Intellectual Honesty and Political Expediency

Norman Finkelstein has built a career on rigorous intellectual honesty, which I respect, whether I agree with every detail of his position or not. Therefore, I was shocked to hear him this morning on Democracy Now!  advocate what I could only interpret as a call to abandon intellectual honesty in favor of unity in achieving political goals. Finkelstein documents a significant and measurable shift in Jewish opinion toward Israel, particularly among younger Jews. He sees political openings as a result and calls for support for a two-state solution. He further argues that to go further is some kind of "political crime" because it betrays the possible for the unattainable. He says that he has been working for Palestinian rights for 30 years and wants something to show for it.

Personally, I began working for Palestinian rights in 1970, the same year that I began to work against apartheid in South Africa. In those nearly 42 years, I have striven for intellectual honesty both in its own right but also because I see it as the only way to successfully shift the discourse by moving people to deal with facts, history, and logic. I do not think the call for a two-state solution is intellectually honest for anyone with deep knowledge and understand of the facts, history, and logic. It is quite clear that no peaceful and just solution in Palestine can coexist with an apartheid Zionist state of Israel, and it is now even clear to many who used to advocate a two-state solution.

Intellectual honesty demands that we assert that states have no absolute or inherent right to exist. Human beings have that right but not states. The right of a state to exist is always conditional, and it is precisely conditional on its behavior toward those over whom it rules. Without their consent, a state has no right to exist. That was why the apartheid state of South Africa had to be dismantled and replaced by a democratic state. By the same token, there will be no peace in Palestine short of a solution which is based on both democracy and secularism. I would add that the same is true of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and many other countries. Whether there is one democratic, secular state or two or three is the business of those who now live in Palestine and Israel, but it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that a solution exists which preserves the Zionist state of Israel.

That leads me to the second demand of intellectual honesty. Political Zionism is and always has been a form of racism. Specifically, it grows from and is imbued with European anti-Semitism which asserted that European Jews were foreigners who did not belong there and should go somewhere else. The founders of Zionism embraced this anti-Semitism and thus became the first genuinely self-hating Jews. On this foundation, they have constructed an entire mythos, such as the existence of a "Jewish people," the idea of  "a land without people for a people without a land," and so on. These intellectually dishonest myths must be confronted as, for example, Israeli history professor Shlomo Sand has done in his book, "The Myth of the Jewish People."

It is the colonial "logic" of Zionism which lies at the heart of the Israeli conquest and occupation of Palestine and the dispossession of its indigenous inhabitants. The Zionist movement harnessed their anti-Semitism into racism against non-Jewish Palestinians, though there is also of course lots of racism against Israeli Jews with Arab origins. To solve the conflict in Palestine without dealing with Zionism as the underpinning of Israeli apartheid is as unthinkable it would have been to solve the conflict in South Africa without dealing with apartheid. Note that this is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. South Africa is still struggling to find its way, but it can at least begin to do that since the abandonment of the apartheid system. It is necessary for Israel to abandon its apartheid system and the racist ideology which underpins it before there can be progress toward a solution.

I can accept that someone who is not familiar with the facts and history of Palestine can go astray on these issues, but I am shocked by Finkelstein's call for intellectual dishonesty in the name of political expediency. I do not agree with him that such a course will lead to a solution of anything.