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On its 40th anniversary, we’re considering the aftermath and consequences of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War with DePaul University scholar Norman Finkelstein, author of Beyond Chutzpah. Yesterday, we heard another perspective on the conflict from American-Israeli historian Michael Oren, author of the best-selling Six Days of War.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jerome McDonnell: Norman Finkelstein is Assistant Professor of Political Science at DePaul and is the author of Beyond Chutzpah: on the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. And I’ll talk with him towards the end of the hour about the very public debate over his tenure bid at DePaul but we’ll spend most of our time today with the Six Day War. And Norman Finkelstein told me about the build up to the war.

Norman Finkelstein: In order to understand the biuld up to the war the best place to begin is November, 1966. There was an Israeli retaliatory, as they call it, attack on a Jordanian village called Samu. In the course of this attack on Samu they blew up around 125 buildings and killed a large number of Jordanian soldiers.

When that attack happened the Jordanians and also the Syrians began to attack Nasser for not coming to their defense. Here was this Egyptian president claiming to be the leader of Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism and he was doing nothing. Nasser was being taunted for his, as it were, impotence in the face of Israeli aggression.

And there were various incidents in the Syrian Golan Heights and also by Syrian-backed Palestinian commandos. Now there there’s a certain amount of confusion which is important to clarify. Moshe Dayan, who became the defense minister during the June ’67 war, gave an interview in 1976 in which he acknowledges, and now I’m more or less quoting him, that 80%, he said at least 80%, but I’ll say 80% of the incidents with the Syrians were instigated by us. That we were engaged, now I’m using my language, but it’s I think a correct paraphrase, we were engaged in a land grab in what were called the demilitarized zones between Syria and Israel. And in the course of this land grab there were conflicts arising with the Syrians. And it was only as a result of these conflicts that the Syrians then would fire artillery from the Golan Heights on the Israelis. So Moshe Dayan himself acknowledged that was instigated by the Israelis.

In April, just let me get right up to the point where the count down, as it were, begins. In April 1967 one of those incidents instigated by the Israelis then unfolded into an aerial battle with the Syrians. And the Israelis knocked down 6 Syrian planes, 6 Syrian Migs, including 1 over Damascus. And it was at this point again when Nasser is being taunted that “you’re not doing anything.”

Things then start deteriorating between Israel and the Syrians. Come the beginning of May Israel is making clear that it’s going to engage in a large scale strike against Syria and now the test is for Nasser. Are you going to do anything about it? The Israelis are announcing over and over again, the generals, the statesmen, that we’re going to give Syria now a serious blow. And it’s at that point that Nasser announces, or Nasser tells Secretary General [not "of State"] U Thant, that the peace keeping force which had been stationed between Israel and Egypt in the Sinai, that peace keeping force should be withdrawn. And that’s the beginning of the count down to the war.

JM: A lot of people seem to think that Arab nationalism was in part threatening the State of Israel. That really what was happening was Arab nationalism threatening the State of Israel, when basically, in the Straits of Tiran this was a situation where Egypt decided, well, this was something that we’re going to blockade there. Israel thought this was in our national interest, we’re being existentially threatened by these countries, this was the last straw, and then that was kind of the thrust of where it started.

NF: The problem with that is, here it’s the devil in the details. You have to know the facts in order to understand what actually happened.

It is correct that the Israelis always feared a kind of, what they called, Ataturk, a secular nationalist in Turkey who modernized the country. And they were fearful of the equivalent in the Arab world of an Ataturk. And they saw that equivalent being Nasser, a secular nationalist who was gonna mobilize the Arab world.

Now when Nasser came to power he wasn’t at all interested in Israel. He was interested in modernizing Egypt but the Israelis were fearful of a modern Egypt, especially a modern Egypt preaching Pan-Arab nationalism.

