Showing posts with label Barnaby Raine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barnaby Raine. Show all posts

28 March 2025

David Miller has gone from Asset to Liability for the Palestine Solidarity Movement

Targeting Jews and Jewish anti-Zionists is explained by Miller’s Failure to Understand Why Imperialism Supports Zionism and Genocide in Gaza – As Such It is Anti-Semitic





The Virulent neo-Nazi Stew Peters Show & His $6 Million Reward for Proving the Holocaust Happened  

I didn’t want to have to write this blog. There are far more important topics such as Genocide in Gaza. However Miller’s recent social media postings are becoming ever more bizarre and crossing the line into anti-Semitism. Miller has abandoned anti-Zionism.

His behaviour is not only strange it is also stupid. If 'antisemitism' is the ritual accusation of the Zionists why try to prove them correct by attacking Jews as Jews? It seems that Miller believes that it is Western Jews who are responsible for the hideous monstrosity that is the Israeli state. This is the Zionist narrative. 

Jews in the West are the moral alibi for imperialism. Does anyone seriously think that Trump is seriously concerned about Jews or anti-Semitism?  His ‘concern’ over the ‘plight’ of Jewish students is grotesque in the extreme given his own racism and hostility to Black Lives Matter and anti-racism, with his portrayal of migrants as rapists and criminals.

Trump has given overt support to the neo-Nazis of Charlottesville, describing them as ‘very fine people’ and to the Proud Boys and other White Supremacist militias. Miller understands none of this.

When Biden said that if Israel didn't exist it would have had to be created he was expressing the views of mainstream imperialist thought in the US.  According to Reagan’s Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, Israel was the US’s unsinkable aircraft carrier and cheap at the price in an area of immense strategic and economic interest. Jews in the words of Barnaby Raine are merely the West's colonial pets.

I was reluctant to break from Miller because of what had happened at Bristol University where he was fired in a McCarthyist witchhunt. I was elated at his victory in the Employment Tribunal and I hope he wins at the EAT.  Initially I pushed back against the criticism of him by JVL and Na'amod, I cannot do so now because David has made it clear that he is going down an anti-Semitic pathway.

In holding Jews responsible for Israel’s holocaust in Gaza, Miller lets imperialism off the hook. The genocide could be halted tomorrow if Trump, or Biden had stopped the flow of arms. It could have been halted if the Arab states had stopped the flow of oil. The fact that that miserable humanoid Starmer, has uttered not one word of criticism speaks volumes.

In a tweet of 24 March Miller said

Those who are interested in ending this genocide must begin by targeting those responsible near them: the entire Zionist movement globally must live in fear of accountability until it is dismantled and its ideology eradicated. And let's be clear, there are Zionists everywhere. In every town and city. Find out where they are.

Zionism is the worst catastrophe that has befallen the Jewish people next to the Holocaust itself. It is an abomination. It has destroyed Judaism’s moral and ethical traditions.

Isaiah’s injunction to

‘learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause’

has been replaced by Israel’s determination to turn Gaza into a land of orphans. We have a new acronym WCNSF (Wounded child, no surviving family).

The injunction in Exodus ‘not (to) oppress a stranger... having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” has been replaced by Death to the Arabs.

I am all in favour of destroying Zionism politically and organisationally but targeting individual Zionists is not the way to do it.

Miller is arguing that we start ferreting out individual Zionists. How will that stop the genocide? Israel isn’t even concerned about killing its own hostages. Why should it be concerned about Miller’s fans tracking down individual Zionists? He says ‘there are Zionists everywhere. In every town and city. Find out where they are.’ And then what?

Leaving aside his paranoia, are individual Zionists in Britain, many of whom are Jewish, really responsible for what Israel does?  Is that how imperialism operates?

But if like Miller you dismiss imperialism as an interconnected system of war and political domination motivated by economic exploitation, then it is far easier to focus on individual Zionists. In so doing you let off the hook US imperialism and the complicity of Arab regimes such as Saudi Arabia’s MBS.

