Norman Finkelstein: Amnesty's Gaza Reports Are 'Just Israeli Propaganda'

Norman Finkelstein: Amnesty's Gaza Reports Are 'Just Israeli Propaganda'

By Nick Mutch

Norman Finkelstein is an outspoken and controversial scholar of the Israel/Palestine conflict and one of Israel's most consistent and trenchant critics. Along with prominent Israeli historian Benny Morris, he has recently announced a partnership with Byline, a crowdfunding platform for independent journalism. He intends to use his journalism to raise $100,000, which he will donate to the Al-Awda hospital in Gaza. You can support his journalism and crowdfunding campaign here. Nick Mutch read advance copies of Norman's work on Amnesty International's Gaza war reports, and spoke with him on the phone from New York about his new project.

July 19, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - Nick Mutch ("NM"): Your latest article is extremely critical of Amnesty International's reports on Operation Protective Edge, the Israeli assault on Gaza last summer. In particular, you attack a false equivalence between "Unlawful and Deadly: Rocket and Mortar Attacks by Palestinian Armed Groups" and "Families Under the Rubble - Israeli Attacks on Inhabited Homes." Could you elaborate on this?

Norman G. Finkelstein ("NGF"): I plunged into the Amnesty reports with a lot of hope and expectation because I vividly recalled their report "22 Days of Death and Destruction," which came out after Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9. I was anticipating a rigorous, honest, legally unflinching account of what happened. In the battle for public opinion, we need organizations like Amnesty that command moral authority, as a counterweight to Israel's well-oiled propaganda apparatus.

But I am a footnote reader, and couldn't help noticing as I turned the pages how many times they were citing sources such as the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It used official propaganda outlets as authoritative sources, whereas the findings of respected Gaza-based human rights organizations such as al-Mezan went unmentioned. It crept up on me that the Amnesty reports were just Israeli propaganda, or the best face one could put on the horror Israel inflicted on Gaza.

Israel destroyed or made uninhabitable 18,000 homes. In "Families Under the Rubble," Amnesty suggests that in each and every case, Israel was actually targeting militants but used "disproportionate force." That is the perfect alibi for Israel. Everyone familiar with international humanitarian law (laws of war) knows that it is impossible to prove disproportionality. It's a meaningless concept. How can you estimate how many civilian lives are "worth" a particular military objective? It's a classic case of comparing apples and oranges.

Were there really 18,000 Hamas militants in those 18,000 homes? Look at the testimonies by Israeli combatants published by Breaking the Silence. They show that Israel did two things in Gaza. Number one, when troops went in, they were told, or construed the rules of engagement to be, everything that moves, you shoot to kill, period. In other words, there are no civilians in the designated war zones. Number two, every home you pass as you enter and leave, you demolish. The D-9 armored bulldozers were operating nonstop, flattening homes, day in and day out. What did any of this have to do with targeting militants?

Everything that moves, you shoot to kill, period.

NM: You say in your article that "Amnesty is reverting to former apologetics" but have also argued that public opinion in the rest of the world is turning against Israel. How do you account for this paradox?

NGF: Amazingly, despite media whitewashing and the formidable power of the Israel lobby, popular opposition to Israeli policy continues to grow. More and more people have penetrated the cloud of lies and are able to see the truth. Once Israel's supporters realized they had lost the battle for public opinion in liberal sectors such as college campuses and human rights organizations, they took off their kid gloves. They started accusing everyone remotely critical of Israeli policy as being anti-Semitic and exerting all sorts of pressures behind closed doors. In the case of college campuses, where articulate opinion overwhelmingly opposes Israeli policy, Jewish alumni have been mobilized to threaten a withholding of contributions.

Or, consider Amnesty's advisory council in the United Kingdom, which recently supported this new anti-anti-Semitism campaign. They capitulated to an absurd campaign. Have you looked at the statistics on this? According to all reliable polls such as Pew, anti-Semitism in the U.K. falls below 10 percent. On the other hand, 60 percent of the U.K. population harbors a negative opinion of Roma/Gypsies and 40 percent of Muslims. There was a big to-do the other day about Nazis demonstrating in the U.K. Do you know how many Nazis actually showed up? Twenty. But The Guardian still ran a big headline about a stupid British poll reporting alarming rates of anti-Semitism in the U.K. There's more prejudice against fat, short, and ugly people. I can assure you, if you ask any U.K. man whether he'd rather be Jewish or bald, he'll take Jewish.

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