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BUILD A MAJORITY FOR PALESTINE, AND THE IMPORTANCE OF FREE SPEECH  
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Norman G. Finkelstein
May 8, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Holocaust scholar and pro-Palestine activist Norman Finkelstein
expresses his support for the student protests, insisting on the
importance of free speech and uniting the majority of Americans around
solidarity with Gaza. _

Dr. Norman Finkelstein speaking to Columbia University students,
April 21, 2024, From YouTube video by Mohammad Sohel

 

_On April 21, 2024, Holocaust scholar and prominent pro-Palestine
activist Norman Finkelstein
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solidarity encampment at Columbia University. Finkelstein expressed
his support and admiration for the student protesters, urging them to
focus on bringing in the widest possible constituency into the
Palestine solidarity movement and insisting on the vital importance of
free speech and academic freedom for the Palestinian cause. We reprint
his remarks here; the transcript has been edited for length and
clarity._

I don’t want to claim any kind of expertise, and I have to always
be careful of appearing to be condescending or patronizing, or
[claiming to be] all-wise in these matters. I would simply say, based
on my experience, the most important things are organization,
leadership, and having clear objectives.

Clear objectives means basically two things. One is slogans that are
going to unite and not divide. In my youth, when I was your age, I was
what was called back in the day a Maoist — a follower of Chairman
Mao in China. One of the slogans that was famously associated with him
was “Unite the many to defeat the few.”

That means, at any juncture in the political struggle, you have to
figure out how you can unite the many and isolate the few with a clear
objective in mind. Obviously, you don’t want to unite the many with
a goal or objective that is not your objective. You have to figure
out, having your objective in mind, what is the slogan that will work
the best to unite the many and defeat the few?

I was gratified that the movement as a whole, shortly after October 7,
spontaneously and intuitively grasped, in my opinion, the right
slogan: “Cease-fire now!” Some of you might think, in retrospect,
what was so brilliant about that slogan? Wasn’t it obvious?

 

But in fact political slogans are never obvious. There are all sorts
of routes and paths and byways that people can go down that are
destructive to the movement. It wasn’t a leadership decision, I
don’t think; it was a spontaneous, intuitive sense by the protesters
that the right slogan at this moment is “Cease-fire now.”

I would also say, in my opinion, the slogans have to be as clear as
possible, leaving no room for ambiguity or misinterpretation, which
can be exploited to discredit a movement. If you take the history of
struggle, there was the famous slogan going back to the late 1800s,
“The eight-hour working day.” It was a clear slogan.

More recent, in your own living memory — for all the
disappointments, in my opinion, of the Bernie Sanders presidential
candidacy — one of the geniuses of his candidacy, because he had
forty or fifty years of experience on the Left, [was the slogan]
“Medicare for all.” You might think, what’s so smart about that
slogan? He knew that he could reach 80 percent of Americans with that
slogan. He knew that “Abolish student debt” and “Free college
tuition” would resonate with a large part of his potential
constituency.

He didn’t go beyond what was possible at that particular moment. I
do think he reached what we might call “the political limit.” The
limit at that point in his candidacy was probably jobs for all, public
works programs, a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, abolish student
debt, and free college tuition. Those were the right slogans. It may
seem trivial, but it really is not. It takes a lot of hard work and
sensitivity to the constituency that you’re trying to reach to
figure out the right slogans.

Free Gaza, Free Speech

My own view is that some of the slogans of the current movement
don’t work. The future belongs to you guys and not to me, and I’m
a strong believer in democracy. You have to decide for yourselves. But
in my view, you have to pick the slogans which are not ambiguous,
leaving no wiggle room for misinterpretation, and which have the
biggest likelihood at a given political moment of reaching the largest
number of people. That’s my political experience.

I believe the “Cease-fire now” slogan is most important. On a
college campus, that slogan should be twinned with the slogan of
“Free speech.” If I were in your situation, I would say “Free
Gaza, free speech” — that should be the slogan. Because I think,
on a college campus, people have a real problem defending the
repression of speech.

I believe the ‘Cease-fire now’ slogan is most important. On a
college campus, that slogan should be twinned with the slogan of
‘Free speech.’

In recent years, because of the emergence of the identity-politics,
cancel-culture ambiance on college campuses, the whole issue of free
speech and academic freedom has become severely clouded. I have
opposed any restrictions on free speech, and I oppose the
identity-politics cancel culture on the grounds of preserving free
speech.

I’ll say — not as a point of pride or egotism or to say “I told
you so,” but just as a factual matter — in the last book I wrote,
I explicitly said that if you use the standard of hurt feelings as a
ground to stifle or repress speech, when Palestinians protest this,
that, or the other, Israeli students are going to use the claim of
hurt feelings, pained emotions, and that whole language and
vocabulary, which is so easily turned against those who have been
using it in the name of their own cause.

That was a disaster waiting to happen. I wrote about it because I knew
what would happen, though obviously I could not have predicted the
scale after October 7. But it was perfectly obvious what was going to
happen.

In my opinion, the most powerful weapon you have is the weapon of
truth and justice. You should never create a situation where you can
be silenced on the grounds of feelings and emotions. If you listened
to [Columbia president Minouche Shafik’s] remarks, it was all about
hurt feelings, feeling afraid. That whole language has completely
corrupted the notion of free speech and academic freedom.

