Finkelstein has described himself as a "forensic" scholar who has worked to demystify what he considers pseudo-scholarly arguments. He has written scathing academic reviews of several prominent writers and scholars who he says misrepresent facts in order to defend Israel's policies and practices. His writings have dealt with politically charged topics such as Zionism, the demographic history of Palestine, and his allegations of the existence of a
"Holocaust industry" that exploits the memory of the Holocaust to further Israeli political interests. Finkelstein's work has been praised by scholars such as
Noam Chomsky, the political scientist
Raul Hilberg, and historian
Avi Shlaim,
On From Time Immemorial Finkelstein's doctoral thesis formed the basis for his interest in examining the claims made in
Joan Peters's
From Time Immemorial, a best-selling book at the time. Peters's "history and defense" of Israel deals with the demographic history of
Palestine. Demographic studies had tended to assert that the
Arab population of
Ottoman-controlled Palestine, a 94% majority at the turn of the century, had dwindled toward parity due to massive
Zionist immigration. Peters radically challenged this view by arguing that a substantial portion of the Palestinians were descended from immigrants from other Arab countries from the early 19th century onward. It followed, for Peters and many of her readers, that the picture of a native Palestinian population overwhelmed by Jewish immigration was little more than propaganda, and that in actuality two almost simultaneous waves of immigration met in what had been a relatively unpopulated land.
From Time Immemorial was praised by figures as varied as
Barbara Tuchman,
Theodore H. White,
Elie Wiesel, and
Lucy Dawidowicz.
Saul Bellow wrote in a jacket endorsement, "Millions of people the world over, smothered by false history and propaganda, will be grateful for this clear account of the origins of the Palestinians." Finkelstein called the book a "monumental hoax". He later opined that, while Peters's book received widespread interest and approval in the United States, a scholarly demonstration of its fraudulence and unreliability aroused little attention: According to Adam Shatz, "when Finkelstein showed that Peters had manipulated Ottoman demographic records to make her case, the book's supporters attacked him as an anti-Zionist. By 1986, though, Zionist scholars having published articles that bolstered Finkelstein's case, his version was the conventional wisdom." In
Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky wrote that Finkelstein sent his preliminary findings to about 30 people interested in the topic, but no one replied, except for him, and that was how they became friends: I told him, yeah, I think it's an interesting topic, but I warned him, if you follow this, you're going to get in trouble—because you're going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they're going to destroy you. So I said: if you want to do it, go ahead, but be aware of what you're getting into. It's an important issue, it makes a big difference whether you eliminate the moral basis for driving out a population—it's preparing the basis for some real horrors—so a lot of people's lives could be at stake. But your life is at stake too, I told him, because if you pursue this, your career is going to be ruined. Well, he didn't believe me. We became very close friends after this, I didn't know him before. Israeli historian
Avi Shlaim later praised Finkelstein's thesis, saying that it had established his credentials when he was still a doctoral student. In Shlaim's view, Finkelstein had produced an "unanswerable case" with "irrefutable evidence" that Peters's book was "preposterous and worthless".
The Rise and Fall of Palestine In 1996, Finkelstein published
The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years, which chronicled his visits to the West Bank during the First Intifada. Through personal accounts, he compares the plight of the Palestinians living under the
Israeli occupation with the horrors of the Nazis. The book was unfavorably reviewed by
Joost Hiltermann, who objected to Finkelstein's "abrasiveness, righteous anger, hyperbole, distortions and unwarranted generalizations", and to his generalizations about West Bank Palestinians: Hiltermann wrote that while "there is plenty of reason to be anguished about the terrible injustice inflicted upon the Palestinian", Finkelstein's "bludgeoning" style wouldn't reach an audience beyond those already converted.
Metropolitan Books, an imprint of
Henry Holt and Company, announced it would publish a revised version of the essay, along with that of German-born historian
Ruth Bettina Birn that had been published in the
Cambridge Historical Journal, under the title
A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth.