And so the record is very clear. 1953, 1954, Ben Gurion, the Prime Minister, and people like Moshe Dayan, they are determined, and here I don’t think there’s any controversy in the scholarly record, they are determined to provoke Nasser into a war so they can knock him out. And there was a famous raid in February 1955 in Gaza, many Egyptian soldiers are killed, they’re hoping, they’re hoping, they’re hoping to provoke Nasser into a war. It doesn’t work and in 1956 they simply launch an attack of their own with the Brittish and the French, the so called Sinai Campaign. What happens in ’67 is, through the concatenation of events, they see a new opportunity to knock out that threat which they always feared, namely Nasser or a modernizing force in the Arab world. And they used the opportunity of June ’67 to crush Nasser.

So in one sense it’s true they were fearful of an Arab nationalism but you have to understand what that fear was. They feared any modernization of the Arab world because they viewed themselves as a kind of alien entity in the Arab world which was was existentially in conflict with that world. And the only way to preserve their security, in their minds, is to keep taking out the club and breaking the skull of the Arabs.

The famous Israeli adages, “The Arabs only understand the language of force,” you have to keep hitting them for them to get the message to stay in line. When Israelis talk about their deterrence capacity, deterrence means, as they state themselves, they have to fear us because if they don’t fear us then at some point they’re going to attack us. That’s how the Israelis see it.

Just on the specific points, quickly.

Number one, the first dramatic moment is when Nasser removes the peace keeping force from the Sinai. That’s considered the first step towards the war. But there was an easy solution to that problem. All Israel had to say was, restation the UN forces on our side of the border. If they were effective on the Egyptian side, they would have to have been equally effective on the Israeli side.

U Thant in his memoir, the Secretary General, the main military figure there, a fellow named Odd Bull, from Norway, in his memoir, they all say the war could’ve been averted had Israel simply restationed those UN forces on its side of the border. And even Tom Segev in his new book 1967 he says, albeit, in a footnote, had they restationed the forces on their side, the Israeli side, the war could’ve been prevented.

The question of the Straits of Tiran. Ok. Number one, U Thant had made an offer, he said let’s do what happened in Cuba during the Missile Crisis. Let’s have a moratorium. The moratorium would be, Egypt promises not to fire on foreign vessels that go through the Straits of Tiran, Israel promises it won’t send through Israeli-flagged vessels. Egypt says, fine. Israel says, no.

Now, another unknown fact. Everybody refers to the blockade in the Straits of Tiran. There was no blockade. I know you’ll be surprised to learn that. It’s a little known fact. The first couple of days the Egyptians searched ships. By the end of the week they stopped searching the ships. The ships were going right through. We know that because the main figure there, he actually just passed away this week, Indar Jit Rikhye, he wrote a book called The Sinai Blunder, and he was in charge of the UN forces there. There was no blockade. He writes it in the book, I even asked, kind of surprised, I called him to check on it a couple of years ago and he laughed. He said there was no blockade.

Number three. Nasser said, you say you have the rights of passage in the Straits of Tiran, we say you don’t. If you want, go to the World Court. Let the World Court adjudicate it. Nasser said, yes. The Israelis said, no.

The important point is, if under international law you’re duty bound to exploit all diplomatic options before going to war, Israel didn’t exploit any diplomatic options for a very good reason. It wanted the war. Why? Because they were confident it would be a walkover, it would be won very quickly and very easily.

Now that may come as surprise to listners but the record is very clear on that. Let me just briefly, quickly, go through it.

May 1967, Israel’s big fear is not going to war. It’s big fear is a repetition of 1956. That is, we go in, we knock them out, but the Americans say, get out. They’re afraid not of the Arabs, they’re afraid of the American reaction. So throughout May they’re sending their people, many, to the United States, what will the US do? They’re asking Johnson, McNamara, the CIA, they’re asking everyone, James Angleton, what will the US do? The first 2 weeks the US is saying, you’re not going. The Israelis are saying, what do you mean we’re not going, they’re threatening us, they’re gonna attack us, they’re gonna destroy us, it’s gonna be another Holocaust. Each time they said that President Johnson asked another one of the intelligence agencies, there were at least a half dozen, he keeps asking them, what’s gonna happen if there’s a war? Over and over again the intelligence agencies keep saying 2 things. Number one, there’s not chance Nasser’s going to attack. None at all. And number two, if he does attack, to quote Lyndon Johnson, as he said to the Israeli Eban, “you’re gonna whip their ass.” In fact the CIA predicted the war would be 7 days long, 7 to 10 days.