Because Miller fails to understand why Western capitalism supports Israel, he believes that it is all due to ‘infiltration’ of government bodies. Since about two-thirds of Jews are Zionists this will inevitably be portrayed as Jew hunting. Is that what Palestine solidarity is about? 

Miller’s call for targeting individual Zionists lays him open to Police attacks. Of course the hysterical reaction of the Zionists is hypocritical. For years now Zionist organisations like the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and UK Lawyers for Israel have gaslighted and doxxed anti-Zionists and Palestinians like Miller himself and Shahd Abusalama.

Of course if the Police were to act as the Board of Deputies enforcers then of course we would defend Miller despite his stupidity.

I am currently being prosecuted for support for the Palestinian Resistance. I was targeted by Heidi Bachram, who follows in a long tradition of Zionist informers who in countries under Nazi occupation betrayed Jews to the Gestapo.

Heidi Bachram would have been in her element feeding the Stasi or the Gestapo with 'useful information' on their enemies

Scottish PSC has tried to arrange a debate between Miller and myself without success. Miller has shied away from debating his ideas. David knows that what he is saying is indefensible.

The idea that the West supports Israel because Zionists have crept into powerful positions barely merits a response. Are the Christian Zionists in Trump’s cabinet all infiltrators?  Is Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State a Zionist infiltrator?

Does the German state support Israel and attack Palestine solidarity demonstrations because of Jews?  Why does the AfD, which is riddled with neo-Nazis and holocaust deniers, love Israel so much?

Far-right and neo-Nazi groups are happy to support Zionism and Israel, not because they love Jews but because they hate Muslims and love imperialism. In appearing on anti-Semitic and White Supremacist platforms like Stew Peters he is mixing in some very unsavoury company. Miller seems to have no sense of self-awareness.

A Reply to Some of David Miller’s Comments

In his first controversial tweet Miller made 3 points:

Jewish Power and Discrimination Against Jews

1.          Jews are not discriminated against.

2.          They are over-represented in Europe, North America and Latin America in positions of cultural, economic and political power.

3.          They are therefore, in a position to discriminate against actually marginalised groups.

In reaction to criticism of this tweet I defended it although I had grave misgivings, in particular about the third point.

Miller was correct to say that Jews are not discriminated against or experiencing racism. There is no state anti-Semitism in Britain. Anti-Semitism is a marginal prejudice not a form of racism with all its power dynamics. I was saying this long before Miller, as was Norman Finkelstein and others. I could even go along with his observations on Jewish 'overrepresentation' in positions of power, because statistically and sociologically it is true.

However where I parted company was Miller's third point that this enabled Jews to discriminate against those who were oppressed. If Jews in powerful positions discriminate against others they do it as part of the group or organisations they are part of, not as Jews. In private communication with Miller I made my position clear


In this long rambling tweet Miller declared that ‘the State of Israel is at war with you’. That when activists or Muslims are arrested by 'counter-terror' police, “that is being done directly on behalf of the State of Israel”

Miller is arguing that Islamaphobia in the West is a product of Zionism and Israel. “the soldiers of Zion have penetrated the security establishment of your state to make its policy.” How they managed to achieve this is not explained. To call this conspiratorial is an understatement.

At a stroke Miller erases the racism that results from colonialism and imperialism. Trump’s Muslim ban was a consequence of the Israeli state not racism in America.  What of the racism against Hispanics in the United States? Did Trump labelling all Mexicans as rapists arise from the soldiers of Zion? Are the deportations to Latin America all Israel’s fault?  Apparently so.


It is not difficult to see how this kind of conspiratorial fantasy degenerates into anti-Semitism. When I was young British fascists condemned Israel. Not because of what it did to Palestinians but because in their eyes it was a ‘Jewish’ state. The Palestine solidarity movement wanted nothing to do with them but Miller with his appearance on the Stew Peters Show and other tweets seems to be embracing them.

