Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Assaults on Gaza
by Norman G Finkelstein
(OR Books, £11)

AUTHOR of The Holocaust Industry and anti-zionist activist Norman Finkelstein does not take prisoners.

Watching him defend himself in live debate against attacks by Israel apologists is a bracing and inspiring lesson in intellectual bravery.
 
He is that awkward and painful thing for the pro-Israel lobby, a Jewish academic from the US with impeccable personal credentials in terms of the devastation of his family in the nazi death camps.

He has been described by the editor of the New Republic as a “disgusting, self-hating Jew,” while arch-zionist Alan Dershowitz said of him: “I don’t think he’s a Jew,” adding in a piece of self-defeating logic, that were he not Jewish, “nobody would have any doubt that he was an anti-semite.”

Finkelstein has earned the bitter enmity of the Israel camp for his scholarly authorship and unstinting opposition to the propaganda and manipulation of history deployed in defence of Israel’s actions.

His new work Method and Madness brings us up to date with Israel’s three onslaughts against the Palestinians of Gaza in 2008 and 2012, along with the bloody attack on the Gaza aid ship Mavi Marmara in 2010 and last summer’s devastating assault which left 2,200 dead, including 500 children.

The unimaginable suffering this has caused does not interfere in Finkelstein’s surgical dissection of Israel’s justifications for its brutal actions.

In regard to Hamas’s ineffectual projectiles fired toward Israeli civilian areas, Finkelstein asks: “Do Palestinians have the right to symbolically resist slow death punctuated by periodic massacres, or is it incumbent upon them to lie down and die?”

The book is a slender compilation of the author’s contemporaneous writings and is packed with rapier-like debunking of the arguments deployed by Israel and its defenders at the time.

There is a fascinating chapter on the Goldstone Human Rights Watch report into Operation Cast Lead which, on its publication, caused widespread apoplexy in Israel — not only because it condemned Israel’s multiple war crimes but also because its author, rather like Finkelstein, had unassailable credentials as an upstanding Israeli judge with no prior record of anti-Israeli positions.

Sadly Goldstone, after years of relentless attacks at home and in the US, retracted his report, but Finkelstein doesn’t let Goldstone off the hook.

It’s not an easy read — how could it be? — and Finkelstein is not setting out a thesis about these wars or Israel’s rogue actions in general. He is demolishing the claims used to defend the indefensible. And he will continue to do so — no recanting can be expected from this quarter.