Now, you may say, that’s the American intelligence, what about the Israeli? We know exactly what the Israeli intelligence was because June 3, 2 days before the war, the head of Israeli intelligence, Meir Amit, he comes to Washington. He’s trying to feel them out, how will they react? He meets with the Americans and the American say this is our intelligence. And you know what Amit says to them? We do not dispute any of your findings, any of your projections. That means June 3 he agrees no chance Nasser will attack and, if by some weird twist of fate he does, “you’ll whip their ass” to quote President Johnson.

Their only concenr was, what will the Americans say? And by the first week in June they were getting signals, through back channels, that the Americans were gonna let them do it, because the Americans didn’t like Nasser either, and they decide, let them do it. That was their concern. There was never concern about the Arabs. They knew exactly what would happen. It was the Americans, they didn’t want a repeat of ’56.

JM: You’re listening to Worldview from Chicago Public Radio. I’m Jerome McDonell and we’re talking about Israel’s 1967 war with Egypt, Jordan and Syria with Norman Finkelstein, Assistant Professor of Political Science at DePaul University.

One interpretation says that Israel took the Golan Heights, General Moshe Dayan went on an ego trip and decided on his own to take the Heights without consulting the Israeli leadership, I asked Norman Finkelstein what he thought about that.

NF: No, that’s not really what happened, it was actually the reverse. Dayan had no real interest in the Golan Heights. The one who did was the Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Eshkol was an agricultural, his main concern was agriculture, he came from the, I think the Kibbutz movement, may be the Moshav, but I think the Kibbutz movement, and there were vital waters, the Baniyas, as they were called, in the Golan, the water, and there was also rich land. And it was the Kibbutzim in the North who were campaigning hard to attack the Golan. So they sent delegations to Dayan and others during the war, because the Golan, as you remember, was taken during the very last day. There was a ceasefire being imposed and just at the last minute they took the Golan. Dayan was fearful, basically they were all fearful, that if they attack Syria it was gonna mean a clash with the Soviet Union, because the main Syrian backer was the Russians at the time. So there was a tactical concern there and the push came from Eshkol and the Kibbutzim and the guy on the Northern front. All of them had coveted different parts of the area outside Israel. A lot of the generals coveted the West Bank. Others coveted the Sinai. Others coveted the Golan. And once again, an opportunity arose to broaden or deepen Israel’s borders and different generals on different fronts took different initiatives. I won’t say they planned to do it and that’s why they created this war. They saw it as an opportunity.

Now people forget how small the timespan is. From ’48 to ’67, it’s less than 20 years. And they were never satisfied with those ’48 borders. They called it the borders of lamentation because they didn’t get East Jerusalem, they didn’t get the Jewish Quarter, they considered the most sacred lands to be places like Hebron, you know, Rachel’s Tomb by Bethlehem. And so it’s only a 20 year period. It’s all the same actors. It’s all the same people. And it’s only 11 years after Sinai. In Sinai they conquered the Gaza and they wanted the West Bank. So it’s the same people, the same mentality, and here was a new opportunity and they took advantage, it wasn’t their first goal. The first goal was clear, and there I think Segev gets it right, the first goal, as he puts it — crush Nasser. Then the second goal is, if you can, reshape those borders.

00:18:22

JM: So is the interpretation that this was an accidental acquisition, does that fit with you? NF: No. JM: I mean some people look at it and say that Israel didn’t really want to conquer all these areas…

NF: Right, that’s what Michael Oren says, and I wrote a long examination of his book and I said it was an accident waiting to happen. All the pieces were in place and now you had the chance. But they all talked about it before the war. It’s all over their writings. They had all, and it’s something that Segev goes through, he goes through all of their plans. They all had thought about this for years and hey had all sorts of operational plans should the occassion arise. So there was no accident about it.