Racism in the West is not the product of support for Israel and its soldiers of Zion. It is home grown.  Of course today Islamaphobia in the West is goes hand in hand with support for Israel, which is seen as an anti-Islamic state. But that is a very different thing. Miller says

‘Take Geert Wilders, in the Netherlands, ... Wilders can be said to be a creation of the State of Israel and its foreign intelligence assets.’

This is completely unsupported by anything in the way of evidence. Geert Wilders is the product of racism in The Netherlands. He is a home-grown fascist. His support for Zionism and Israel flows from that. In his own words

If Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next.

Miller therefore exonerates the British and other states of racism by saying that their racism is not the product of their own class societies but solely that of Israel.  


Miller talks about ‘the global struggle against Jewish supremacism’. In this phrase Miller conflates all Jewish people with the Israeli state like the Zionists. That Israel is a Jewish Supremacist state is a fact which Israel’s human rights group Bt’selem testifies to. Again it is difficult not to take this as a call to oppose Jews everywhere and to brand them all as Jewish Supremacists.

Even accepting that two-thirds of diaspora Jews support Israel and Zionism, for a whole number of historical reasons, I doubt if any but a fraction are open Jewish supremacists. Most Jews see Israel, wrongly, as some form of refuge against anti-Semitism. Of course a minority are overt racists and Jewish supremacists but even they are not arguing for Jewish supremacism within the societies they live in.

Despite his academic status Miller’s language is sloppy, vague and open to misinterpretation. It is not helped by the fact that instead of putting his ideas down on paper he tweets out his latest undigested ideas and thoughts.

Miller confirms that he is no anti-imperialist or socialist when he says that the British and US states don’t do what they do because of imperialism and their need to subjugate, exploit and conquer, but because of infiltration. He even says that

there's no such thing as 'foreign' policy. The British state has made a colossal miscalculation by participating so directly in this genocide,... The British people will have to repair this trajectory by taking British political and public institutions out of the grip of Zionist fanatics. This is the only way to preserve the balance of British society in the long-term. It is essential that Britain is de-Zionised,

In other words he is arguing that the support of the British state for Israel is on account of a handful of Zionist fanatics. Without them the state would be quite a benign institution. It wouldn’t be imperialist or racist, cut disability benefits or privatise the NHS. Instead

A de-Zionised Britain could be an example to other post-imperial states in how to confront centuries of imperial violence and chart a course away from the suicidal client relationship with the US.

This is utter garbage and has nothing to do with a principled opposition to imperialism, let alone Zionism. It ignores the economic imperative behind imperialism. Anyone who thinks Miller is on the left is wrong. I responded to this here and JVL republished it as Looking down the wrong end of the telescope.

The global Left is occupied and infiltrated by Zionist fanatics  

In another conspiratorial tweet we are told that the ‘global left is occupied and infiltrated by Zionist fanatics.’ For someone who is a Professor Miller is remarkably imprecise in his language. Who is this global left? One of the problems with the left is that it isn’t united but in Miller’s fevered imagination it is homogenous!

The left is divided into Marxists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Social Democrats and the unaligned. There is little agreement between them. But in Miller’s fantasies we are all infiltrated.

Miller doesn’t realise that attitudes on the Left towards Israel have changed. In the wake of the Nazi holocaust most people on the left saw the establishment of the Israeli state as some form of recompense. They were wrong not to see that an ethno-nationalist Jewish state could not help but become an echo of everything they had escaped from. I summed this up when I said that ‘Israel was Hitler’s bastard offspring’.

The Labour left around Tribune saw Zionism and Israel as progressive. The Labour Party saw settler colonialism as a positive thing and the natives were invisible. This was why people like Hyndman of the Social Democratic Federation supported the Boers in the Second Boer War.

Much of the Trotskyist movement adopted a position of neutrality during the Nakba seeing the 1948 war as one between British imperialism and its Arab allies and Israel. The Communist Party, after Stalin’s about turn in 1947 supported UN resolution 181 partitioning Palestine and with it the creation of the Israeli state.