You now have that experience, and hopefully going forward that
language and those concepts will be jettisoned from a movement that
describes itself as belonging to a leftist tradition. It’s a
complete catastrophe when that language infiltrates leftist discourse,
as you are seeing now.

I’m going to be candid with you, and I don’t make any claim to
infallibility — I’m simply stating based on my own experience in
politics: I don’t agree with the slogan “From the river to the
sea, Palestine will be free.” It’s very easy to amend and just
say, “From the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free.” That
simple, little amendment drastically reduces the possibility of your
being manipulatively misunderstood.

But when I was hearing that this slogan causes pain, anguish, fear, I
have to ask myself a simple question. What does the slogan “We
support the IDF” convey? The Israel Defense Forces, right now, is a
genocidal army. Why are you allowed to have public support at this
moment for a genocidal state and a genocidal army?

The language doesn’t seem as provocative — “We support the
IDF.” But the content is ten thousand times more offensive and more
outrageous to any, so to speak, civilized mind and civilized heart
than the “From the river to the sea” slogan. The only reason there
is an argument about that slogan — even though, as I said, I
disagree with it, but that’s a separate matter whether I agree or
disagree — is because we have legitimized this notion that hurt
feelings are grounds for stifling speech. That to me is totally
unacceptable; it’s wholly alien to the notion of academic freedom.

The most powerful weapon you have is the weapon of truth and justice.

Some of you might say, that’s a bourgeois notion, it’s socially
constructed, and all that other crap. I don’t believe that at all.
You read the most eloquent defenses of unhindered, untrammeled freedom
of speech by people like Rosa Luxemburg, who was, by any reckoning, an
extraordinary individual and an extraordinary revolutionary. But being
both did not mean she would accept any curbs on the principle of free
speech, for two reasons.

Number one, no radical movement can make any kind of progress unless
it has clarity about its goals and clarity about what it might be
doing that’s wrong. You’re always engaging in course corrections.
Everybody makes mistakes. Unless you have free speech, you don’t
know what you’re doing that’s wrong.

Number two, the truth is not an enemy to oppressed peoples, and it’s
certainly not an enemy to the people of Gaza. So we should maximize
our commitment to free speech so as to maximize the dissemination of
what’s true about what’s happening in Gaza — and not allow any
excuse for repressing that truth.

What Are We Trying to Accomplish?

You’re doing ten thousand things right, and it’s deeply moving
what you’ve achieved and accomplished, and the fact that many of you
are putting your futures on the line is very impressive. I remember
during the anti–Vietnam War movement, there were young people who
wanted to go to medical school — and if you got arrested, you
weren’t going to medical school. Many people struggled with the
choice between getting arrested for the cause. It wasn’t an abstract
cause — by the end of the war, the estimate was that between two and
three million Vietnamese had been killed. It was an unfolding horror
show every day.

People struggled with whether they would risk their entire futures.
Many of you come from backgrounds where it was a real struggle to get
to where you are today, to Columbia University. So I deeply respect
your courage, your conviction, and every opportunity I have I
acknowledge the incredible conviction and tenacity of your generation,
which in many ways is more impressive than my own, for the reason
that, in my generation, you can’t deny that an aspect of the antiwar
movement was the fact that the draft lay on a lot of people. You could
get the student deferment for the four years that you’re in college,
but once the deferment passed, there was a good chance you were going
over there and you were coming back in a body bag.

 

So there was an element of self-concern. Whereas you young people,
you’re doing it for a tiny, stateless people halfway around the
world. That’s deeply moving, deeply impressive, and deeply
inspiring.

With that as an introduction, to return to my initial remarks: I said
any movement has to ask itself: What is its goal? What is its
objective? What is it trying to achieve? A few years ago, “From the
river to the sea” was a slogan of the movement. I remember in the
1970s, one of the slogans was, “Everyone should know, we support the
PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization]” — which was not an easy
slogan to shout on Fifth Avenue in the 1970s. I vividly recall looking
at the rooftops and waiting for a sniper to dispatch me to eternity at
an early age.

However, there’s a very big difference when you’re essentially a
political cult and you can shout any slogan that you like, because it
has no public repercussions or reverberations. You’re essentially
talking to yourself. You’re setting up a table on campus, giving out
literature for Palestine; you might get five people who are
interested. There’s a big difference between that situation and the
situation you’re in today, where you have a very large constituency
that you could potentially and realistically reach.

You have to adjust to the new political reality that there are large
numbers of people, probably a majority, who are potentially receptive
to your message. I understand that sometimes a slogan is one that
gives spirit to those who are involved in the movement. Then you have
to figure out the right balance between the spirit that you want to
inspire in your movement and the audience or the constituency out
there that’s not part of the movement that you want to reach.

I believe one has to exercise — not in a conservative sense, but a
radical sense — in a moment like this, maximum responsibility to get
out of one’s navel, to crawl out of one’s ego, and to always keep
in mind the question: What are we trying to accomplish at this
particular moment?

_[NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN is the author of many books on the
Israel-Palestine conflict. His most recent book is I’ll Burn That
Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics,
Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom
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Our new print issue, centered on the topic of religion, is out now.
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* Palestine solidarity
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* political strategy
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* Israel
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* Gaza
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* Palestine
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* U.S.-Israel relations
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* U.S.-Israel military aid
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* U.S.-Palestine relations
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* student activism
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* Student protests
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* student movement
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* Free Speech
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* democracy
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* Columbia University
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* campus activism
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* movement building
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* Ceasefire
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