Let me just make another point that Segev makes. You could’ve just defeated Jordan without taking over the West Bank. You simply knock out it’s airforce and disable its army. You didn’t have to take over the West Bank to defeat Jordan. We know ourselves, in order to defeat an enemy you don’t have to always occupy its territory. You simply, as it were, defang it militarily. The decision to occupy the West Bank was a choice. It was, as I think Segev uses the expression, it was a land grab in the West Bank.

JM: It’s possible to interpret this differnt ways but after 1967 did Israel become a more religious country because they had so many of the sites in their possession you were just talking about, Rachel’s Tomb, … of Jerusalem. Did it kind of reconect Israel with its religious roots in a way that changed politicians and changed people in Israel and kind of brought fourth the Settler movement and things of that nature?

NF: I don’t, you know… People make a big deal out of that, being reconnected with the Wailing Wall and places like the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and so fourth. I don’t think that’s really what it was. What it was was the Israelis, because they were told by their government that they were on the verge of a new Holocaust and because the Israeli people were genuinely fearful, as were American Jews, it did seem that what happened in ’67 was a miracle.

And so there was all of this kind of religious metaphore about the 6 Day War, the 6 days of creation, this miracle that had happened, and it proves there must be a god, and the Jews must be a chosen people, and all of that went to their head and was very intoxicating and it had a religious quality to it. But I don’t think it was the reconnection with the land and that sort of stuff. No, I think it was the headiness of the war which was largely responsible for what you could call the burst of irrationality and this belief that a miracle had happened, whereas, in fact, there was nothing miraculous about it at all. A perfectly rational assessment of the assembly of forces on both sides would tell you who was going to win.

JM: Do you think that Israel, after it acquired all of this territory, realized, well, this was going to be something that we could trade for peace, this is going to transform the region because before we couldn’t really get anywhere with our neighbouring countries but now we’ve got something to trade for peace and this is the thing that is going to eventually lead to peace with Egypt and may be the neighbours?

NF: Well, that question is predicated on the assumption that there wasn’t a diplomatic resolution possible before June 1967. I don’t think the record bears that out.

There were 2 issues before 1967 which prevented a diplomatic settlement between Israel and its Arab neighbours.

One issue was the borders. Israel was awarded 56% of Palestine under the UN Partition resolution. By the end of the first Arab-Israeli War in 1949 they had about 80% of Palestine. So there was an issue of it having to return to those Partition borders.

And the second big question was the refugees. The 750,000 Palestinians who’d been expelled in 1948 and the question of how to resolve that question. And Israel didn’t want to take back the Palestinian refugees.

And so now you have after ’67. What you can say with a certain amount of accuracy, I think it was very well put by Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s former Foreign Minister, in his book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, he said in June 1967 — and it’s your listners, I think it’s worth pondering — “in June ’67 we won the ’48 borders.” That is to say after June ’67 there was no longer any talk about returning to the Partition Plan, “we won the borders.”

And now the question was, you’ve won the borders, and now there’s a question of the refugees. It seems pretty clear after ’67 Arab states — I’m not saying whether it’s right or wrong, I’m just saying it as a fact — the Arab states were open to the resolution of the refugee question which would be compensation instead of return.

So if Israel had been willing to accept the ’67 borders and compensation — which would’ve been basically paid for internationally, not by Israel — and compensation for the refugees, they could’ve had peace since ’68.

No question about it.

But, like most States, they just had this big victory, they are intoxicated by it, the Arabs are humiliated and the famous line by Moshe Dayan, we’re standing by the telephone, waiting for your call, and if you don’t call, too bad, we’re not leaving. And that’s why I think The Economist, this past week, it had an article on the 40th anniversary, and the title was not bad, I didn’t really agree with the content, but the title was not bad, it was called “The Wasted Victory,” because they could’ve gotten the ’48 borders and the resolution of the refugee question. But they didn’t want it, they wanted more. They got greedy.