However times have changed and the key point was the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 when both Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from Labour Friends of Israel. The scales fell from their eyes. In 1948 most people knew nothing of the Nakba. What they saw were those who had survived Hitler’s genocide struggling again to survive. They were wrong. As we now know Zionism had much in common with the Nazis ideologically and had collaborated with them, as my book Zionism During the Holocaust explains. Israel’s fledgling army had been trained by the British and easily saw off the ramshackle Arab armies with the exception of Transjordan’s Arab Legion commanded by Glubb Pasha.

With the rise in support for anti-imperialist struggles, the revolution in Cuba and opposition to the Vietnam War and Apartheid in South Africa, the left moved into the Palestinian  camp internationally. Israel was seen as an arm of US imperialism.

In the Labour Party it was the right-wing which had historically been pro-Arab and pro-Palestinian.  People like Christopher Mayhew, David Watkins and Andrew Faulds. After 1982 the Right began to realign and Tony Blair made support for Zionism virtually a condition of New Labour.

So Miller is wrong on this point. The global left is less occupied by Zionists than it ever has been. He says that ‘'Pro-Palestinian' is a meaningless term’.  Perhaps to David but not to Palestinians.

Miller says that ‘A basic tenet of anti-imperialism is to begin with suspicion when confronted by possible agents of Empire.’ Really?  A basic tenet of anti-imperialism is support for the oppressed against the oppressor. We are told that:

leftists around the world are constantly deferring to Jewish 'allies' for analysis on Zionism... Not only do these leftists refuse to protect their movements from entryism, they actively solicit, privilege and even worship Jewish opinion about Jewish supremacist crimes.

It is impossible to interpret this as anything other than anti-Semitic and a symptom of Miller’s hostility to the left. Jews supporting the Palestinians should be treated with suspicion. Miller fails to acknowledge that Jews might have good reason to oppose Zionism in the same way as Jewish communists and the Bund opposed Zionism in their time.

Jews are part of the Palestine solidarity movement. Of course Jews, including Israeli Jews, might have a special understanding of Zionism having gone through a process of deprogramming but that isn’t because they are Jewish. It is a recognition that anti-Zionist Jews have a special expertise.

We only have to think of people like Moshe Machover, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Haim Bresheeth – even myself! It was the Israeli group Matzpen which was first began calling Israel a settler colonial state.

Jewish activists have been to the fore in occupying Congress. Whilst Jewish Voice for Peace have been organising thousands of its supporters David Miller has been waging war against Jewish ‘infiltrators’ on Twitter.

This kind of attack, which can only turn the solidarity movement against itself is divisive and destructive. Miller is effectively doing the Zionists’ work.

American Jews are divided as never before, especially young Jews. Jewish students have been an integral part of the campus protests in the United States and Britain. Jonathan Ben-Menachem was one of many Jewish students who joined the protests at Columbia and other universities across the US calling for their institutions to cut ties with companies linked to Israel. In an interview he described his

amazement as the media and political figures have attempted to characterise the protests as antisemitic and dangerous, despite Jewish student organisations playing a central role in them.’

There has been this discourse that Columbia is this hotbed of antisemitism,... It’s crazy how bad faith that discourse has become.

Sarah, also a Jewish student at Columbia, was arrested for taking part in the encampment. She was held by the NYPD for eight hours, with her hands in zip ties. She was suspended the next day, but snuck back onto campus a few days later to take part in a Passover Seder celebration with fellow protesters.

“It was definitely one of the more joyful experiences I’ve had at Columbia,” she told The Independent. “So many of us got arrested or suspended, it was really nice to see so many Jewish faces at the Seder.”

Sarah had been appalled by attempts to smear the Columbia protests as antisemitic, saying that the term had been

weaponized in a really deceitful way by political opportunists who insist on conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

There’s never any substantive response to people like me who are anti-Zionist Jews,” Sarah noted. “There’s a long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism.

Nara Milanich, professor of history at Barnard College, asked:

Are Jews on campus, or anyone else, safer because hundreds of police in riot gear with firearms were invited to come onto campus and haul our students off in zip ties?  I don’t feel safer,” she said.

