Finkelstein: Gaza is gone, but don’t give up

Here are two videos of the inestimable Norman Finkelstein. The first one is just under ten minutes while the second is much longer: it starts at about 28 minutes into the 100-minute video.

'Gaza is GONE:' Prof. Norman Finkelstein on Israel's Destruction by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

“Norman Finkelstein: There’s no question in my mind what’s going to happen: Israel is going to say we’re not letting cement into Gaza. It already did that after Cast Lead. It said that Hamas will use the cement to build tunnels. ‘We’re not going to let cement in.‘ And nobody in the international community is going to quarrel with that.

“Hamas, they say, built 450 miles of tunnels, which I consider complete nonsense. All these numbers that everybody repeats moronically from the state of Israel. If they had built 450 miles of tunnels […] that would be larger than the tunnel system of the New York Subway system. The New York Subway system has 430 miles of tunnels. Are you going to tell me that Hamas built 450 miles in Gaza? It’s 26 miles long and five miles wide.

“But that’s the excuse that Israel is going to use and everybody will accept it. So, between the 45 million tons of rubble and the fact that Israel won’t let cement in—there is no Gaza anymore.”

Extended episode: Norman Finkelstein Isn't Giving Up by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

At 51:00,

“There’s no war in Gaza. The moment Israel, the moment the media reported, each day, the conflict under the subheadline…it would be the main headline, and the sub headline everywhere was the ‘Israel Hamas War’. The Israel Hamas War. The moment they got that sub headline, Israel won the propaganda war because they were depicting it as a war. There was no war in Gaza. There are no battles in Gaza. You search your memory, 365 days, do you remember one day when a battle was reported? What they do is they just flatten everything in their path. Pulverize it. And then, they move in, in order to blow up—they don’t even go into the tunnels, they blow up the shafts of the tunnels.

“There was no war in Gaza. It’s all a myth. That’s why you know, when you hear the talk…Israel says ‘we killed 18,000 fighters—Hamas terrorists.’ How would they know? How would they know who they killed? Gaza’s Ministry of Health doesn’t know. Because Hamas doesn’t wear uniforms. They don’t carry around IDs saying Hamas terrorist. So, the Ministry of Health hasn’t a clue whether this young male in front of them is Hamas or just was a young male who was walking in the street or in a building. So how would Israel know? It never actually fights Hamas militants. It may see some dead bodies on the ground but it doesn’t have a clue whether it’s a militant.

“Every time you see the Israeli figures…I could predict every figure Israel will produce from now till next year. You know how you know how many are produced? What numbers they’ll use? It’s very simple: whatever number Israel, excuse me, whatever number the Ministry of Health releases as total deaths…let’s say now they’re saying 42,000 right? So Israel is going to say we killed 21,000 Hamas terrorists. With this, they want to show the one-to-one ratio to prove they’re the most moral army in the world. Because other places, it’s 3-1 or 4-1, but here it’s 1-1, so all they do is take the total number killed, divide it in half, and say that’s the number of militants we killed, or terrorists that we killed. They don’t have a clue. There’s no fighting going on in Gaza. It’s a genocide.”

At 57:00,

“The South Africans, they went to the ICJ to say: ‘this is a genocide. It’s not a war.‘ And, if you read their application, they never use language like ‘a disproportionate attack’. They don’t use language like ‘disproportionate’. They don’t use the language like even ‘indiscriminate’. They use the language, ‘they’re targeting the civilians.‘ Do you know what a disproportionate attack means? It means you have a military target and you cause what’s called ‘excessive damage’ to civilians and civilian infrastructure.

“So, let’s say you want to attack Nala. You want to kill Nala. Does that justify killing 300 civilians? Or is it disproportionate? But a disproportionate attack presumes you are targeting a military site or combatants. But that’s not what’s been happening in Gaza. They’re not attacking military targets. If they hit a military target, it’s just by accident. It’s a statistical error if they hit—it’s the equivalent of a statistical error.”

From the accompanying article, Norman Finkelstein Isn’t Giving Up by Useful Idiots (Substack),

““I read this letter,” he tells us, “from sixty-five physicians from around the world who gave testimony as to what they observed. And every one of the physicians testified that the children who were coming into the hospital had bullet wounds to the skull or to the chest. No shrapnel. It wasn’t bombs and shrapnel. It was targeted bullet wounds to the skull and to the chest of children. What does that have to do with war?”

““There were fifty-four disabled children who used the school in the convent complex. They fired two shells at it. What does that have to do with war?”

“Norman also recalls meeting Hezbollah members, and shares what he got wrong about the organization. “Israel, he says, “is willing to kill for material benefit, and Hezbollah and Hamas are willing to die for survival” He also recounts his time meeting Hamas leaders, and explains Israel’s unfair advantage:

““Israel is the entrenched, concentrated manifestation of Western imperialism. It’s got deep roots. It’s got the whole Western system behind it, that Western system which won’t let go. It will nuke China before it lets go of its global dominance. And in order to defeat it, it requires a very long-term struggle and intense calculation.”

“[…] Norman explains this despair, and the generational hopelessness which lacks historical precedent.

““Our generation,” he laments, “has, for good reason, lost the belief, the conviction that we have the force of history behind us. That we have the force of justice behind us. Our generation believes there’s a good chance we’ll be defeated. There’s a good chance we’re not going to win.”

“But that doesn’t mean we should give up.

““The only thing I can say as a conclusion is you never know. You can only know one thing for certain: If you do nothing, it can only get worse.”

“It’s that certainty that he says keeps him going. “If you resist, there are moments where it looks very grim. And then there’s that folk song, it’s always darkest before the dawn. It’s this hope that keeps me carrying on. It’s always darkest before the dawn.”

““There’s another reality. There’s something in the human constitution that simply can’t do nothing. In the face of such death and devastation, you just can’t.””