Leon Wieseltier and the
Anti-Defamation League’s
Abraham Foxman unsuccessfully pressured Metropolitan to cancel it.
Columbia University's
István Deák backed out of writing a preface but did endorse the book, along with historians
Raul Hilberg,
Christopher Browning,
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and
Eric Hobsbawm. According to Adam Shatz, Finkelstein's arguments in the book are that only a minority of Germans voted for the Nazis, that antisemitism wasn't Hitler's primary appeal to the German people, that "Germans overwhelmingly condemned the Nazi anti-Semitic atrocities", and that Goldhagen's book was successful because of its Zionist agenda. Shatz suggests that these points are either exaggerated or not new: Israeli intellectuals such as
Amos Elon and
Tom Segev and the Holocaust historian
Omer Bartov have made similar points about the ideological subtext of Holocaust writing. But they also take pains not to dismiss the trauma the Holocaust visited and continues to visit upon Jews. By contrast, Finkelstein adopts an ugly conspiratorial tone when he attributes the book's popularity in the United States to its Zionist message. He alleges "a repellent gang of plutocrats, hoodlums and hucksters" have sought enormous legal damages and financial settlements from Germany and Switzerland, money that then goes to the lawyers and institutional actors involved in procuring them rather than actual
Holocaust survivors. In a television interview to publicize the book, he said a "handful of American Jews have effectively hijacked the Nazi Holocaust to blackmail Europe" to "divert attention from what is being done to the Palestinians".
The Holocaust Industry was also harshly criticized by
Brown University Professor
Omer Bartov,
University of Chicago Professor
Peter Novick and other reviewers accusing Finkelstein of selective or dubious evidence and misinterpretation of history. At the time the book was published in Germany,
Der Spiegel reported the country was "in the grip of Holocaust madness. Finkelstein is being taken seriously. What he says corresponds with what many who do not know the facts think." In an interview, Finkelstein said, "the Holocaust is a political weapon. Germans have legitimate reasons to defend themselves against this abuse". In an August 2000 interview for Swiss National Radio, Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg said the book expressed views Hilberg held, in that he too found "detestable" the exploitation of the Holocaust by groups such as the
World Jewish Congress. Asked whether Finkelstein's analysis might play into the hands of neo-Nazis for antisemitic purposes, Hilberg replied, "Well, even if they do use it in that fashion, I'm afraid that when it comes to the truth, it has to be said openly, without regard to any consequences that would be undesirable, embarrassing". In a review in the journal
Historical Materialism,
Enzo Traverso called the book "polemical and violent" but also "in many ways appropriate and convincing". Traverso expressed many reservations about Finkelstein's arguments about the Swiss banks and the reaction in Europe. Traverso agreed (with Hilberg) that the allegations Finkelstein made against a number of Jewish-American institutions are probably correct. He also referred to the favorable reception Finkelstein's book received in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, calling it "welcome hyberbole". But Traverso criticized Finkelstein for ignoring the European aspect of the matter, and said Finkelstein's analysis was too simplistic and crudely materialistic. He concluded, "Finkelstein's book contains a core of truth that must be recognised, but it lends itself, due to its style and several of its main arguments, to the worst uses and instrumentalisations". The historian
David Cesarani criticized Finkelstein for absolving Swiss banks of serious misconduct toward Holocaust survivors and for depicting the banks as victims of Jewish terror. Cesarani said that Finkelstein based his claim on a single sentence from an annex to a report that related to some specific issues, while ignoring the report's main conclusions, which "fully justified the campaign [against the Swiss banks] that was necessary to wrest compensation from initially unapologetic and obdurate Swiss banks".