According to Miller all of those quoted above are Jewish infiltrators whom non-Jewish Palestine solidarity protesters are deferring to. Whereas to the press and politicians like Starmer and Braverman anti-Zionist Jews are invisible.


What really made me sit up and take note of Miller’s direction of travel was his retweeting of an article by Richard Lynn, editor of Mankind Quarterly ‘On the high intelligence and cognitive achievements of Jews in Britain’.

Mankind Quarterly isn’t some obscure academic journal. It was was established in 1960 with funding from White segregationists opposed to civil rights in America. It has been described as a ‘white supremacist journal’ and ‘a pseudo-scholarly outlet for promoting racial inequality.’

When I first saw the tweet I immediately saw that it smacked of the racial sciences:

Are Jews so (relatively) privileged because of ‘intelligence’ or ‘culture’? Or are there other explanations? And what are the consequences in terms of the power and influence of Zionism and the production of genocide in Palestine and Islamophobia in the West?

Miller saw a connection between ‘Jewish intelligence’ and Zionism. I explained in my response that Zionism was the idea of British imperialism and its Christian Zionist advocates not Jews.

A lead article in The Times of 17 August 1840, called for a plan 'to plant the Jewish people in the land of their fathers' claiming that it was under 'serious political consideration' and commending the efforts of Lord Shaftesbury. When Palmerston approached the Board of Deputies in August 1840 to inquire about co-operation in Jewish settlement projects, he got a very lukewarm response. The only ones who didn’t want to ‘return’ were the Jews themselves! In a resolution passed on 7 November 1842 the Board of Deputies resolved that it

'is precluded from originating any measure for carrying out the benevolent views of Colonel Churchill respecting the Jews of Syria’.



In his latest tweet Miller simply digs himself further into a hole. We are told that ‘there are no 'Israeli' anti-Zionists’. Presumably my comrades Ronnie Barkan and Stav, who are currently facing trial for participating in a Palestine Action outing and who are already on suspended sentences don’t exist?  Both of them are Israeli.

Miller also doubts that there are ‘more than a handful of Jewish anti-Zionists anywhere, particularly if we assess anti-Zionism on a *material* basis.’ What is this material basis?  Apparently we must first become martyrs! I wonder if this applies to non-Jews and if not why not?

Apparently I was one of the few Jewish anti-Zionists he conceded did exist but I suspect that after this article I will also be relegated!

Miller is not only going down an anti-Semitic rabbit hole but a Zionist one too. Zionists claim that all Jews, bar a handful of ‘self-haters’ are Zionists. Anti-Semites too are happy to see Jews as Zionists with anti-Zionist Jews rendered invisible.

It is extremely sad and regrettable that Miller is unable to see that Zionism was the adopted policy of British and then US imperialism well before Jews. Jews provided the imperialists with legitimacy. Winkling out Zionists is not a strategy.

Tony Greenstein

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17 December 2024

Norman Finkelstein Seems to Have Been Stung by My Criticisms into Responding with an Infantile E-Mail

You Cannot Call BDS a ‘Cult’, Support the Existence of an Apartheid State & Attack the Slogan of the Movement ‘Palestine Must be Free’ & Expect To be Worshipped Like An Ancient God



Norman Finkelstein has been a remarkable analyst and critic but he has also acted like a bull in a china shop.

Finkelstein’s demolition of the fraudulent Joan Peter’s From Time Immemorial, which claimed that it was the Zionist settlement which attracted the Palestinians to Palestine and that there were therefore no refugees, was a classic example of how to deconstruct an opponent’s argument. To say that Finkelstein demolished Peters and her wretched book, whilst swimming against the tide of favourable reviews in all the mainstream press, the NYT included, is an understatement.

When Daniel Goldhagen wrote the execrable ‘The Germans: Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ which said that the Germans killed Jews because they were a particularly sadistic and cruel nation, Finkelstein tore him to pieces. So devastating was his criticism that Goldhagen threatened him with libel initially, rather than reply to the substance of the criticism.


