35 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An enlightening book, September 12, 2005
I am appalled at what Saul Freidman said about this book. Clearly he did not read the book. Norman Finkelstein has not been tormenting holocaust survivors.This is a cruel thing to say as both of Professor Finkelstein's parents were themselves Holocaust survivors. Both were in the Warsaw Ghetto and his mother was in Auschwitz. His parents lost all their surviving relatives in the holocaust. Dr Finkelstein was angry because although many Jewish organizations got rich from reparations from the holocaust, virtually none of the survivors got one penny, including Finkelstein's parents. If Freidman had read the interview with Professor Finkelstein he would know this.Instead he accuses this poor man, who has only tried to honor the memory of his parents, of tormenting Holocaust survivors. Shame on you, Saul Freidman! That is no way to treat a fellow Jew- just because he does not agree with you about Israeli policies. Friedman also lies--or has not read any of the book--on the issue of "suicide bombers." Not one of the people interviewed defends suicide bombing. Farber, Shapiro, Finkelstein, Quester and others specifically condemn the suicide bombing conducted by groups like Hamas. But they also condemn the murder of defenseless Palestinian women and children by the Israel Army--5 times as many as Israelis murdered. Steve Quester, a Jew who lived with a Palestinian family, witnessed Israeli soldiers shooting at little Palestinian children. As Jews we have to be honor our greeat ethical and religious tradition. This means we must condemn injustice even when it comes from our side. This means we must face the fact that the Israeli government has treated the Palestinians like dogs. The Jews in this book are brave enough to demand justice for all people. Dr Farber has done a great service by putting this book together. He did this out of love for the Jewish people--he wants them to live up to the high standards of justice upon which our religious tradition is based. And this book convinced me that we Jews can do that. But we must first start treating the Palestinians as our brothers and sisters. We must demand that Israel withdraw from the West Bank and remove the Jewish settlements, so that the Palestinians can have a decent amount of land to create their own state. As Americans we must tell our own government that it must say to Israel that it will reduce the billions of dollars of grants given to it every year unless it ends the Occupation. If you read this book with an open mind it will completely change the way you look at the situation in the middle east.It changed my mind. It made me realize that the Palestinians are human, it made me ashamed of what Israel has done--and it made me feel that in the name of the great tradition of Judaism (which believes that all human beings are equal--see Isaiah)I must work to help end the occupation of Palestinian land. Dr Farber's has his own perspective which he explains in the last chapter. He believes strongly in the teachings of the Biblical Jewish prophets. As Micah said in the Bible: "Act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with thy God." Farber has done that.Kudoos. He has put together an important book. Every Jew, every American, should read it.
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27 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Prophetic Judaism vs Israeli Policies, June 27, 2005
This is a brilliant book. Before I read it I thought both Jews and Palestinians were equally to blame for the quagmire in Israel. After reading Dr Farber, Noam Chomsky, Mezvinsky, Finkelstein and the account of his experiences by Steve Quester who spent 3 summers in the West Bank risking his life to protect Palestinians, I changed my mind. I realized that what the Jewish settlers did and are doing to the Palestinians in 1948 and today is exactly what Europeans settlers did in America to the Indians--dispossessing a native people of their land, rendering them homeless, herding them into the modern reservations. In Israel the reservations are rufugee camps in the West Bank and elsewhere. Finkelstein's account of Palestinians' expulsion and dispossession in 1948, laced by Farber with accounts by observers of the 1948 war, made me want to cry.What have we done to the poor Palestinians? What have we become as Jews? We were a moral spiritual people and now most of us spend our time trying to deny that we have done anything wrong, inventing rationalizations for Israel. We claim the Palestinians were always bad, Arabs are always bad, or that there were no Palestinians in Palestine! Finkelstein--whose parents were both Holocaust survivors--demolishes this last myth. The scholars in this book are top of the field.And the book is praised by first rate scholars, as well as by the great Daniel Berrigan. It is fascinatating to get a glimpse into the souls of those Farber interviews--because his questions are probing.
