Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.

Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (Berkeley: U C Press, 2005), 343 pages. $22.50.

IN HIS NEW WORK BEYOND CHUTZPAH: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History Norman Finkelstein employs his method of relentlessly sifting through the labyrinthine of citations and footnotes of his interlocutors in order to expose cases of intellectual fraud that have been mobilized to defend the policies of the state of Israel. In his latest book, Finkelstein shows how the reiteration of previously discredited scholarship is not only a matter of intellectual sloth but broadly captures the more fundamental lack of evidentiary rigor required when one is defending Israel. Finkelstein's project is not so much to construct a case whereby the supporters of Israel know that Israel is morally indefensible. Rather, Finkelstein's meticulous citational archeology exposes the dubious and distorted scholarship produced by prominent defenders of Israel.

The book is divided into two parts along with an appendix. Part one, "The Not-So-New 'New Anti-Semitism'", chronicles the perennial threat of a new anti-Semitism on the horizon as a rhetorical trope deployed against critics of Israel beginning with Arnold Forester and Benjamin R. Epstein's The New Anti-Semitism in 1974 and on down the chain to Abraham Foxman's Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism in America among others from 2003. According to Finkelstein, claims of anti-Semitism are recklessly (but nonetheless maliciously) deployed against those questioning (and in some cases) condemning criminal actions perpetrated by the state of Israel. The charge of anti-Semitism wielded by Israel supporters works to undermine critics of Israel and stifle public debate by portraying the slightest criticism of Israeli policy as mere camouflaged racism. This charge of anti-Semitism effectively shields Israel against any and all criticisms.

Pointing to manufacturers of the new anti-Semitism, Abraham H. Foxman and Gabriel Schoenfeld, Finkelstein observes how these writers connect the rise of anti-Semitic actions in Europe and the United States as coinciding with the Second Intifada that brought attention and sympathy to the Palestinian plight. In a report to the European Union entitled Manifestations of Anti-Semitism in the European Union the authors of the report connect Israeli government policy to a marked rise of anti-Semitic actions throughout Europe. However, pro-Israel supporters deny that the state of Israel is in any way responsible for provoking the anti-Semitic response because, according to Finkelstein, this would make both the state of Israel and its Jewish supporters morally and politically culpable for the policies of the Jewish stale. Finkelstein employs Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew to illustrate how the denial of Jewish culpability is formulated. Sartre argues that it is the anti-Semite that provides the content of "stereotypical Jewish vices" thereby absolving the Jew from any responsibility of the crimes. Anti-Semitism exists before the crime is committed. The crime is only noticed, reported or recognized, (not because of the event) but, rather because of what the person who is engaged in the action represents.

This formulation deprives the Jew of any agency. Accordingly, Jewish actions do not in themselves cause or contribute to the rise of Anti-Semitism but rather anti-Semites seize upon any act of Israel and distort the outcomes to suit their need for anti-Semitic fodder. Jewish actions do not have negative causal properties. Alternatively Jews are only responsible for anti-Semitism when Jewish actions are positive, (i.e. participation in the Civil Rights movement). The not so new anti-Semitism is a semantic hoax that confounds opposition to the policies of the Jewish state with hatred of Jewish people per se. One of the goals of the Zionist project is to connect the Jewish identity with the state of Israel. Consequentially this has the effect of connecting the crimes of the state of Israel to the Jewish identity. However this spurious connection cannot distract from the heart of one of Finkelstein's concerns--challenging the human rights abuses by the state of Israel is necessary to protect Palestinians.

Importantly the predominant targets of the charges of the new anti-Semitism are the political left. Indeed, the supporters of Israel have formed an alliance with fundamentalist Christians and the political right, the historical oppressors of Jews in the United States, while abandoning their historical allies on the left. For example, Finkelstein quotes Phyllis Chesler from The New Anti-Semitism: "What's new about the new anti-Semitism is that for the first time it is being perpetrated in the name of anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and anti-colonialism." Chesler sees those who address the racial dimension of the explicitly Jewish state as anti-Semites hiding behind progressive verbiage.

