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georgehunter's review
4.0
Knowing Too Much is a book by Normal Finkelstein that is mostly a series of book reviews, taking aim at Liberal Zionists in the establishment and deconstructing their work.
The exception is the first book reviewed, Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby, in Finkelstein’s chapter 4, which is itself an attack on Zionism. Finkelstein makes the case that Mearshmier and Walt’s thesis of tail-wagging-dog only had resonance because the Iraq war went badly. This is a poor way to make the point. Like Joseph Massad and Noam Chomsky, for Finkelstein, Israel is best understood as a tool of US foreign policy or Imperialism. Which is why it is strange that Finkelstein doesn’t get into how the invasion of Iraq went badly, for whom, or why. The destruction of the country, it’s infrastructure and the death of over a million of its citizens and regional aftershocks are not described by Finkelstein, nor does he take-up their pre-war foreseeability or the possibility that in an imperial dog-wags-tail world such an outcome might have been by design. I also believe the dog wags the tail (cf. the evidence Finkelstein produces of the US vetoing its own avowed policies at the UN) but I disagree with Finkelstein’s weak method of argumentation.
Chapter 5 takes up Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2006 book Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew across the Middle East divide. Finkelstein compares Goldberg to, of all people, Ari Shavit (another LIberal Zionist du jour), to demonstrate Goldberg's dismissal Palestinian suffering. Finkelstein goes into detail to hold Goldberg’s double standard up to the light: cheering “gun Zionism to Jews on one page while singing the praises of Mahatma Gandhi and MLK to Palestinians on another."
Chapter 6 reviews a series of reports, not a book, but the effort is equally important. Finkelstein shows how Human Rights Watch executed a double standard similar to Goldberg - and did so in an act of revisionism. HRW’s first report on the 2006 Lebanon war, Fatal Strikes: Israel’s indiscriminate attacks against civilians in Lebanon, is compared to the its second and third reports, Civilians Under Assault: Hezbollah’s rocket a acks on Israel in the 2006 war, and Why They Died: Civilian casualties in Lebanon during the 2006 war. Finkelstein shows how HRW updated its original findings by using one set of war crimes standards to find Hezbollah guilty of war crimes and another set of standards to let Israel off the hook - and did so in complete inversion of the evidence.
Chapter 7 is primarily a destruction of Michael Oren’s fictional and propagandistic “history,” Six Days of War: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East, but also includes a useful table setting Alan Dershowitz’s equally fictitious account against that of Zeev Maoz. In short, “the preponderance of evidence points to the conclusion that Israel did not fear an imminent Arab attack when it launched a first strike. It is accordingly inaccurate to denote Israel’s 1967 blitzkrieg 'preemptive.’” Finkelstein cites Ariel Sharon himself to validate that the 1967 attack was about asserting Israeli deterrence in the face of Nasser’s lack of fear. Along the way, Finkelstein also identifies the techniques Oren uses to reconcile the archival evidence with his apologetic narrative. This is rather useful since it could easily apply to so many other Zionist histories, such as those of Eugene Rogan:
“- attaching equal weight to a public statement (or memoir) and the hard evidence of an internal document contradicting it
- burying in an avalanche of dubious evidence a critical counter-finding
- minimizing, misrepresenting, or suppressing a critical piece of evidence."
Chapter 8 is devastating critique of Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez’s Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets’ nuclear gamble in the Six-Day War. “The June 1967 war marked, according to them, the climax of a manifold Soviet conspiracy to destroy Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Additionally they allege that not only the Soviets but also the Arabs, Americans and Israelis have participated in a “cover-up” of this conspiracy for the past 40 years, until their own “laborious sleuthing” unearthed nuggets of information and connected the dots.” Finkelstein contacts the Russian Pilot whose alleged actions lie at the heart of Ginor and Remez’s conspiracy, and the pilot refutes all of their claims. The wide embrace of this absurd theory also implicates not only the authors but also the American establishment that supported them.
Chapter 9 usefully provides a history of UN resolution 242 and refutation of the Zionist claim (via Julius Stone) that International law does not forbid the acquisition territory by force when "the force is used to stop an aggressor.” The chapter also centers around a review of Dennis Ross’s account of “peace talks,” The Missing Peace: The inside story of the fight for Middle East peace, in which Palestinian violence is blamed for the collapse of the peace process, and Israeli colonial violence is glossed over. "It is a point d’honneur for Ross that he personally lobbied for the Oslo Accord to 'contain a clear renunciation of terror and violence from Arafat'; that he personally urged Albright to 'come down hard on [Palestinian] terror'; and that he personally ‘confronted' Arafat to 'take action' against terrorism. His passionate sympathy for Israeli victims of criminal violence apparently did not extend to Palestinian victims, however. Judging by his own account Ross never once entreated Israeli leaders to curb their far greater brutality."
Chapter 10 is a review of the works and metamorphisis of Benny Morris from New Historian, challenging the Zionist narrative (Righteous Victims; Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem), to become Zionism’s “court historian” (1948: the first Arab-Israeli war; One State, Two States). TO me, one of the most comparisons of Morris with Morris concerns a core understanding. In the past, Morris agreed with Ben-Gurion that the Zionist-Arab ‘conflict,' “is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves,” whereas “the root cause of the conflict, according to Morris as he reinvented himself by customizing his history, was and remains to this day 'Islamic Judeophobia.’"
