Finkelstein also took part in a good debate on the issue on Democracy Now! this week with Shlomo Ben Ami.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/14/1518240

Absolutly right, there's nothing unusual about the situation at all.

A people are driven from their land though conquest by a superior military. The conquerers settle. They, in turn, are driven from the land by a new power. Then--you guessed it--the -new- new conquerers are driven off. This happens innumerable times, and finally, one people who'd been driven away long ago--with no greater or lesser claim than any of the previous or later residents--returns, and is in conflict with descendents of other conquerers.

It's not just not unusual, it's the story of human history. What's curious is why we decide to stop history at a certain point, and declare that -those- are the true residents.

I'm not sure what the point it here. It sounds like he is complaining about Israeli apologists but....for what? For there being a state of Israel or for the treatment of Palestinians? I think the treatment of the Palestinians is unconscionable. On the other hand, I do think Israel has a right to exist.

I like Bartcop's idea of just giving the Palestinians a homeland in Oklahoma. Nobody else really wants to live there anyway....

This is the first time I've found an article posted offensive. Finklestein is wrong to say that this is a simple issue. It is complex. It is only simple for the radicals on both sides who seek to wipe out the other. For those looking for a solution all can live with, it is complicated. You have Jews whose ancestors inhabited that land in one way or another for the last 3000 years,having conquered it from Canaanites and Philistines. And you have Arabs who conquered the land from a long line of conquerors, or who may have been the historical Philistines. Both groups have a claim and it is not clear whose claim supercedes whose. For example, by the standards that would give the land to the Palestinians, white Americans, Canadians and all white North and South Americans should move out and give the land back to the Indians. Jews can make the same claim to being the original inhabitants and ask the Palestinians to move back to Arabia. Obviously, none of these scenarios is feasible. So the only solution is to find some sharing arrangement. To be fair, until recently, Zionists have always been open to sharing. In 1948, it was the Palestinians and Arabs from surrounding countries who refused to share. To be fair to the Arabs, they thought they could wipe out the Jews and keep the land for themselves. They lost fair and square. But they still refuse to share on the victor's terms. They lost and continue to lose but refuse to accept a sharing arrangement. Now there are elements of the Zionist movement (Likkud) that refuse to share as well. So if Finklestein thinks this isnt complicated, he's seriously on crack.

Finkelstein likes selective history. He forgest that there were no "Palestinians" to speak of before the Zionist movement brought returning Jews to repopulate the land. Jews lived in the area as long as anyone, and the total early 19th century population was in the thousands. After the Zionist movement brought large numbers of Jews back to their historic homeland, large numbers of Arabs followed because of the greater economic opportunity. The political decision to create a Jewish homeland in Israel occurred at the same time as the equally political decisions to create nations of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and others.

Why should the Arabs who immigrated to Israel in the late 19th and 20th centuries have greater rights to it than the Jews? And why should people born elsewhere have any rights to it?

i feel terrible for the palestinians because they've been betrayed by their own leadership far more acutely and chronically than americans. you'd think that $900 million would be enough seed money to build infrastructure in palestine, yet, that's exactly how much money (according to IMF) that arafat and his cronies pilfered from international donations. (including israeli support.)

hamas, the exemplar of armed religious fanaticism in the region masquerades as a collective of freedom fighters. from indescriminate killings of innocent pedestrians and using their own people as human shields (on countless occasions) to the sexist and delusional promise of virgins in the afterlife -- they are the true oppressors.

link to the chomsky-dershowitz debate at harvard: http://iopforum.harvard.edu:8080/ramgen/fr112905israel.rm

I do disagree with Finkelstein. The situation is complicated. It's absurd to say this is just another case of colonialism, racism, or some other kind of oppression. When Britain starts a war with China just to get them to trade for opium, that's straightforward imperialism. When a people is brought to the brink of annihilation by genocidal Europeans, after which they establish an ethnic homeland in another part of the world through the help of other Europeans, in the process dispossessing some other local people, that's complicated. I'm not exactly a Zionist, but the experiences which motivated Zionism were just as real as the experiences of the Palestinians today.

