Norman Finkelstein on Gaza, ‘from the river to the sea’ and political messaging: ‘We need to bring unity to this struggle’
New York University professor Nikhil Singh interviews the political scientist and longtime critic of Israel after his speech at Columbia University
Nikhil Singh
Fri 17 May 2024
Nikhil Singh is chair of the department of social and cultural analysis and professor of history at New York University
Norman Gary Finkelstein, born December 8, 1953, is an American political scientist and activist. His primary fields of research are the politics of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.Finkelstein was born in New York City to Jewish Holocaust-survivor parents. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D. in political science from Princeton University. He has held faculty positions at Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and DePaul University, where he was an assistant professor from 2001 to 2007. In 2006, the department and college committees at DePaul University voted to grant Finkelstein tenure. For undisclosed reasons [likely due to Zionist pressures] the university administration did not tenure him, and he announced his resignation after coming to a settlement with the university.
How do the messages and slogans adopted by social movements matter? In the 1960s, one of the simplest and most powerful slogans of the African American civil rights movement was: “Freedom now!” With that slogan, the movement indicated that Black demands exceeded a narrow reading of legal rights and protections. At the same time, it tapped into one of the most powerful keywords in the American political lexicon in a way that was immediately legible to a large, popular audience.
The occasion for the conversation below was a speech that the political scientist Norman Finkelstein gave at the Columbia University encampment protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. Finkelstein challenged students to think of the kind of messaging that might broaden their audience and build their movement. He questioned the slogan “Palestine will be free, from the river to sea” as mostly ineffective for these purposes, due to how it inflames fears among Israel’s supporters and gives fuel to arguments that pro-Palestinian protests on US university campuses are antisemitic and even “genocidal”.
The students were largely unmoved.
Finkelstein has re-emerged as a prominent voice in the current protests and discussions surrounding them. Despite his vast knowledge of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, his formal academic career was effectively destroyed by ideological adversaries due to his critiques of Israel. At the same time, movements in support of Palestinian struggles have not always sat easily with him; he has opposed, for example, the approaches of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nikhil Singh: You have raised questions about the effectiveness of certain slogans and messages emerging from from pro-Palestinian student movement on US university campuses. I am hoping we can get into these questions to understand what you think is at stake.
Norman Finkelstein: Before we get into this conversation, I do want to acknowledge that [last week] President Biden announced a significant revision in US policy towards Israel. He stated that the United States would not make available certain weapons as Israel launches a ground assault on Rafah. There’s no doubt in my mind that this decision was made primarily because of the student movement that began a few weeks ago. Those young people courageously and consistently went out day after day and put their futures on the line for the people of Gaza. This should weigh very heavily on the conscience of those university presidents contemplating suspending and expelling those students.
Singh: I certainly agree with this. I’m on a university campus [New York University] where these are live issues, where there’s a lot of movement to put forth a no-confidence vote in our university president, who has now twice called the police on student protesters. The students have a significant amount of support among faculty and I salute them for what they’ve done. More than 2,000 students have been arrested across the country from around 50 universities. This is a significant student movement, even if its impact, and the substance of any “shift” in US policy, remains to be seen.
Finkelstein: There’s that famous statement attributed to Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” And this is proof positive of that. They conceded not only, but primarily, because of that student movement. It’s a heroic moment and a wonderful example.
The thrust of what I said to the protesters at Columbia University was the following: political slogans often seem like something trivial, mundane, and lacking in any profound intellectual content. Something that you dream up that hopefully rhymes. Like: “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.” But a political slogan is one of the most significant aspects of a political movement. That’s because a slogan consolidates two things: first, a whole political vision. But it also does something else – it taps into the moment. It articulates the most that you can achieve at a given moment. So it has to take into account public consciousness at a particular moment.
When Trotsky gave advice to his followers in Spain during the Spanish civil war, he said that in a revolutionary period, political consciousness changes very rapidly. What yesterday seemed impossible today seems possible, because the worldview of the masses, so to speak, has changed. So Trotsky would say that you have to constantly be alert and attuned to the public consciousness, and change your slogans accordingly.
The greatest political slogan of the 20th century was the Bolshevik slogan in 1917: “Bread, peace, land.” What’s so brilliant about that slogan? “Bread” meant “bread for the starving workers”. “Peace” meant “peace for the soldiers who are dying on the front in world war one in droves”. And “land” meant “land for the land-hungry” – effectively, serfs. Those three words encompassed the whole program.
At Columbia, I relied on this background to say “ceasefire now” was an excellent slogan. The young people amended it, correctly, to “permanent ceasefire”.