As useful as all these book reviews are, however, it is difficult to see how much they have to do with the way the book is positioned to the reader - not as a series of book reviews, but as an analysis of the end of the Jewish American love affair with Israel. The first three chapters discuss what most potential readers will already know: that a gap is opening up between Liberal Jewish-America and Fascist Jewish-Israel. Indeed, the Electronic Intifada’s review ( https://electronicintifada.net/content/book-review-finkelstein-airbrushes-palestinians-out-their-own-struggle/11481 ) rightfully takes Finkelstein to task for attributing this change to Jewish actors and “airbrushing Palestinians out of their own struggle.” EI also reminds readers - at the beginning of its piece - of Finkelstein’s red-hot rage against the BDS movement. But Finkelstein and his work are not without merit just because he is, himself, a liberal zionist (albeit a critical one). It is just that one needs to dance gingerly to extract that merit.
Much of that dancing is required because, as a liberal Zionist, the one thing Finkelstein refuses to take up is also the only thing that matters: 1948 and the refugees. Finkelstein is obsessed with 1967 - with Michael Oren’s fiction of 1967, with Ginor and Remez’s conspiracy of 1967, with UN resolution 242 from 1967, and with the love affair of Jewish Americans with Israel. Finkelstein not only describes 1967 as the year the latter phenomenon began (as a means of assimilation into American society, once American and Israeli interests were aligned), but also as the year Israel began to go bad: "The ‘new' Israel that emerged after, and was largely a by-product of, the June 1967 war came to bear fainter and fainter resemblance to the Zion of the liberal Jewish imagination. The irony is, the fascination of American Jews with Israel’s socialist utopia began just on the point of its vanishing."
Narratives of transformation and change are important for liberal Zionists because they imply there was something innocent and pure about Israel's creation until things began to go bad - after 1967, after neoliberalism, after Netanyahu, etc. For them, the problem is not the establishment of an ethnonationalist settler-colonial state, but whatever came afterward. It is a way of appearing to be extremely critical, without actually engaging on the question that matters.
This is also why liberal Zionist “solutions” to “the conflict” prescribe more of the very same diseases to cure our infection: segregation & partition. Finkelstein is no different in this book, stumping for “a two-state settlement along the 4 June 1967 border and mutual recognition.” And the refugees from 1948, Norman? Where shall they go? When will you grant them, from your perch in America, the right to return home?
The exception is the first book reviewed, Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby, in Finkelstein’s chapter 4, which is itself an attack on Zionism. Finkelstein makes the case that Mearshmier and Walt’s thesis of tail-wagging-dog only had resonance because the Iraq war went badly. This is a poor way to make the point. Like Joseph Massad and Noam Chomsky, for Finkelstein, Israel is best understood as a tool of US foreign policy or Imperialism. Which is why it is strange that Finkelstein doesn’t get into how the invasion of Iraq went badly, for whom, or why. The destruction of the country, it’s infrastructure and the death of over a million of its citizens and regional aftershocks are not described by Finkelstein, nor does he take-up their pre-war foreseeability or the possibility that in an imperial dog-wags-tail world such an outcome might have been by design. I also believe the dog wags the tail (cf. the evidence Finkelstein produces of the US vetoing its own avowed policies at the UN) but I disagree with Finkelstein’s weak method of argumentation.
Chapter 5 takes up Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2006 book Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew across the Middle East divide. Finkelstein compares Goldberg to, of all people, Ari Shavit (another LIberal Zionist du jour), to demonstrate Goldberg's dismissal Palestinian suffering. Finkelstein goes into detail to hold Goldberg’s double standard up to the light: cheering “gun Zionism to Jews on one page while singing the praises of Mahatma Gandhi and MLK to Palestinians on another."
Chapter 6 reviews a series of reports, not a book, but the effort is equally important. Finkelstein shows how Human Rights Watch executed a double standard similar to Goldberg - and did so in an act of revisionism. HRW’s first report on the 2006 Lebanon war, Fatal Strikes: Israel’s indiscriminate attacks against civilians in Lebanon, is compared to the its second and third reports, Civilians Under Assault: Hezbollah’s rocket a acks on Israel in the 2006 war, and Why They Died: Civilian casualties in Lebanon during the 2006 war. Finkelstein shows how HRW updated its original findings by using one set of war crimes standards to find Hezbollah guilty of war crimes and another set of standards to let Israel off the hook - and did so in complete inversion of the evidence.
