On Thursday, March 21, Princeton’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) hosted Norman Finkelstein GS ’87 for a lecture titled “On the Gaza Genocide.” The talk centered on a comparison between the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and Israel’s ongoing operations against Hamas in Gaza. During the lecture, Finkelstein refused to condemn Hamas for perpetrating the October 7 massacre, comparing its fighters to escapees of Nazi death camps. He and the moderator also advanced the conspiracy theory that a “Jewish billionaire class” puppeteers the US.
Many consider Finkelstein a provocateur, and his activism and work have generated much controversy. He has publicly called Israel a “satanic state” from “the boils of hell.” A Tory opinion piece from 2019 described Finkelstein as a “noxious and malignant purveyor of prejudice,” and a news article in the Daily Princetonian referred to his previous speech on campus as “anti-Semitic.”
After an introduction from Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize–winning former New York Times foreign correspondent, Finkelstein opened his remarks on the subject of October 7. “Clearly, there was some massive death that occurred, some massive atrocities,” he noted, recalling his initial reactions to reports of the massacre. “The question was, do you condemn what Hamas did? And I have to say, and I’ve freely admitted to it: I found that to be a moral quandary.”
Finkelstein implied that the atrocities Hamas committed, including murdering and kidnapping civilians, may have been merely incidental. “One basic question where I think the evidence is completely murky is: what exactly was Hamas’ goal?” He continued: “I think it’s quite possible we’ll never know.”
Finkelstein likened the Gazans who planned the systematic slaughter of innocents to an escape from a concentration camp. “Most of the young men who burst the gates of Gaza on October 7 had been born into a concentration camp, and as of October 6, the very high probability was that they were going to die in that concentration camp.”
During the attack, Hamas kidnapped 250 individuals and killed 1,200, from infants to the elderly. Over half of the captives remain in Hamas’ power. Evidence continues to build that the perpetrators used sexual violence to terrorize civilian women.
“I have no problem condemning the act of the atrocities,” Finkelstein continued. “But I did recoil at condemning the perpetrators of these atrocities.”
Norman Finkelstein wrote his Ph.D. at Princeton on the subject of Zionism, and he has taught at various universities over the decades. In 2007, he failed to meet the requirements for advancement at DePaul University and was refused tenure. In 2014 he taught briefly at Sakarya University in Turkey. He is best known for his activism and his books, especially The Holocaust Industry, which claimed that the legacy of the Holocaust is often used to shield Israel from criticism. Finkelstein himself frequently invokes the Holocaust, reminding audiences of his parents’ survivorship and comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.
Finkelstein previously spoke at Princeton in October 2019, when he called a Jewish student who served in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) a “concentration camp guard.” He also described Israelis as “biped bloodhounds drinking the blood of one million [Palestinian] children” and suggested that there is a moral obligation to kill Israelis. His comments later received condemnation from some of the event’s sponsors.
Finkelstein’s March 21 lecture echoed the themes he touched on in 2019. “It was bloodlust, revenge,” he said, describing Israel’s chief motive in launching its campaign into Gaza. “The fury that these Untermenschen, these subhumans in Gaza, had on October 7 outsmarted the Israeli Übermenschen, the Israeli supermen.” The Übermensch is a Nietzschean philosophical concept, recast by Nazi ideology as an archetype of the heroic, racially pure German.
Finkelstein drew further comparisons to the Holocaust, viewing the dire humanitarian conditions within Gaza as orchestrated by Israel in order to expel or exterminate the Gazan population. “Every crisis is an opportunity,” he explained of Israel’s reasoning. “They were going to use what happened on October 7 to finally, once and for all, put an end to the ‘Gaza problem.’”
Finkelstein also expounded on the strategic purpose of the campaign, as Israel aims to reestablish military deterrence in the region. Israel’s neighbors include Iran, which is close to acquiring nuclear weapons and has vowed to destroy Israel. For months, Hezbollah, another Iranian proxy group, has been actively launching missiles into Israel from the northern Lebanese border. Iran’s role in the current conflict was not mentioned during the speech, though Finkelstein alluded to a “resistance front” against the US and Israel.
During the Q&A section, the moderator Chris Hedges first asked Finkelstein to comment on a statement he claimed was made by Israel’s former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: “Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel; we, the Jewish people, control America.” The quote is known to have been fabricated by a fundraising organization that funneled donations to Hamas.
In response to the question, Finkelstein speculated that Jewish contributions to the US Democratic Party are shaping what he considers a favorable policy toward Israel. “There is a Jewish billionaire class, and since October 7 it’s gone mad,” he said. “That’s not an exaggeration.”
Finkelstein pointed to the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay as an example of malign Jewish influence on society. In his view, the public pressure campaign was “the grossest, most egregious, the most flagrant violation of academic freedom in our country’s history.” The statement was met with applause from the audience.
Gay’s resignation followed exposure of plagiarism in her published work. Public scrutiny of her career began after she testified before a House committee that a determination of whether calls for genocide against Jews would violate Harvard’s code of conduct “depend[s] on the context.”
Finkelstein also praised the Houthis, an Islamist tribal faction that controls much of Yemen. He mused that the Houthis would be his third pick for a Nobel Peace Prize, after the doctors in Gaza and the nation of South Africa, which recently charged Israel with genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Finkelstein’s comments on the Houthis were loudly applauded by the attendees.
The Houthis have for months hijacked and attacked international trade vessels, ostensibly to support the Palestinians. They have also enacted the “systematic persecution” of Yemeni Jews in areas they control, according to a UN report. The terror group’s recent actions have prompted an international campaign against them, led by the US and the UK. In an anti-Israel demonstration in February, Princeton students voiced their support for Houthi piracy, chanting “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around.”
“You have a responsibility to protect people who are being threatened with genocide,” Finkelstein observed. “Isn’t that what the Houthis are doing?… Alone among the world’s peoples they are resorting to armed force to stop the genocide in Gaza.”
The first audience question was from Dr. Zack Dulberg GS, who asked whether the motto on the Houthi flag – “God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam” – could be reconciled with Finkelstein’s statement, “I totally support the Houthis, as a Jew.”
“The only Jews that the Houthis have known are Israelis,” Finkelstein responded. He drew a comparison to his parents’ loathing for the German people after surviving the Holocaust. “Do I wish the Houthis were more discriminating in their slogans? Of course I wish it. But do I understand where it comes from? Yes.”
Dulberg responded to Finkelstein with the phrase “Am Yisrael Chai,” meaning “The Jewish people live on.” The phrase, often used to emphasize Jewish resiliency in the face of calamity, was met with jitters from the audience and chants of “Free Palestine,” while Finkelstein claimed to not understand the phrase’s relevance.
The event, hosted by SJP, was also sponsored by the History Department and the Department of Near Eastern Studies (NES), along with the student group Muslim Advocates for Social Justice (MASJID). When asked about the event, NES Chair Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi told the Tory, “Sponsorship of an event does not mean that the department endorses the positions of the invitees.” Ghamari-Tabrizi did not comment on how Finkelstein’s invitation advanced academic discourse, or whether the NES Department has guidelines on hosting racist or hateful speakers.
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