The second part, "The Greatest Tale Ever Told," Finkelstein confronts Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel as a standard Zionist account of the impact of Israel state policy. In The Case for Israel, Dershowitz studiously avoids engaging the reputable and mainstream human rights reports Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International (AI), Physicians for Human Rights--Israel, B'Tselem (an Israel based group) and Al Haq (a Palestinian based group). Finkelstein shines as he compiles the results of thousands of pages of source material documenting Israel's human rights record and emphasizes the consensus amongst the human rights organizations that contradict various claims by Dershowitz. In a glaring case of intellectual dishonesty, Dershowitz uses an internal Israeli Defense Force (IDF) analysis maintaining that "when only innocent civilians are counted, significantly more Israelis than Palestinians have been killed." In fact, the ratio of civilian casualties is actually three Palestinians for every one Israeli civilian. Later Dershowitz claims Palestinians "use women ... and children as human shields" with no source cited. No human rights group has found evidence that Palestinians conscript people. However, Human Rights Watch has documented the IDF policy of coercing Palestinians to act as human shields. Dershowitz suggests that physical force was only used occasionally and as "a modified form of nonlethal torture." However, AI consistently documented these practices from 1991 to 1999 while HRW places the number of Palestinian prisoners tortured in the "tens of thousands". Dershowitz justifies home demolitions as a "benign", "soft form of collective punishment" while AI details the fifteen minutes given to families to vacate the premises before the bulldozers commence and HRW calculates at least 10% of the mostly refugee population of Rajah have had their homes destroyed since the beginning of the second Intifada. The list of abuses continues with the overall condition of prisoners, ambulance and medical interference, land grabbing, lack of regard for innocent lives in targeted bombing, and the list goes on. The overall pattern of these human rights reports establishes Israel's low regard for the human rights of non-Jews and renders Israeli state policy in Palestine indefensible.

Finally, the book concludes with the notorious charges of plagiarism against Dershowitz. Finkelstein's main charge against Dershowitz centers around Dershowitz's "lifting" of evidence (without citation) from Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial. The alacrity of Finkelstein's comparison of the works of Peters and Dershowitz should be standard reading for a social science methodology course on the proper use of secondary research. In Finkelstein's earlier work Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Finkelstein debunks Peters' position that there were no people living in Palestine before the Jewish migration and exposes her case as a fraud based on fabricated evidence and butchered citations whereby the full citation would take on an entirely new meaning. Dershowitz' evidence coincides with Peters' evidence to such a degree of similitude that coincidental citation is astronomically unlikely. When Finkelstein first challenged Dershowitz on this issue Dershowitz denied the charges and stonewalled. Later he claimed to have checked and cited her original sources. However, the appendix juxtaposes Peters' work and Dershowitz's work, ellipses and all, to reveal an uncanny similarity in the choice of citations selected. For instance, Dershowitz quotes from Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad in exactly the same manner as Joan Peters. Both Dershowitz and Peters cobble together sentences from Twain that are eighty-seven pages apart in Twain's own text.

Likewise, employing a British consular letter from W.T. Young to Viscount Canning, Dershowitz attributes authorship of the letter to Young. Peters uses the same quote and also attributes authorship to Young. However, if Dershowitz really did consult the original source he would have actually attributed the quote not to Young but to the author of the memorandum Young enclosed in his original letter to Canning. In both of the cases above, Finkelstein posits that Dershowitz could have only reproduced the same quotes if in fact he copied the original from Peters' book, which he failed to cite. Finkelstein provides us with Harvard University's manual on plagiarism as "passing off a source's information, ideas, or words as your own by omitting to cite them" and leaves the reader to judge if Dershowitz is guilty.

Finkelstein's examination reveals more than the dubious scholarship of Dershowitz. Rather Finkelstein highlights two points within scholarly and mainstream debates surrounding Israel's occupation of Palestine. First, no other current national struggle is as shielded from the reports of mainstream human rights organizations as the case of Israel. Simply, the only sources deemed adequate by scholars supporting the Zionist project are those with close ties to the Israeli state. This leaves the human rights reports the most underutilized sources of information when discussing this particular conflict, though they are often the main objective sources for other major global conflicts. The second point is the lack of scrutiny within the academic community applied to the claims of pro-Israel scholars. The same discredited arguments are periodically recycled and given uncritical acceptance in academic circles.

Although not his intention, the well-publicized attempts of Dershowitz to prevent the publication of this book successfully generated controversy to tweak the curiosity of some who otherwise would have overlooked the book. This has become the greatest success of Finkelstein's book. Finkelstein's tactic of critiquing the work of a predominant Zionist Harvard professor not only raises important questions on the general lack of academic standards for Zionist scholars, Finkelstein's work is also an effective way to actually get the human rights record of the abuse of Palestinians to penetrate the bulwark of Zionism in the academy.

Stephanie Farmer is a PhD candidate at the University of Binghamton, New York.