within the ongoing agony of Gaza that Finkelstein has launched against her, in his new book, a devastating personal denunciation. Essentially, the book is a thunderbolt in the form of a legal document.

Read the full review here.