And the greediness, I think, history will show, destroyed the country. I don’t think pesonally any longer — and I don’t say it with any kind of satisfaction — I don’t think Israel has a future there anymore. It’s turned into a, you could call it, it’s turned into a crazy State because when you listen to the language of Israel, it’s totally out of sync with the rest of the world. You take the last war in Iraq. There’re only 2 countries in the world that supported the war, Kuwait, for reasons you can understand, and Israel — 70% of the population. Now, the war with Iran. There’s literally only 1 country in the world, you know, look at the polls — Israel. The population, the government pushing hard — war, war, war. Attacking Lebanon, attacking Gaza, it’s become a kind of crazy State and a lot of the craziness came out of this June ’67 war. It could’ve had a relatively, you know, you can’t say it’s gonna be perfect, it’s not gonna be Scandinavia, but they could’ve resolved the major problems 40 years ago.

Two things. They got intoxicated with their power and secondly, they got entangled in ways which I think were very detrimental to them in this relationship with the United States.

JM: Did the ’67 War cement the relationship with the United States?

NF: Yes, there’s no question. You know, Israel’s main arms supplier before 1967 was France. It was France that provided the Mist [spelling?] airplanes for the airforce. And also it was France that helped them build the Dimona, the nuclear reactor. They had ambivalent relations with the US, sometimes warm, sometimes cold. But after ’67, and the record’s very clear on this, ’67, the United States, I guess it’s a National Security advisor to Lyndon Johnson, he’s very thrilled — why? You knocked out Nasser. And they’re worried about this Arab nationalism spreading to places like Saudi Arabia, all those rickety regimes which have all of our oil that happens to be under their land, so they’re very happy that Israel has knocked out Nasser. And that’s the beginning of this relationship, which I think is really misunderstood here as Israel determining US foreign policy — it’s just not what’s happening.

There’s a common interest. Israel has always sought to dominate the Arab world and so has the United States. Now, for different reasons — the US for the oil, Israel, because it viewed itself being in a, as it were, intrinsically conflictual relationship with the Arab world, so it has to either dominate it or it’s gonna be destroyed, that’s how they see it.

In particular people like Ben Gurion, they never thought you could live at peace with the Arab world because they said we’re aliens, we forced ourselves on them, they’ll never accept us. And so they always felt that they’re gonna in conflict, as did the US because the US wanted their oil.

00:29:38

JM: I think a lot of listeners would say, well, there’s been Jews in the Middle East for all these years, why do they necessarily feel perpetually alien?
They were not always aliens, they’re people from the Middle East too.

NF: Yes, I think the reason is, well, part of it, I don’t want to say all of it, is a psychological dimension. You know, Jews coming from Eastern Europe and who see the world in terms of the Jews v. the Goyim, the Jews v. the Gentiles, that there’ll always be a conflict, so they’re transplanting that mentality to the Middle East and they’re saying the only reason Jews were acceptedin the Arab world before us is because they head what was called a dhimmi status, namely a second class status, that nobody will accept the Jews as being full equals, whether it’s in Europe or in the Arab world, and therefore we have to, you know, constantly remind them who’s in charge.

So part of it is a psychological dimension and part of it is a factual one. They realized we came from there and we imposed ourselves here and that it’s going to be resisted.

Of course there is the possibility that there will be animus but there will also be acquiescence over a period of time, as it were, acquiescing in the facts.

JM: Do you think the ’67 war has any larger legacy now, 40 years later? Obviously there’s lots of unresolved issues that were created, but are there other, larger legacies?

NF: Well, the main legacy is, how do you resolve the conflict. And you could already see, right after the June ’67 war, they are dealing with the same issues as they’re dealing with now. Number one, they have this big problem, this is ’67, they have absorbed 1 million Arabs and they want to be a Jewish State. What do you do? They’re afraid, they’re terrified of this Arab birth rate and now the 1 million more Arabs, how do you preserve a Jewish State? And right after the war they’re already thinking in terms of, well, may be we can transfer some, may be we can send a hundred or three hundred thousand to Iraq. The same problem — we got the land but we don’t want the people, and how do you resolve it?

