Norman Finkelstein, in his final book, comprehensively exposes the deceit, politicking, and careerism that enabled the Gaza genocide at the United Nations.
The greatest injustices in the world are often masked in volumes of complex and incomprehensible legal language that are not accessible to the general public. The genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is one horrific example of how the world’s highest legal institutions appear to have gone through the motions of upholding international law, but in reality, are riddled with corruption and political ambition that have enabled the Zionist entity to commit ongoing war crimes and ethnic cleansing.
In his most recent book, “Gaza’s Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places,” which may be the ‘capstone’ to his life’s work of documenting the settler-colonial state of Israel, Professor Norman Finkelstein lays out in detail the facts about what is occurring in Gaza versus the flawed claims made by the United Nations and international courts. Finkelstein joins Chris Hedges to discuss the “shortcomings” and “outright fraud” in what he calls “pockets of corruption in the international system” in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.
Finkelstein does the tedious work of individually exposing the discrepancies in court reports about Palestine and demonstrating their implausibility, a difficult task when you consider that, as he states, “There’s a very big mental distance between something intuitively not sounding right and trying to prove it.” Fortunately, there are numerous reports from a variety of bodies such as the United Nations and human rights groups that have extensively documented the atrocities taking place in Gaza. Finkelstein pulls on this body of work to contrast the evidence-free claims of careerist international legal officials with the overwhelming amount of reporting conducted on Gaza by the most credible humanitarian organizations in the world.
Hedges and Finkelstein discuss the ways World Court judges and United Nations commissioners twist the facts, pick and choose their sources and manipulate events to achieve notoriety or protect their careers. They then provide an analysis of United Nations Security Council resolutions, particularly Resolution 2803, which created the ‘Board of Peace’ that literally gave President Trump ownership of Gaza. This and the failure of the UN Security Council to condemn the US-Israeli attack on Iran, which Finkelstein calls “the most brazen, flagrant breach of the UN Charter,” lead to the regrettable conclusion that these institutions are “no longer [are] valid arbiters of international law.”
The world watches in horror as the United States and Israel brazenly commit war crimes and genocide, defying international law and then sanctioning those institutions, such as the International Criminal Court, that endeavor to hold them accountable. Despite daily images of destruction, starvation and death in Palestine, now extending from Gaza to the occupied West Bank and farther to Lebanon and beyond, only Iran and Ansar Allah have taken effective action to stop the atrocities. Western nations, meanwhile, keep the gears of Israel’s war machine turning. Also, ordinary people have organized and are taking action in what Chris Hedges describes as “the final line of defense between a world that respects the rule of law and a world of unmitigated barbarism.”
One group that has made significant gains is Palestine Action, which has specifically targeted the Israeli weapons producer, Elbit Systems, in the United Kingdom. Palestinian activist and co-founder of Palestine Action, Huda Ammori, joins this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the draconian steps taken by the UK government to criminalize and dismantle Palestine Action. Much to the chagrin of the Zionist elements of the Western establishment, every attack by the UK and its allies has resulted in greater public support for Palestine Action.
Ammori’s family has a long history of fighting Zionism in Palestine. She reflects on the brutal subjugation they endured and her lifetime of activism, saying, “It’s an obligation for Palestinians to resist their occupiers and for each generation to pick up the mantle.” The limitations of the political system, however, have only impeded activists’ efforts to facilitate the liberation of Palestine from the death grip of Israel and its Western-backers; before starting Palestine Action, she realized that direct action was a necessary next step. When Ammori and her partner, Richard Barnard, launched Palestine Action they achieved significant material gains.
It was this progress that brought the full weight of the state against them, including the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization and the banning of all forms of solidarity and support for them. Law enforcement have raided their homes and arrested thousands of activists. The state has also held activists for prolonged periods in jail, which they protested with hunger strikes, and blocked their efforts to raise funds. Ammori is challenging the legality of the proscription, now headed to the UK Supreme Court, in what is considered “an extremely important case, not just for Palestine Action as a group, but for our Free-Speech rights in Britain in general.”