The other slogan in question, which I had trouble with, was “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. That’s not a new slogan. But the fact that the slogan is venerable does not mean you shouldn’t think twice about it. Political movements must engage in self-criticism and course correction. So, to the argument that “we’ve always been chanting that slogan”, I would respond: “Yes. And we’ve always been losing.”
Today we’re living in a different time. When we used to chant that slogan, we weren’t talking to anybody except ourselves. There was no public interest in what we were saying. But now it’s a totally different ballgame. There’s a whole new public consciousness around the issue.
Singh: I agree with you that messaging is important and that it matters for building bigger movements. But I think the underlying problem isn’t just the message, but the unity and coherence of the movement itself, and the ability of movements in general to arrive at positions for which they enjoy internal clarity and agreement. The slogan may be the end point of that process. But if we start with the slogan and think about how we could tweak it, we might miss the underlying question – what do we actually think? – which is even more difficult.
I’m going to stay agnostic on “from the river to the sea” for the moment. For a lot of protesters, that is simply an expression of solidarity with Palestinians. And it’s extraordinary to see this level of solidarity expressed towards Palestinians in a country where Palestinian life and political aspirations have been disregarded by our entire political and media establishment for generations. For this generation, the Palestinian struggle is becoming the moral cause of our time.
But there remains an underlying question of what our position can and should be with regard to a future settlement of this conflict. I don’t think it’s our place to say what Israelis and Palestinians should ultimately decide. People in the United States can best influence our own government. That’s why “ceasefire now” is a good slogan. That’s why “disarm and divest” is a good slogan. There are lots of ways we can directly influence policy and governing institutions here.
But given this long struggle, where two peoples are at a terrible, violent impasse, those participating in a solidarity movement are forced to choose sides. Waffling in the middle is not an option. Israel’s dominance, its long failure to reach a just settlement with Palestinians, and its continued expansionism, partly explains why we see the settler colonial argument regain prominence. The problem is that this argument can also imply that Israel itself does not have a right to exist, and that Jewish people who have lived in that land for generations eventually have to go somewhere else.
We know that this is a position that has been articulated in parts of the Arab world. And we know that it has at various times been a position within the broader Palestinian national liberation struggle. And while I don’t have clarity about what a final settlement of this conflict looks like, I do have clarity that it involves the millions of Jews who live in Israel remaining an existing party to it.
The fact of the matter is that Zionism – a commitment to a national homeland for Jewish people – is supported by the majority of Jews in Israel, and it may even be supported by the majority of Jews in the United States. There’s a strong identification with Israel, there’s a relationship to people who live there. There are family ties, and travels back and forth. How do you take that into account – or do you? – as part of what you consider when you are protesting on behalf of Palestinian freedom in the current moment?
Finkelstein: Where do we begin? I don’t think this is just about messaging. It’s not like a PR concern. It is a political concern. And as I said, a slogan synthesizes a whole vision. You’re right that people want to show their solidarity with the people of Gaza, and they don’t give a darn about what anybody else thinks. There are 15,000 children dead. There are 40,000 people dead. There is a whole landscape razed to the ground, reduced to rubble, pulverized. Some would argue: “The hell if it hurts your feelings, the hell if it causes you ‘fear’ or discomfort.” I get that.
The two problems I have with that are very simple. I don’t want to sound pedantic. I want to win. So if I put forth caveats, it’s not because of academic concerns, but because of a political activist’s desire to win. If you want to build a mass movement, you want to bring as many people as possible inside the big tent. You have to become a political force to be reckoned with, which is what the student movement did in the past month and why Biden finally had to budge. I have no doubt it was those screaming headlines every day about those student demonstrations that made Biden realize: “I have to do something now.”
The way you become a formidable political force is by growing in your numbers. I believe that a political slogan should be as clear and succinct as possible, to allow for no wiggle room that can be misinterpreted and exploited by the other side. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a slogan that gives the other side a lot of room to exploit. “What do you mean by Palestine will be free? Do you mean there is no room for Israel?”
There is public consciousness at this point that there’s something wrong with a state which privileges Jews. As B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, put it, there’s only one state from the river to the sea – meaning the West Bank, Israel and Gaza. There’s one state, and it is anchored in the principle of Jewish supremacy. However you cut it, Jews have more rights in that state. To that extent, I have no problem with saying, “We can’t countenance that.”
But as you already said, “Palestine will be free” can also mean something else. It can fit into what’s called the settler colonial framework, which basically says, “Settlers do not have legitimate rights to the land. The land belongs to those who are ‘Indigenous’ to it. And everybody else, at most, can live there on the sufferance of the Indigenous majority, or they have to pack up and leave.” And the reason that slogan is ambiguous is because the movement is ambiguous about what its goal is. And if you try to remove the ambiguity, you risk breaking up the movement.