Holocaust Industry

Finkelstein’s Holocaust Industry, helped change the debate over the weaponisation of the memory of the holocaust but it nonetheless refrained from drawing any conclusions about the relations between the Zionists and the Nazis which are surely relevant to the Zionists’ exploitation of the holocaust?

The pre-eminent holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg, author of the Destruction of European Jews was a ‘strong supporter’ of Finkelstein. Finkelstein savaged the Zionist Jewish Claims Conference which has embezzled millions of dollars, intended for the holocaust survivors, for the Zionists’ pet projects (as well as engaging in more mundane corruption).

This was all too much for the Socialist Workers’ Party resident guru, Professor Alex Callinicos [Finkelstein and the holocaust] who declared, in a review which, more than anything, demonstrated that the SWP is incapable of a serious analysis of anti-Semitism today or how the holocaust has been used to undermine Palestine solidarity.

How different is his assertion that “the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not plain fraud” from the Holocaust revisionist David Irving’s rantings during his recent libel case?... so exaggerated is his polemic that at times he comes, quite contrary to his own intentions, dangerously close to giving comfort to those who dream of new holocausts.

Perhaps this is one reason why the SWP front organisation, Stand Up to Racism, continues to march with genocidal Zionist organisations like Glasgow Friends of Israel.

The misnamed Zionist group Honest Reporting was more than happy to take advantage of Finkelstein's attack on BDS as were other Zionists

Finkelstein is not an anti-Zionist

I say all this because Finkelstein has one major flaw. And it’s not just an overweening ego. Finkelstein is not an anti-Zionist nor is he a socialist, despite once having been a Maoist. His support for a 2 State Solution, which he has never disavowed, is based on the myth of the ‘International Community’ which is nothing more than an attempt to cloak the interests of US imperialism in a democratic garb. His faith in International Law as the arbiter of relations between states and nations has been shown to be hollow with the genocide in Gaza.

Gaza has demonstrated that international law is unable to prevent Israel from committing genocide in Gaza because it has no enforcement mechanism. As long as Israel is backed by the United States it can and does act with impunity. International law can’t even prevent states like Germany and Britain supplying arms for the genocide.

Finkelstein is erratic in that he took a correct position on the 7th October attack by the Palestinian Resistance, namely that it was akin to a slave revolt against their masters, but he refused to draw the necessary conclusion that the slaves destroyed the institution of slavery where they could (Haiti) because it was incompatible with their own freedom and liberty.

Norman has consistently supported the continued existence of the Israeli state and played down its supremacist and apartheid nature. That's what support for 2 States means.


Finkelstein's Opposition to the slogan 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' echoes what the Zionists say

In his interview with the Guardian, Finkelstein made plain his disagreement with the slogan ‘Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea’ when he said:

“What do you mean by Palestine will be free? Do you mean there is no room for Israel?”

But then he went on to say something even more interesting.

 “Palestine will be free” can also mean something else. It can fit into what’s called the settler colonial framework, which basically says, “Settlers do not have legitimate rights to the land. The land belongs to those who are ‘Indigenous’ to it. And everybody else, at most, can live there on the sufferance of the Indigenous majority, or they have to pack up and leave.” And the reason that slogan is ambiguous is because the movement is ambiguous about what its goal is. And if you try to remove the ambiguity, you risk breaking up the movement.

Finkelstein did not say this to the encampment at Columbia University. At Columbia he beat about the bush and was vague and waffled on about strategic goals. He didn’t say ‘what about Israel’ there because he knows the reception that would have got. As soon as he had he finished speaking the students broke into the very slogan that he was trying to get them to disavow! Clearly his argument was not very convincing.

