Read it here.
Read it here.
Read it here.
In Old Wine, Broken Bottle: Ari Shavit’s Promised Land, a book-length critique of My Promised Land, forensic scholar Norman Finkelstein includes a table that juxtaposes Shavit’s various descriptions of Palestinians and Jews. What it reveals is the systematicity with which he associates Palestinians with filth, disease, and cultural and technological backwardness. By contrast, Shavit goes to excessive lengths to underscore his Jewish characters’ taste for European high culture, to the degree that it constitutes something of a leitmotif. Jewish-Israeli contributions to agronomy and medicine, among other civilization-enhancing values, are repeatedly underscored.
Given their pervasiveness, one cannot escape the feeling that these dehumanizing tropes serve a strategic function in the book’s overarching polemic. And indeed, the reader’s acceptance of Shavit’s most provocative contention—that the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was not only tragic but also morally justified on the grounds that it brought the State of Israel into existence—is emotionally and rhetorically premised on this prior matrix of orientalist characterizations. As Finkelstein puts it: “The tacit message is that Palestinians, if left to their own devices, would have produced just another destitute, dreary, and despotic Arab state, while the world would have been deprived of Israel’s high-tech industries, cutting-edge inventions, and flourishing cultural landscape.”
To read the rest of the review, visit The Cairo Review of Global Affairs
Knowing Too Much is essential reading for understanding Finkelstein’s real views, why the debate in the U.S. Jewish population exists, and the critical importance of deepening it.
To read the rest of the review, visit New Politics
Finkelstein at one point claims that it ‘is child’s play not just to poke holes in but also turn on their head all of Shavit’s propositions’ (p.54), but perhaps he does not appreciate the ease with which those yearning for a redemption of the Zionist cause can be swept away by the propaganda of writers like Shavit. Old Wine, Broken Bottle not only blocks such a redemption, but is also a vital tool in the development of a counter-narrative for the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian crisis to that predominantly portrayed in the media. The Jewish-American community’s growing estrangement from Israel may, indeed, not be reversed by My Promised Land. However, with the recent conflict in Gaza yielding over 1,900 dead at the time of writing, what seems more important to focus on is finding the spark that will move greater numbers in Jewish communities, in the US or internationally, to oppose loudly the occupation and current slaughter. As a hugely persuasive challenge to Zionist ideology, which for many underpins their tolerance of the Israeli government’s actions, Finkelstein’s latest critique might just provide that spark.
Read the full review at Counterfire.
Norman Finkelstein will discuss his new book Old Wine, Broken Bottle on CSPAN-2 Saturday, August 9 at 7 PM ET.
For more details, see BookTV.
In the toxic environment that characterizes much, if not most, debate on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, a special poison is reserved for the liberal Zionist. Such a person, who stands by Israel even as he yearns for it to change, is fated to be hated by both camps: hawkish Zionists despise the liberal for going too far in his criticisms, accusing him of a hand-wringing betrayal of the cause that can only comfort the enemy, while anti-Zionists denounce the liberal for not going far enough, for failing to follow the logic of his position through to its conclusion and for thereby defending the indefensible. The liberal Zionist is branded either a hypocrite or an apologist or both.
The treatment meted out to My Promised Land, a personal history of Israel by Ari Shavit, a columnist for Israel’s left-leaning daily Haaretz, is a case in point. The laptop warriors on both sides donned their familiar armor and set about attacking the book from right and left. “Far from self-criticism, this is simply self-debasement,” wrote the former World Jewish Congress official Isi Leibler in The Jerusalem Post, suggesting that among Shavit’s motives was an ingratiating desire to win “endorsement from the liberal glitterati for whom debasement of the Jewish state has become a key component of their liberal DNA.” Meanwhile, the leftist academic Norman G. Finkelstein has devoted an entire, if short, book to taking down My Promised Land. In Old Wine, Broken Bottle he insists that Shavit’s insights “comprise a hardcore of hypocrisy and stupidity overlaid by a tinsel patina of arrogance and pomposity. He’s a know-nothing know-it-all who, if ever there were a contest for world’s biggest schmuck, would come in second.”
Read the full review at the New York Review of Books.
Finkelstein demolishes Shavit’s book without difficulty. Where pundits perceive insight and depth, Old Wine, Broken Bottle points out a naked emperor spouting torrents of high-flown, perfectly meaningless rhetoric. At times its critique can appear ungenerous: Shavit notes in passing Israel’s oft-suppressed missed opportunity for peace in 1971, for instance, and rightly deems the 1982 Lebanon campaign ‘deceitful and outrageous’; but Finkelstein is unmoved by either cursory admission, and even offers a wry dig at the aged ‘Disco Ari’’s’ nights out in Tel Aviv.
Read the full review at New Left Project.
Norman Finkelstein first came to public prominence with his brilliant expose (published as a chapter in his book “Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict”) of Joan Peters’s much-lauded book “From Time Immemorial”; and much of his work has consisted of similar devastating critiques of best-selling books of Zionist propaganda (notably “Beyond Chutzpah”, which eviscerates Alan Dershowitz’s “The Case for Israel”). “Old Wine, Broken Bottle” is the latest in this formidable line.
For the full review, visit JFJFP.
Once upon a time it was a commonplace that Israel’s founding entailed the dispossession of the indigenous population. After World War II, Hannah Arendt observed matter-of-factly, “it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely by means of a colonized and then conquered territory…. [T]he solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs.”
Check out the full excerpt at Guernica.
Decades of failed peace talks have led nowhere; but do not lose hope just yet. Join Robert Foster as he attempts to host the first ever Middle East Peace Raps, using rhyme and reason to bring together Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, and a representative of Hamas.
Featuring special cameos from prominent American Jewish scholar, Dr. Norman Finkelstein, and Palestinian rap legends, DAM, this is an episode for the ages. Join us as we bravely (or perhaps stupidly) take on one of the most bitter, divisive and controversial conflicts of our times: Israel & Palestine.
To watch the video, visit Rap News 24.
Over the next month, Book Culture is proud to be hosting two (two!) events in conjunction with our favorite radical publisher, OR Books, the first with (in)famous editor/writer Gordon Lish and the second with Jewish anti-Zionist provocateur Norman Finkelstein.
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Gordon Lish is now best known for his work as an editor—most famously, and controversially, of Raymond Carver—and as a teacher. His own writing—sometimes compared to that of Stein, Beckett and Thomas Bernhardt—remained out of print until the publication by OR of his Collected Fictions in 2010. Dalkey Press followed in 2013 with their reissue of his novel Peru, and OR has just released his first original work in sixteen years, Goings: In Thirteen Sittings, a faux-memoir in which an eighty-year old Gordon gleefully revisits the malignant passions of his youth. Lish will be at Book Culture on April 23rd to read from his new book.
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Norman Finkelstein has for many years been the bête noir of American Zionism. Finkelstein’s doctoral thesis was a critique of Joan Peters’ 1984 work From Time Immemorial, which sought to delegitimize Arab claims to Palestinian identity, and since then Finkelstein has continued to spar with prominent Zionists. While Finkelstein’s work successfully discredited Peters, his own work (including The Holocaust Industry and Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (both published by Verso) has consistently been a target of attack by Zionist intellectuals, and in 2007, he was denied tenure at DePaul University following pressure by Alan Dershowitz, Elie Wiesel and others.
Read the full announcement on the Book Culture blog.