Chapter 7 is primarily a destruction of Michael Oren’s fictional and propagandistic “history,” Six Days of War: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East, but also includes a useful table setting Alan Dershowitz’s equally fictitious account against that of Zeev Maoz. In short, “the preponderance of evidence points to the conclusion that Israel did not fear an imminent Arab attack when it launched a first strike. It is accordingly inaccurate to denote Israel’s 1967 blitzkrieg 'preemptive.’” Finkelstein cites Ariel Sharon himself to validate that the 1967 attack was about asserting Israeli deterrence in the face of Nasser’s lack of fear. Along the way, Finkelstein also identifies the techniques Oren uses to reconcile the archival evidence with his apologetic narrative. This is rather useful since it could easily apply to so many other Zionist histories, such as those of Eugene Rogan:
“- attaching equal weight to a public statement (or memoir) and the hard evidence of an internal document contradicting it
- burying in an avalanche of dubious evidence a critical counter-finding
- minimizing, misrepresenting, or suppressing a critical piece of evidence."
Chapter 8 is devastating critique of Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez’s Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets’ nuclear gamble in the Six-Day War. “The June 1967 war marked, according to them, the climax of a manifold Soviet conspiracy to destroy Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Additionally they allege that not only the Soviets but also the Arabs, Americans and Israelis have participated in a “cover-up” of this conspiracy for the past 40 years, until their own “laborious sleuthing” unearthed nuggets of information and connected the dots.” Finkelstein contacts the Russian Pilot whose alleged actions lie at the heart of Ginor and Remez’s conspiracy, and the pilot refutes all of their claims. The wide embrace of this absurd theory also implicates not only the authors but also the American establishment that supported them.
Chapter 9 usefully provides a history of UN resolution 242 and refutation of the Zionist claim (via Julius Stone) that International law does not forbid the acquisition territory by force when "the force is used to stop an aggressor.” The chapter also centers around a review of Dennis Ross’s account of “peace talks,” The Missing Peace: The inside story of the fight for Middle East peace, in which Palestinian violence is blamed for the collapse of the peace process, and Israeli colonial violence is glossed over. "It is a point d’honneur for Ross that he personally lobbied for the Oslo Accord to 'contain a clear renunciation of terror and violence from Arafat'; that he personally urged Albright to 'come down hard on [Palestinian] terror'; and that he personally ‘confronted' Arafat to 'take action' against terrorism. His passionate sympathy for Israeli victims of criminal violence apparently did not extend to Palestinian victims, however. Judging by his own account Ross never once entreated Israeli leaders to curb their far greater brutality."
Chapter 10 is a review of the works and metamorphisis of Benny Morris from New Historian, challenging the Zionist narrative (Righteous Victims; Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem), to become Zionism’s “court historian” (1948: the first Arab-Israeli war; One State, Two States). TO me, one of the most comparisons of Morris with Morris concerns a core understanding. In the past, Morris agreed with Ben-Gurion that the Zionist-Arab ‘conflict,' “is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves,” whereas “the root cause of the conflict, according to Morris as he reinvented himself by customizing his history, was and remains to this day 'Islamic Judeophobia.’"
As useful as all these book reviews are, however, it is difficult to see how much they have to do with the way the book is positioned to the reader - not as a series of book reviews, but as an analysis of the end of the Jewish American love affair with Israel. The first three chapters discuss what most potential readers will already know: that a gap is opening up between Liberal Jewish-America and Fascist Jewish-Israel. Indeed, the Electronic Intifada’s review ( https://electronicintifada.net/content/book-review-finkelstein-airbrushes-palestinians-out-their-own-struggle/11481 ) rightfully takes Finkelstein to task for attributing this change to Jewish actors and “airbrushing Palestinians out of their own struggle.” EI also reminds readers - at the beginning of its piece - of Finkelstein’s red-hot rage against the BDS movement. But Finkelstein and his work are not without merit just because he is, himself, a liberal zionist (albeit a critical one). It is just that one needs to dance gingerly to extract that merit.
Much of that dancing is required because, as a liberal Zionist, the one thing Finkelstein refuses to take up is also the only thing that matters: 1948 and the refugees. Finkelstein is obsessed with 1967 - with Michael Oren’s fiction of 1967, with Ginor and Remez’s conspiracy of 1967, with UN resolution 242 from 1967, and with the love affair of Jewish Americans with Israel. Finkelstein not only describes 1967 as the year the latter phenomenon began (as a means of assimilation into American society, once American and Israeli interests were aligned), but also as the year Israel began to go bad: "The ‘new' Israel that emerged after, and was largely a by-product of, the June 1967 war came to bear fainter and fainter resemblance to the Zion of the liberal Jewish imagination. The irony is, the fascination of American Jews with Israel’s socialist utopia began just on the point of its vanishing."
Narratives of transformation and change are important for liberal Zionists because they imply there was something innocent and pure about Israel's creation until things began to go bad - after 1967, after neoliberalism, after Netanyahu, etc. For them, the problem is not the establishment of an ethnonationalist settler-colonial state, but whatever came afterward. It is a way of appearing to be extremely critical, without actually engaging on the question that matters.
This is also why liberal Zionist “solutions” to “the conflict” prescribe more of the very same diseases to cure our infection: segregation & partition. Finkelstein is no different in this book, stumping for “a two-state settlement along the 4 June 1967 border and mutual recognition.” And the refugees from 1948, Norman? Where shall they go? When will you grant them, from your perch in America, the right to return home?
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