What Finkelstein said in his Guardian interview is that he doesn’t agree with the settler-colonial framing that apparently sees Israel as a product of western colonialism and imperialism and in which the settlers have no rights. What Finkelstein is doing is deliberately distorting and caricaturing the settler-colonial paradigm. It does not say that the settlers don’t have legitimate rights to the land. That was never said in South Africa, quite the contrary. What it said was that the settlers were entitled to live as equals with the indigenous and that is what Palestinians say today.  Although to be blunt I wouldn’t blame Palestinians for saying for example that the neo-Nazi settlers on the West Bank should fuck off back home.

What the settler colonial framework does say is that the settlers’ rights are no greater than those who are indigenous to the land and they have to jettison their belief that they are superior. All of this Finkelstein disparages and distorts.

In essence Finkelstein is a liberal democrat. That is why he is so fond of the reactionary Mahatma Ghandi whose acceptance of communal electorates helped pave the way for Partition and the present day Hindu Supremacist state of India and the permanent military dictatorship of Pakistan. 

Finkelstein isn’t prepared to say that Israel is a settler colonial state that has got to go. On the contrary he admires the early Zionists, the kibbutzim, their ‘idealism’, the ‘austere life’ and the ‘rugged individualism’ of the early Labour Zionist settlers. This isn’t a matter of speculation. It is what he wrote in correspondence to me.

It is unfortunate that Finkelstein, who is very close politically to Noam Chomsky, who himself has never disavowed Zionism, hasn’t made his position clear on Zionism and the continued existence of a Jewish State. When Finkelstein calls Israel a ‘lunatic’ or ‘satanic’ state what he is doing is saying that the genocide it is carrying out today and the expansion now in Syria isn’t on account of Zionism but relates to the ‘thuggish’ messianic vision of Netanyahu as an individual.




Susan Abulhawa & the Oxford Union Debate 

Susan Abulhawa, who made that brilliant speech at the Oxford Union debate on November 28, which was won by 278-59, was highly critical of Finkelstein’s behaviour for many of the same reasons as I've given. Susan wrote:

Finkelstein decided to back out ostensibly because Morris wasn't coming, but in reality, I think he didn't want to be overshadowed by actual Palestinians who can speak more cogently and eloquently than him on the matters pertaining to our own lives, on which he claims expertise, almost exclusively. Norman is a star and shall be treated as a star. Therefore, he demanded to have his own Oxford Union session, undiluted with the voices of pesky Palestinians. That left a gaping hole in the opposition's side, which could not be filled on such short notice. That's why the president of the union, Ebrahim Osman-Mowafy stepped in....

Norman Finkelstein had his own event the following day and everyone fawned over our white American savior. Yes, I'm angry. Norman came to be invited because I suggested he be there to have an academic counterweight to Morris. Rather than supporting Palestinians, he withdrew, apparently because he's too special and important.

The Spires of Oxford

However it wasn’t Finkelstein’s event the next day which made a political impact but the Oxford Union Debate which the pro-Palestinian side won by 4-1. Given that he had been invited at Susan’s suggestion his failure to co-ordinate tactics with her is indicative of his individualistic and egotistical approach when it comes to being part of a collective movement.

Finkelstein's Infantile E-mail

It was because of my recent blog in which I called on Finkelstein to ‘Stop Undermining the Global Movement in Support of the Palestinians’ and then a subsequent challenge by me to debate his objections to the Palestine Must be Free slogan (which he declined) that he sent me an infantile email. I guess I should be amused at finding out how thin Norman’s skin is!

Norman’s email was notionally in response to a circular I sent to people advertising a webinar on December 3, How Anti-Semitism has Complemented Zionism in which Tony Lerman, Barnaby Raine, Michael Richmond and myself spoke. Norman wrote:

I’m tempted to ask readers of my book to email Finkelstein (normfinkelstein@gmail.com/norm6344@gmail.com) to disabuse him of his belief! However that would be to respond in kind.

All I can say is that it’s clear that Finkelstein was stung by my criticisms and  instead of debating it out as we have done before, our usually loquacious academic pundit responded with a temper tantrum. Clearly Finkelstein finds it difficult to defend his opposition to the slogan without having to defend his other views such as the two state solution.

Below is my letter to Finkelstein.

Tony Greenstein

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