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Transcript
Professor Norman Finkelstein, one of our most important scholars on the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel, in his new book, “Gaza’s Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places,” excoriates the international community and humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations, for their abject failure to uphold international law and halt the genocide in Gaza. At best, these institutions, he shows, are impotent, at worst complicit.
He implodes Israeli lies with incontrovertible facts and evidence, obliterating, for example, the charge by Israel that Hamas instrumentalized rape as a weapon of war. He sets the genocide in its proper historical context, illustrating that it did not begin on October 7th when Hamas and other fighters made an incursion into Israel, but is the culmination of decades of dispossession, discrimination, violence, and land theft by Israel.
Professor Finkelstein assiduously and methodically lays out the evidence gleaned from human rights reports and legal documents to, as he writes, “Make clear that Israel has embarked not on a war, but on a qualitatively different enterprise, the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of people from a particular group identified as having a shared ethnicity, nationalist, etc., with the intention of partially to wholly destroying that group.” “This genocidal undertaking,” he states, “cannot be reconciled with the laws of war, but what’s more contradicts them.” He exposes those international officials who serve as quislings for Israel, imploding their fatuous assertions one by one. He makes clear that the Israeli genocide is a national project, broadly supported by the vast majority of Israeli society.
“This book,” he writes, “is the culmination of a life’s work.” He first dismantled the historical myths used to justify the settler-colonial state of Israel as a doctoral student at Princeton, “making him,” he notes wryly, “not only unemployed, but something quite different: unemployable.” Although treated like a pariah by academic institutions and the media, he is one of our nation’s most important forensic scholars, relentlessly exposing political, academic, and journalistic malfeasance in his service of justice and truth. “To tell the truth is revolutionary,” Antonio Gramsci wrote, “Nothing is more destructive for revolution than illusions, and nothing benefits it more than the clear and open truth.” This book is a sterling example of the standards Gramsci demanded.
Professor Finkelstein has spent decades battling against Israel and its powerful lobby, and he has paid a huge price, not just in terms of his career, but his emotional well-being. He says this will quite possibly be his last book. He’s exhausted. He needs a mental respite. If this is true, this book will be the capstone to a life of the mind that few can equal. Joining me to discuss “Gaza’s Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places” is Professor Norman Finkelstein. It’s an amazing book and really, it’s always with the power of your research, and by the time you finish it there’s just no argument to be made against it. And I think one of the things that fascinated me or I thought was so important about the book is that even those institutions that perhaps, we can talk about the ICC and others, have attempted to at least acknowledge the genocide, they still fall short in terms of how they characterize Palestinian resistance. Let’s begin where the book begins. Well, you actually begin with that wonderful discussion, which you’ve spoken to me before about with Nat Turner’s slave revolt and you quote Charles Sumner on abolition. But why don’t we just set the context once again for what happened on October 7th, then go into this whole chapter you have called “Rape fantasies.”
Norman Finkelstein:
Well, the book begins actually with a prologue, which is an attempt to reduce to its bare minimum another book I had written, “GAZA: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom.” In that book, which I believe was published in 2018, I simply try to restore the context for the situation in Gaza, and I go into quite painstaking detail in that book. When I started this book, “Gaza’s Gravediggers,” I was determined not to do two things. Number one, I was not going to recapitulate “GAZA: An Inquest.” I figured the book is out there, the book published in 2018. For those who want to read it, they’ll read it. But I’m not going to try to recapitulate everything I went through there. So, it’s a very bare bones recapitulation of “GAZA: An Inquest.” That was one thing I decided not to do.
The second thing I decided not to do is a little bit different. Namely, when I wrote “GAZA: An Inquest,” nobody knew the historical record on Gaza. There had been many human rights reports written on the situation there, in particular after each of Israel’s high tech killing sprees in Gaza. There was a voluminous report after Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in 2008, 9. I believe it was December 26th through January 17th, what Amnesty International called “22 Days of Death and Destruction.” And after Operation Cast Lead, there was a very large and historic report. The chair of the UN Commission, which investigated Israeli and Hamas crimes during Operation Cast Lead, was chaired by a person named Richard Goldstone. He was South African. He was an internationally respected jurist. But most importantly, for our purposes, he was not only Jewish, but a self-identified Zionist. He was active in Israeli causes and described himself as a Zionist. And he, along with the commission, there were four members, produced a devastating document on what happened during those 22 days of death and destruction.