Marc Elis the theolgian says we should apologize to the Palestinians, we should confess our sins. They were expelled and not allowed to return--in violation of the UN and international law. In our greed for land we HAVE sinned. In our disregard for justice and God we have sinned. Nor,as Farber shows,can the conflict be blamed solely on the the Holocaust.Most of the holocaust survivors did not want to go to Israel but to America, but Ben-Gurion opposed that.American Jewish organizations refused to fight for the right of Jews to come here. Further as Chomsky and Farber show there were other Jews like Martin Buber and Judah Magnes who proposed solutions that would enable the Jews and Arabs to share the land but the hard core Zionists would have nothing of it
I was surprised to learn that Steve Quester, an American Jew, was welcomed with open arms by the Palestinians. Quester went to Palestine with the ISM, a movement that knee-jerk Zionists disparage as pro-terrorist but his dedication to non-violence could not be clearer. The reviewers who puts down the ISM probably did not read the interviews with Quester and Adam Shapiro. Or she read them with a hardened heart.
Why are the people Farber interviewed speaking out on behalf of the Palestinians when the Jewish community is trashing them for it?? One young woman in the book, Ora Wise, is the daughter of a conservative rabbi. Her entire family is furious at her for supporting Palestinians rights to self--determination.Her father won't talk to her. It cannot be easy for these people to take the positions they do. They do it out of a sense of moral obligation. The theologian Marc Ellis says in Farber's book that many Jews of conscience choose to take positions that lead to their ostracism by the organized Jewish community. This is a lonely position to be in--hated and despised by family and friends;Ellis says they are entering into a "new exile"--from the Jewish community in the diaspora. Why? Why do they risk their lives by going to Palestine where Israeli soldiers shoot bullets over their heads or beat them with sticks? (Several, like Rachel Corrie, were even murdered by the Israeli Army.) There can be only one reason. The call of conscience is so powerful among many Jews (albeit a minority) it overwhelms the lure of security. Marc Ellis a theologian says that by standing up for the Palestinians they are saving the Jewish covenant itself, Jews' covenant with God to serve all of humanity, to serve as a light unto the nations.They carry the covenant with them into exile. It is lonely but the lives of the Jewish prophets were lonely. Farber states that he worships the God of justice rather the idol of the Jewish state.
One reviewer claimed that Jews were a majority in the part of Palestine granted.Does she not understand that is irrelevant: Jews were a minority in Mandate Palestine. They were only 30% of the population and had purchased only 6% of the land. Not everything can be bought with money. These scholars show that the Palestinians were attached to their homes and their land. Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister and architect of the Jewish state, knew that a war was necessary in order to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its Arab inhabitants. He said so in 1937:"... we have to stick to compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the projected Jewish state.."
In the end Farber demonstrates that prophetic Judaism and Zionism are incompatible. Jews cannot worship power and serve the cause of justice, the God of justice. I think his last chapter is one of the most powerful statements in the book.It is a powerful affirmation of Judaism. In fact he argues that the hard-core Zionists are self-hating Jews because they have repudiated the heart of the Jewish tradition--its prophetic core. He srgues the only way to recover this tradition is to enter into solidarity with the Palestinians, and to divorce ourselves from our modern role of defending the crimes of the powerful Jewish nation-state. That is what Isaiah would have done. For it was Isaiah who exhorted all peoples to beat their swords into ploughshares---and foresaw a time of peace when the earth would be full of the knowledge of the Lord. Farber's book is a contribution to the goal of Isaiah.
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11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Jewish self-haters all?, June 16, 2007
This review is from: Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers: Conversations with Jewish Critics of Israel (Library Binding)
Criticism of Israel and its policies is verboten in polite company in the US. Those who doubt this need only look to the reception accorded President Jimmy Carter's tepid book
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Carter makes no controversial claims. Yet we are repeatedly told that Carter is an anti-Semite and wants to destroy the state of Israel! Or consider the shameful attacks on Prof. Norman G. Finkelstein for daring to document that the Nazi genocide was being exploited, and not for the benefit of survivors, in his book
The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, New Edition 2nd Edition: we are to believe he is a minimizer of the Nazi genocide, even though it is well known that both his parents were survivors of the concentration camps. All this even as toasts are raised to the plagiarist, torture-condoner, arch-Israeli-apologist Dershowitz.
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