So what do you do? You could limit yourself to simple demands, which everybody can agree on – namely, “permanent ceasefire”. During the war in Vietnam, there were two slogans at the end. One was “out now” – meaning “all the troops, out now”. It was a very simple slogan, and it united people. The other slogan was “sign the treaty” [to end the war].
Those slogans reduced the point of unity to the common denominator. Another possibility is to risk fragmentation by fighting it out. And a third is constructive ambiguity. Amend the slogan to: “From the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free.” It doesn’t endorse one state, it doesn’t endorse two states. It doesn’t say: “All Jews have to go.” It doesn’t say: “Jews can stay.” It just doesn’t imply: “We’re trying to get rid of Jews.” For me, the ideal slogan would actually be: “From the river to the sea, one person, one vote, Palestinians will be free.”
Maybe we should fight it out now – but I have very conflicted feelings about that, because I think it will fragment the movement. Instead, finding that common denominator could bring unity and clarity to this struggle.
Singh: One of the problems of the discussion, of course, is that we always put the onus on the weaker party to adjust. We don’t really talk about the problem of messaging on the other side, on the Israeli side.
You know better than anybody that almost any position you take in support of Palestine will be characterized as genocidal or wanting to get rid of the Jews.
Obviously, this is a paranoid outlook. It has some justification and basis in reality, like most paranoia, but it also blockades any concessionary movement on the Israeli side, by design. It makes it very difficult for those of us who try to stake out a nuanced position, one that recognizes Israeli security concerns, or Jewish existential concerns – which are real, and you can’t study the history of the world for the last couple of centuries and not know this – while arguing for justice and remedy for the Palestinians for ongoing colonization and dispossession, second-class citizenship in Israel, and siege and permanent war, now approaching genocide, in Gaza.
It puts the messaging problem for movements in support of Palestine in a difficult bind. Israel’s successful information war, its constant use of lawfare [the use of courts to delegitimize critics], and the tremendous support it enjoys across the US political and media establishment, makes this an uphill climb for any movement here that supports Palestinians.
Finkelstein: Whatever we do, of course the other side is going to try to exploit it. However, you can make their job harder, or you can make their job easier. During the Vietnam war era, I was a Maoist, a follower of Mao Zedong. My credo was: “Chairman Mao, live like him! Dare to struggle, dare to win.” Our slogan during the demonstrations was not “out now”. It wasn’t “sign the treaty”. It was: “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win.” Not a great slogan if you want to win over people.
Singh: I do think it is important to recognize that the students who are leading this are learning as part of the process. Many of them have been learning since 2020, if not before, in the protests around police violence. The students are developing some of their own protocols and ways of understanding, as they say, around how to take care of each other. And a politics of care is very central to these movements in a way that I think is different from the movements that we grew up in. I see these students trying to work out questions that are profoundly sensitive to differences, and broadly humane at the same time.
There’s also something unique happening there. They are trying to assemble a fairly large, perhaps unprecedented conception of who belongs, of whose lives matter, and to make connections, for example, between what they saw in the streets of Ferguson or Minneapolis (with the murder of George Floyd), and what they’re seeing in Gaza.
Ultimately, it’s not our job to tell them what to do – and I’m not saying that you’re doing that – it is our job to provide our perspective, as people who have lived through and participated in different moments of struggle, and help them to figure out what is the broadest, most humane, politically effective project to strive for, in what is likely to remain a long, ongoing conflict.
Finkelstein: My whole world outlook was engendered by my parents’ experiences during and before world war two. My mother was a brilliant student. She studied mathematics at Warsaw University, which was unusual if you were a woman and you were Jewish. I once asked her: “What was school like?” She shrugged her shoulders and said, “The Jews were forced to stand in the corner of the lecture hall. We couldn’t sit. And at the end, the Polish hoodlums would attack us.”
So I’m sensitive to suffering. But in my classes, I am very strict on the principle of academic freedom. I’ll often take the politically incorrect position, in order to create the maximum space for everybody to express their opinion with ease. But notwithstanding that, I do try to create a feeling of solidarity among the students – a collective experience of arguing ideas. I think there’s a way of conveying that solidarity and care without demanding mental conformity. I agree that young people are trying hard to build community on the basis of caring. I think there is a way to do that while giving untrammeled expression to freedom of speech, and letting people win or persuade or convince based on the merit of your ideas. You can do both – or at least I’ve tried to do both as a professor.
Singh: I appreciate that as a final thought. I think it threads through the questions we’ve been asking, which is how do we generate solidarity at larger and larger scales so that we can win – which, in a society such as ours, means building a large enough majority to force concessions from the small number of people in power. This may be the jumping off point for a future conversation. Thank you.
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