Criticism of Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel lasted for years and had a negative effect on Finkelstein's academic career|147x147px Shortly after the 2003 publication of
Alan Dershowitz's book
The Case for Israel, Finkelstein derided it as "a collection of fraud, falsification, plagiarism, and nonsense". During a debate on
Democracy Now!, Finkelstein said that Dershowitz lacked knowledge of specific contents of his own book. He also claimed that Dershowitz did not write the book and may not have even read it. Finkelstein suggests that this copying of quotations amounts to copying ideas. Examining a copy of a proof of Dershowitz's book he managed to obtain, he found evidence that Dershowitz had his secretarial assistant, Holly Beth Billington, check in the Harvard library the sources he had read in Peters's book. Dershowitz answered the charge in a letter to the
University of California's Press Director Lynne Withey, arguing that Finkelstein had made up the
smoking gun quotation by changing its wording (from "cite" to "copy") in his book. In public debate, he has said that if "somebody borrowed the quote without going to check back on whether Mark Twain had said that, obviously that would be a serious charge", but said that he did not do that and had indeed checked the original source. Finkelstein agreed to remove the suggestion that Dershowitz was not the true author of
The Case for Israel because, as the publisher said, "he couldn't document that". Asserting that he did consult the original sources, Dershowitz said Finkelstein was simply accusing him of good scholarly practice: citing references he learned of initially from Peters's book. Dershowitz denied that he used any of Peters's ideas without citation. "Plagiarism is taking someone else's words and claiming they're your own. There are no borrowed words from anybody. There are no borrowed ideas from anybody because I fundamentally disagree with the conclusions of Peters's book." In a footnote in
The Case for Israel that cites Peters's book, Dershowitz explicitly denies that he "relies" on Peters for "conclusions or data". James O. Freedman, the former president of
Dartmouth College, the
University of Iowa, and the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, defended Dershowitz: I do not understand [Finkelstein's] charge of plagiarism against Alan Dershowitz. There is no claim that Dershowitz used the words of others without attribution. When he uses the words of others, he quotes them properly and generally cites them to the original sources (Mark Twain, Palestine Royal Commission, etc.) [Finkelstein's] complaint is that instead he should have cited them to the secondary source, in which Dershowitz may have come upon them. But as
The Chicago Manual of Style emphasizes: 'Importance of attribution. With all reuse of others' materials, it is important to identify the original as the source. This not only bolsters the claims of
fair use, it also helps avoid any accusation of plagiarism.' This is precisely what Dershowitz did. Responding to an article in
The Nation by Alexander Cockburn, Dershowitz also cited
The Chicago Manual of Style: Cockburn's claim is that some of the quotes should not have been cited to their original sources but rather to a secondary source, where he believes I stumbled upon them. Even if he were correct that I found all these quotations in Peters's book, the preferred method of citation is to the original source, as
The Chicago Manual of Style emphasizes: "With all reuse of others' materials, it is important to identify the original as the source. This...helps avoid any accusation of plagiarism ... To cite a source from a secondary source ('quoted in...') is generally to be discouraged" Cockburn responded: Quoting
The Chicago Manual of Style, Dershowitz artfully implies that he followed the rules by citing "the original" as opposed to the secondary source, Peters. He misrepresents Chicago here, where "the original" means merely the origin of the borrowed material, which is, in this instance, Peters. Now look at the second bit of the quote from Chicago, chastely separated from the preceding sentence by a demure three-point ellipsis. As my associate Kate Levin has discovered, this passage ("To cite a source from a secondary source...") occurs on page 727, which is no less than 590 pages later than the material before the ellipsis, in a section titled "Citations Taken from Secondary Sources." Here's the full quote, with what Dershowitz left out set in bold: "'Quoted in'. To cite a source from a secondary source ("quoted in") is generally to be discouraged,
since authors are expected to have examined the works they cite. If an original source is unavailable, however, both the original and the secondary source must be listed." So Chicago is clearly insisting that unless Dershowitz went to the originals, he was obliged to cite Peters. Finkelstein has conclusively demonstrated that he didn't go to the originals. Plagiarism, QED, plus added time for willful distortion of the language of Chicago's guidelines, cobbling together two separate discussions. In a follow-up analysis he concluded that he could find "no way of avoiding the inference that Dershowitz copied the quotation from Twain from Peters's
From Time Immemorial, and not from the original source", as Dershowitz claimed. ==Controversies==