One state or two? Boycott of Israeli goods or goods from the settlements? Is the lobby the genesis of American wrongdoing in Palestine or is it imperialism? The questions -- regarding vision, strategy, and analysis -- produce sharp cleavages on the Left. Indeed, generally ones much deeper than they need to be. And they remain stubbornly unsettled.
They also congeal in the person of Norman Finkelstein, who has taken some unpopular positions -- his insistent call for a two-state solution, his references to "cultish" aspects of BDS -- as well as more popular ones, like blaming the occupation solely on the Israel lobby. For that reason he has become a lightning rod, attracting furious bolts of criticism and support. The core issues, however, remain obscured amidst a charged atmosphere of extravagant denunciations (catcalls of Zionism and worse) from one side and fierce defenses from the other.
From one perspective, it's an odd contretemps. Finkelstein has spent decades fighting for Palestinian dignity and a place for Palestinians to live free of the occupation's suffocating violence and capricious indignities. He is the maverick scholar who exposed the American intellectual community as a gaggle of hacks by dissecting Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, showing it to be a hoax intended to deny the Palestinians peoplehood by painting them as peripatetics who had fabricated a "Palestinian" identity to ride the wave of Israel's successful nation-building project. And his forensic dismantling of Israeli scholarly mythologies in Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict remains one of the very best primers on the prejudices that surround the conflict.
For all that time his fight has been for a two-state settlement: something that seemed reasonable in 1988 and in the early 1990s. But what seemed possible twenty years ago -- with the Israeli electorate temporarily shaken by the savage repression of the 1st intifada and Israeli capital needing to recover from the aftermath of the destabilizing military-industrial accumulation patterns of the 1970s and 1980s, break through the sectoral envelope of domestic accumulation, and globalize -- seems less possible now, with militarized accumulation again on the rise in the Middle East and elsewhere. In some ways, the argument for two states has become a relic when so much of the discourse (less so the organizing) of the radical pro-Palestinian Left in the West and the Palestinian Left in the Occupied Territories is oriented towards one single state.
Furthermore, the constituency for partition is far from a majority of the Israeli population. Those accepting removal of all settlements totaled 18 percent of the population in 2006 and declined to 14 percent in 2007. So, the Israeli state is in sync with the sentiments of the Israeli people. Rejectionism is consensual, while disagreements are technical, niggling about how tight should be the noose around Palestinian society's neck. Thus a program for a forced withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders is a challenge to Israeli power. Two states with a just resolution of the refugee question and UN SC 242 borders is rabidly rejected by not only Israel but also America. It makes little sense to speak of "selling out" when the two-state solution is so stolidly rejected by those who must consent to its implementation for it to have meaning.
For that reason, Finkelstein's two-state program, on which his left-wing critics' attention has lately centered, is a secondary problem in his analysis. The primary one is elsewhere: an idealism matched with an odd moral rationalism. Combined, they make for an analysis bleached of power -- where it resides in Israeli and American society and who benefits from the occupation. Yet such an analysis must be the point of departure for any organizing strategy, whether it is oriented towards two states or one.
Finkelstein's latest book, "This Time They Went Too Far", is ostensibly about the massacre in Gaza that Israel carried out in the winter of 2008-2009 and its cultural and political aftermath. The book is mainly a collection of facts, culled and collated from endless human rights reports, and the facts paint Israel in a very poor light. But it is only partially about its titular topic. It is also a launching pad for Finkelstein to re-tender his argument for two states: Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 Green Line and a just resolution of the refugee problem.
Finkelstein's recipe for peace is simple: truth combined with Palestinian non-violence might compel the moral majority of the West, the angry liberal ex-Zionist Jews and non-Jews who in the past stabilized Israeli oppression, to put enough pressure on the American government to put enough pressure on the Israeli government to stop the occupation.
Despite Finkelstein's championing of Palestinian non-violence, he does not fall into the familiar trap of fetishizing it, and he insists on the Palestinian right to self-defense. His stance on Palestinian resistance is admirable in a context in which it is increasingly fashionable to decry the barbarism of Israeli oppression only to cluck sternly at the Palestinians when in weak reply they send a rocket skyward, the overwhelming majority of which crash blindly into Israeli fields and deserts. He asks the question that needs to be asked: can one in good conscience utter the words that demand that the Palestinian people die on their knees?
