Finkelstein’s Constant Alertness
On Tuesday 30 January 2007 SLU Solidarity with Palestine hosted DePaul professor Norman Finkelstein to speak on the Israel-Palestine conflict. From his gripping lecture and several books, Professor Finkelstein reminds me of something Edward Said once said in his 1993 Reith Lectures: “At bottom, the intellectual, in my sense of the word, is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwillingly, but actively willing to say so in public. This is not always a matter of being a critic of government policy, but rather of thinking of the intellectual vocation as maintaining a state of constant alertness, of a perpetual willingness not to let half-truths or received ideas steer one along. That this involves a steady realism, an almost athletic rational energy, and a complicated struggle to balance the problems of one’s own selfhood against the demands of publishing and speaking out in the public sphere is what makes it an everlasting effort, constitutively unfinished and necessarily imperfect. Yet its invigorations and complexities, for me at least, make one the richer for it, even though it doesn’t make one particularly popular.”
For many of us who were there that evening in the Anheuser Busch Auditorium, Professor Finkelstein exuded that athletic rational energy as well as an unwillingness to accept so many of the myths and assumptions in the mainstream academic discourse about Palestine and Israel. In his recent book, he writes, “The purpose of Beyond Chutzpah is to lift the veil of contrived controversy shrouding the Israel-Palestine conflict. I am convinced that anyone confronting the undistorted record will recognize the injustice Palestinians have suffered. I hope this book will also provide impetus for readers to act on the basis of truth so that, together, we can achieve a just and lasting piece in Israel and Palestine.”
It was quite moving at the end of the question and answer period when a Palestinian-American woman addressed the audience, speaking of her life under military occupation as a university student at Bir Zeit in the 1970s. She said to Professor Finkelstein, “We need so many of you out there to speak. People will listen to you. The do not listen to us.”
Professor Finkelstein, often subjected to outrageous defamation and distortion admitted that he is feeling very hopeful. He had addressed the controversy surrounding Jimmy Carter, and while not a fan of the ex-President, he believed that Carter had broken a taboo. His critics who make the most outlandish accusations against Carter failed: Carter did not back down. He did not give in. He did not go silent.
For over twenty years, Norman Finkelstein has done the same as Carter: To his detractors’ dismay, he has not relented. As he writes in his book, “Tell the truth, fight for justice: this is the time-tested strategy for fighting anti-Semitism, as well as other forms of bigotry.”