Not an easy problem to resolve because in the great scheme of things there’re only 3 possible resolutions.

One, you can call it, so to speak, the American way — wipe out the indigenous population. That’s not really an option, at least in the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century.

A second option is to expel them. They tried that and they weren’t all together unsuccessful in ’67 — people forget they managed to expel about 250,000 Arabs from the West Bank in 6 days. The whole population was just 1,200,000. So for a 6 day period they got rid of quite a few but it didn’t work. They still were left with a million.

And then the third possibility is, if you can’t exterminate them and you can’t expell them, the third possibility is reduce them to second level people, namely an apartheid type resolution of the conflict, as it were, the South African way.

And that’s what Israel has been trying to do for the past number of years, to create a kind of apartheid solution in the Occupied Territories. Israel’s absorbing 10% of the West Bank with the Wall. It’s absorbing the Jordan valley, which is about a 1/3 of the West Bank. It’s criss crossing the Occupied Territories with settlements to break it up into what they call cantons and so they’re trying to create an apartheid type resolution.

Now, those are, as it were, the negative solutions to the problem: extermination, expulsion and apartheid.

And then there’s another option — the option which is embraced by the whole of human kind, apart from Israel and the United States. And that is return to the June 1967 borders, mutual recognition between an Israeli and Palestinian State and some sort of mutually acceptable resolution of the refugee question. That’s the option. Give them the ’67 border or a land swap of equal size and equal value, don’t give us the Negev. Equal size and equal value, it’s settled.

Those are the terms to resolve the conflict. They have endured for 40 years.

JM: What do you think would’ve happened if there wasn’t a ’67 war, that if it had just been Jordan sticking out there, in the West Bank, East Jerusalem? What happens without it?

00:35:15

NF: To tell you the truth, I think a war was inevitable. It was inevitable not because there was no diplomatic solution possible. The war was inevitable for a separate reason. Israel will not allow the Arab world to modernize. That’s the big problem.

The big problem is that whenever any kind of autonomous modernizing element emerges in the Middle East Israel sees it as, to use their favorite word, an existential threat. Because they don’t believe, if the Arab world modernizes, it will ever accept them and that I think is a very big problem. They will not allow an autonomous modernizing element to exist in the Middle East, apart from themselves.

JM: Wasn’t there a time during the Oslo Accords though when Shimon Peres and others really thought, well, what we’ve got to do is build up business relations NF: Right, a new JM: neighbouring relations, modernization, everything…

NF: They called it A New Middle East. A New Middle East that we control. And that’s how all the Arabs looked at Peres’ offer. [The way] they looked at it is as he wants to create a new Middle East in which we, with out technology, our Silicon Valley and our this and that, and we’ll be in charge. I’m not faulting them. I’m too old and too wise in these things to hold Israel to a different standard. I’m just saying, the racism is so deeply entrenched, they can’t conceive of dealing with Arabs as equals. They can’t. They not only can’t conceive it, they dread it. Because they see themselves as, which they are, they’re a very small little entity in this Arab world and they don’t think the’ll ever be accepted. And, frankly, you know, they want now admission into the EU, they don’t even see themselves as part of the EU — excuse me — as part of the Middle East. They themselves see themselves as Western, not Eastern. Modern, not backward. It’s in many ways a self-fulfilling prophecy — you will not be accepted in large part because you don’t see yourself as part of us, you see yourself as alien, you see yourself as superior, you see yourself as better. So how can you expect under those circumstances you’ll ever be accepted?

Palestinians, Arabs, give them a chance like everybody else. The Israelis can’t see that. The sense of superiority, the deeply entrenched racism. It was a racism that had to be. You have to understand that. It was like our racism with the Native Americans. If you don’t have that deeply entrenched racism, how could you justify in your own minds what you’re doing? You know? You’re throwing people out of their homes. You’re saying their connection with the land is not as important as our connection with the land. Well, how can you justify that unless there’s a very deeply entrenched racism? It’s a functional necessity.
But if you get to know them, talk to them, meet them — smart, nice, descent, like most people, on the whole, in general, you know? Then there’s hope.