Still I don't agree that the "Zionists have always been willing to share". True, in 1948 the Jews in Palestine were demanding a quite modest slice of land, which was in fact less than they had even before the six day war. But this slice was going to be an exclusively Jewish state. It's like saying that black separatists in the U.S. in the sixties were very willing to share, because they only wanted a couple states in the South. The Palestinians were not and are not today demanding an exclusively Palestinian state. The conflict in that sense is not symmetrical. Any Jew from anywhere in the world can go to Palestine today and with little effort become a voting Israeli citizen. But if you are a Palestinian born in the West Bank you have no such rights.

I must disagree with Finkelstein because he has made a number of statements that are blatantly false. Here are some facts he decides to leave out.

One: the Jews legally purchased, for way more than it was worth, most of the land that became the state of Israel from the Palestinians who were content to let it lie as useless desert while the Jews went through the back-breaking labour to turn it into arable farmland. The success of the Jews made the wealthy arab landholders fear that their own people would rise up and demand a better standard of living. They then began the process of religiously villifying the Jews that continues today.

Two: they made no attempt to drive away the native "Palestinians" at any point unless said "Palestinians" attacked them first.Their were many instances of "Palestinian" irregulars attacking Jewish settlements and massacring them, women and children included.

Three: The reason the "Palestinians" left their homes was because their leaders(selfish bastards who kept their people poor and ignorant so they could easily control them) told them that the Jews would come and kill them all. In actual fact their was only one instance of the Jews killing civilians leading up to and during its war for survival as a state, and this was carried out by a fringe radical group that has since ceased to exist. In no way does this balance out the countless instances of rape, torture, murder and civilian massacre practiced by the arabs.

Four: The only reason they are still in Israel today is because when they first fled, the other arab countries surrounding Israel refused to let them in just so they could use them as a way to discredit the Jews.

Five: At the time, they were free to live anywhere in Israel as long as they could live peacefully within the community. This is still true today. After setting up their farming communities when they first arrived, the Jews tried to teach the arabs better farming methods to improve their lives. They always gave help when asked.

Six: "Palestinian" nationalism was (and still is to my mind) fiction. It was created as a means to destroy Israel. Thats it. It has no historiccal basis beyond the fact that there were arabs living in the area that the British decided should be called the "Palestine mandate" who were then referred to as "Palestinian arabs" or more often just arabs. Because thats what they were. The people, who were no different from arabs anywhere else, who happened to be their at the time.

To conclude my rant I must ask you to remember this: the greatest enemy of an arab has always been another arab. They have been shamelessly exploited by their leaders to further their own political agenda. The whole affair is one long sad story that was started by the lies of a few old selfish arab bastards.

Adam: There is a technical term for almost all of your points--you may have heard it before ('bullshit'). It's a simplistic fantasy: hey it's not so bad that Israel may occupy land inhabited by disenfranchized Palestinians indefinitely into the future, because they could never rule themselves anyway.

As for the yarn that the refugee problem had nothing to do with the Israeli army, it's been thoroughly debunked by Israeli researchers themselves. The best treatment is Morris' "Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem". It shows that indeed some refugees were told to leave by Arab soldiers and some left on their own (because they believed the propaganda that Israel would be defeated within weeks). But Israeli soldiers also drove out Palestinian Arabs e.g. out of Deir Yassin. This last fact was of course well known before Morris's study, though he concluded that it wasn't part of an intentional plan to expel Arabs.

But it really doesn't matter--the right of civilians to return to their homes after the fighting is over is a widely recognized principle of international law. Without it states could conveniently direct the fighting toward the population centers of unfavored groups in an underhanded attempt to get rid of them. If you were forced to leave your home in a time of war, would you accept the fact that you couldn't return because--sorry--you left under false pretenses, and it was a Caucasian (or black, hispanic, asian etc.) person like you who told you to leave? It's a plainly racist argument.

To respond to Adam's fabrications as to what caused the refugee problem, I'll simply quote Benny Morris, the Israeli historian who has done the most serious archival work and is generally regarded as the leading scholar on this topic. Here's his conclusion about the origin of the refugee problem: "Above all, let me reiterate, the refugee problem was caused by attacks by Jewish forces on Arab villages and towns and by the inhabitants' fear of such attacks, compounded by expulsions, atrocities, and rumors of atrocities - and by the crucial Israeli cabinet decision in June 1948 to bar a refugee return," leaving the Palestinians "crushed, with some 700,000 driven into exile and another 150,000 left under Israeli rule."