So, when those documents came out, very few people had read them. The Goldstone Report was read, but there were many others which had not been read except for a handful of activists or people in the human rights community. So, I was basically trying to set in print a historical record, which was largely unknown, as a kind of historical document. It was a requiem. I didn’t expect that it would sell very well. In fact, at the end of the book, I said, “I don’t expect anyone’s going to read this book.”
Chris Hedges:
I read it. I read it.
Norman Finkelstein:
But you recognize very few people. It was an academic book put out by an academic publisher at the University of California Press. And I modeled it after a book by a late 19th century activist on behalf of Native Americans. Her name was Helen Hunt Jackson. The book was called, “A Century of Dishonor.” Theodore Roosevelt hated that book, by the way, and he devoted quite a few pages of his multi-volume history of the West excoriating Helen Hunt Jackson. But nobody read the book. I came across it one day in the library shelf, dusted it off, removed the cobwebs and read it. And I imagine my book would be the same. It would sit on the library shelf, assuming libraries survive, which is questionable. I figured it would sit on the library shelf, maybe in a hundred years somebody will discover it. And the purpose of “Inquest” was a volume that preserved the actual history, like a century of dishonor about all the treaties that the U.S. had broken with the Native Americans and all the murder and mayhem that ensued.
When I started the new book, “Gaza’s Gravediggers,” that was a superfluous task. The record was known. It was widely publicized. Okay, a lot of it was known via TikTok, but for those who wanted a written record, it was there. In fact, by the time I was writing this book, “Gaza’s Gravediggers,” already South Africa had submitted what’s called its memorial, that means its case before the International Court of Justice on the actual genocide case. What the court ruled on was on something different called ‘provisional measures.’ I won’t go into that now unless you’re interested, but the South African memorial is 750 pages with 4,000 pages of documentation. So, do you really need me to write a book on that subject? Every human rights organization had put out multiple very large reports. The UN Commission of Inquiry had already, by that time, published six discrete reports on October 7th and thereafter. So, I wasn’t going to do that. I thought it would be superfluous. What I did think was not well documented were the shortcomings, and in some cases more than shortcomings, outright fraud, that were perpetrated in what I called ‘pockets of corruption in the international system, pockets of destruction in the UN Commissions of Inquiry, the special representative for Secretary General Gutierrez on Sexual Violence in Conflict, namely the Pramila Patten Report. And then there were judges who, in my opinion, acquitted themselves dishonorably and more than dishonorably in the ICJ, International Court of Justice, and ICC, the International Criminal Court.
So that was the purpose of the book. I like to go through court records and, when I think a claim is not plausible, try to demonstrate its implausibility, and that can require quite a lot of concentration, scrutiny, and as I said, at some level I suppose, it’s one set of biographers. If you hate your subject, you can’t be a good biographer. And the same way if you hate this kind of work, then you really can’t do it. It’s just mind-numbing and very painstaking. And the toughest part is to be honest. The hardest part is working through the argument, trying to figure out what’s wrong with this argument. Why doesn’t it sound right. There’s something wrong here. Well, you know what? There’s a very big mental distance between something intuitively not sounding right and trying to prove it. And I sat down in several instances, in the case of the vice president of the International Court of Justice, the ICJ, Judge Sebutinde, I was not going to leave any wiggle room. I want that woman off the court, ousted from the court, removed from the court, use whatever euphemism you want. She has to be removed from the court. And I devoted a hundred pages to going through that court record and showing this just doesn’t work. What she’s saying, it doesn’t hold together. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, “The singular virtue of truth is it holds together.” That if you go through the pieces like a jigsaw puzzle, different shapes, different places on the jigsaw puzzle board, it holds together. The singular disadvantage of truth is it doesn’t hold together.