There’s a lot to overcome, for sure, but there are possibilities for people to learn to respect each other and achieve, you know, no eternal peace, but a reasonable, practical living together.

That’s what you hope for. And work towards. That’s the most important [part] — you have to work for it.

00:40:04

JM: You’re listening to Worldview from Chicago Public Radio. I’m Jerome McDonnell and we’ve been talking today with Norman Finkelstein, Assistant Professor of Political Science at DePaul, about the 1967 war in the Middle East but I couldn’t help but as him a few questions about his tenure bid at DePaul. Finkelstein’s always had a controversial edge, for example, he’s written that some Jewish organizations have exploited the Holocaust, but the controversy never ends in his conflict with Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz. It began on a Democracy NOW! radio program several years ago when he alleged that Dershowitz’ book The Case for Israel was plagiarized. Then Dershowitz tried to stop publication of Finkelstein’s book Beyond Chutzpah: on the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History — a chunk of the book is devoted to rebutting Dershowitz’ book. More recently, Dershowitz has mounted a long campaign against Finkelstein’s tenure bid at DePaul. DePaul’s department of political science and college personell committees have suported the tenure bid but some administrators are against it. The president of DePaul University has until about the middle of this month to decide on the matter and Finkelstein gave me his reaction to the public controversy over his tenure bid.

NF: Well, I can’t say it’s been easy. You know, I’m not going to play the martyr. I was just reading a student paper, a student wrote a paper about his mother who was in Guatemala during the 1970s and it’s describing how all of her friends, her faculty at the university, they’re all being killed, murdered. She said people stopped taking bathes in the water because the water was filled with heads floating all over it. She said at first we thought it was coconuts. And then we realized it was human heads and people stopped bathing in the water. So, you know, next to that, what is my suffering? It’s meaningless. And we should maintain our sense of proportion and recognize, by any standard in the history of humanity, I’m doing fine, I’m healthy, my head is on my shoulders, and my body parts aren’t being splattered all over the place.

Having said that, it hasn’t been pleasant. And I wish I could say that it had a sort of morally or politically redeeming element, that it’s a fight about principle. I wish I could say that. But it rapidly degenerated into just mud slinging and a circus. And I wish I could say I debated Professor Dershowitz but you don’t debate with Professor Dershowitz, it’s just a spitball contest, it’s not serious at all. It’s hurling all these fantastic ad hominum claims that I lost my job because I was mentally — previous job — because i was mentally unstable; that my late mother, who was in the Warsaw Ghetto, Maidanek concentration camp, and two slave labor camps and lost, every single member of her family was exterminated, he now claims my late mother was a Nazi collaborator, or I think she was a Nazi collaborator. That’s not debate. There’s no principle. It’s just mud slinging. It hasn’t been a pleasant experience for me and I can’t say there’s been any redeeming value in it. People keep trying to remind me there’s a political principle at stake but I’ve long forgotten it. And, to be perfectly honest, I don’t care what happens any more. If you took a polygraph to my wrist and you told me, you got tenure, or you told me I didn’t, my pulse wouldn’t skip a beat. I’ve been totally wearied by it. People have no idea what happened this year.

JM: Have you come away from it with any respect for people at DePaul? Your university seems to have supported you up to a pretty high level.

NF: Ah, you know, you have to make distinctions. I’ve been overwhelmed with support, by people. I must get about a half dozen beautifully crafted letters each day CC’d to me, having been sent originally to the president. These aren’t form letters and they aren’t e-mails, in the sense of “hi, how are you.” We’re talking about letters which consist of a good 6 or 8 hefty paragraphs, where people have thought through a lot. And, you know, I’m sure in the future I’ll have a chance to look back and see the bigger picture. There was a huge amount of support literally, not hyperbolically, literally from all over the world, people poured in letters and support of all sorts. And also some faculty at DePaul, certainly the students at DePaul, I had to finally tell them to stop because each action on my side evoked such a viscious counter reaction that at some point I told them, no more action, because I can’t deal with the counter reaction. And I cannot tell you how vicious and ugly it got. It got very vicious and very ugly. And it was not just Professor Dershowitz.

So I don’t want to lose sight of the kind of support I got. But unfortunately, the vicious reaction totally shocked me. It really did. I mean, I’m no new boy on the block. JM: Yeah NF: I’m 53. I’ve been thrown out of many universities but it’s almost always done very quietly. Behind the scenes, phone calls, letters, pressures. I did not expect that this… It turns out that Professor Dershowitz was in correspondence with the ex-chairman of my department for 3 years. He was pushing. He had correspondence with the president, it turns out. I wasn’t aware of any of this, though, I felt it in my department. I felt it but I had no idea. And that’s how I thought it would work, it was going to be
behind the scenes and then if I make any kind of protests it would be Finkelstein’s paranoia, you know, he’s imagining it. But this time there was nothing left to the imagination. It was all very forthright and it turned into a national hysteria. I didn’t expect that. And I didn’t expect the level of ugliness that it would reach.

JM: What does it mean for your scholarship in the future? I mean, does it, you know, dampen any enthusiasm for your work?

NF: I lost a lot of time this year. I lost a lot of time, it was squandered. There were many battles that had to be fought with the pen to prove my innocence of very ugly charges. And it meant squandering huge amounts of time and many weeks which were filled with consecutive sleepless nights trying to answer the barrage of ad hominum, filthy and sordid ad hominum attacks that were being leveled against me.

Professor Dershowitz inundated the Law School, the DePaul University Law School. Sent each member of the Law School a 60 page dossier on me, filled with the most filthy scurrilous allegations.

And many people in the Law School believed it. They were very adamant that I was a Holocaust denier and worse. I had to fight senior members of the Law School administration who were saying scurrilous things because “how could Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, be lying?”

So I lost a huge amount of time this year. As to what will happen, I’ll survive.

JM: Well, thanks a lot for joining us and talking about the 1967 war and your tenure battle.

NF: Thank you.

Reader letters

Sent : Tuesday, June 12, 2007 4:21 PM
Subject : WBEZ interview

As you requested on your website, I have written to thank Mr. McDonnell for the recent interview.

I thought you might want to have a copy of the note:

“Interview 6 June 2007 with Prof. Norman Finkelstein on Chicago public radio WBEZ 91.5

“I have just read a transcript of Jerome McDonnell’s interview with Professor Finkelstein about the context of the 6 Day War and
about his tenure situation at DePaul. Thank you very much for having the courage and the interest to have the interview. Despite
the unfounded and unintelligent criticism of the professor’s work, it is obvious that the man is in control of his facts, understands the
complexity of the situation in Israel, and is attempting in a judicious way to come to the truth of the history. Further, his sense of
realism and honesty about the tenure battle show that the man has mettle and perspective and knows himself and is truly worthy
of the title “intellectual.” As I write this, the President of DePaul has made the decision not to grant Prof. Finkelstein tenure, and it is
a shameful day for the academic world as a result. Again, thank you for your public service in airing the interview.”

However, I wanted to extend my personal best wishes for your future. Whether you stay at DePaul next year or move on to
another and better situation, I am sure that you will continue to produce valuable work. It is clear to me that you have not approached
your topics with naïveté, and that you took the risks you did in the interests of getting closer to the truth. The interview also told
to me that you were not surprised by the strength and the out and out meanness of those who oppose you. So I am sure that you will
exhibit the same courage in the coming months when you decide where you will go from here and what you will do.

I wish you strength and clear insight in that decision, and hope that the current rejection by DePaul can be overcome with
the same good sense as in your reference to the paper of one of your students.

Sincerely yours,

…..
Glendale, CA

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