Chris Hedges:
Well, let’s talk specifically about Judge Sebutinde. We can start there before we go to the Patten Report. Give us your critique, what it is that you dissected.
Norman Finkelstein:
I would say there are several aspects to my critique of Judge Sebutinde. For your listeners, let me just situate her. She’s from Uganda, and she’s the vice president of the court. For a short period of time when Judge Nawaf Salam left the court, he became the Prime Minister of Lebanon, she was actually the president of the court. That didn’t last very long, but there was a period when she was president during the Gaza genocide case.
Now, my main critique of Judge Sebutinde, I would say it comprises these parts. Number one, as I’m sure you’re aware, Chris, and probably many of your viewers, there was a voluminous record on the Gaza genocide. People like Piers Morgan, he always complains about the lack of admitting journalists, and that is a problem, the fact that Israel bars journalists, and obviously from its point of view, there’s a very good reason why it wants to bar journalists. But the fact that it barred journalists doesn’t mean we don’t have a very authoritative record of what happened in Gaza. Why? Because every human rights and humanitarian organization in the world has a base in Gaza. And so, we had reports from every single organization. We had reports from UNCTAD. We had reports from the World Bank. We had reports from Save the Children. We had reports from UNESCO. It was a voluminous set of reports, and they all came to the same basic conclusions. There was just no dissent within international humanitarian and human rights organizations and UN organizations.
So, Judge Sebutinde has a formidable problem on her hands. If she wants to prove that Israel is not guilty, for example, of using starvation as a weapon of war. If she wants to prove that, who is she going to rely on? Remember, the International Court of Justice is the legal arm of the United Nations. So, to disprove the claim that Israel’s using starvation as a weapon of war, you have to say all the UN organizations are lying, individually and collectively, that it’s this grand conspiracy by the whole international system in all of its constituent parts. Even US organizations like the Agency for International Development, the one that was headed by Samantha Powers at the time. Every international humanitarian human rights organization, they’re just saying the same thing. There was no dispute. There was no contention to use the word that the media likes to use. There was no controversy over what was happening in Gaza.
So, Judge Sebutinde had a big problem in her hands. And how does she solve the problem? She only cites Israeli sources. There was only one mention I came across, one, of a UN source, which was actually irrelevant because it referred to a different time period. So, what I did in the book was I have these long tables citing hundreds of UN, international humanitarian, human rights organizations saying one thing, and poor Judge Sebutinde just citing Israel. That’s not credible.
It’s not credible for many reasons. First of all, if you’re going to say all these international organizations are lying, because that’s in effect what you’re saying. You’re saying there’s no starvation in Gaza. You’re saying there’s no hunger problem in Gaza. You’re saying that food is being fairly distributed in Gaza. So, you’re saying all of these organizations are lying. Well then if you’re making that claim, you kind of have to show how they’re lying. You can’t pretend as if all this evidence doesn’t exist. If there’s a mountain of evidence, as I’ve said many times with regard to Holocaust deniers – of course, Holocaust deniers have the right to say whatever they want – but to be taken seriously, you have to refute the mountain of evidence that has been adduced in support of the Nazi Holocaust having happened. You can say whatever you want for sure, but you can’t be taken seriously in the court of public opinion unless you set about refuting the mountain of evidence. She doesn’t do that. She just goes her merry way as if the evidence never happened.
The second thing is the court, like most court systems, has rules of evidence. And the rules of evidence are, for example, a concept all of your listeners are familiar with, namely that you treat evidence against interest with greater value than evidence for interest. That sounds high falutin but it’s very simple. If Adolf Hitler said there were no gas chambers, you would say, “Well yeah, that’s exactly what he would say.” But if Himmler said there were gas chambers, you say, well, that’s a pretty compelling piece of evidence because it certainly goes against his interests to say that. Her only evidence is Israel. That’s not serious evidence. That’s like Hitler saying there were no gas chambers. So that was one aspect.
The other aspect is her whole argument just doesn’t hold together. What she says in January – just for the sake of your listeners, because I want to just give the context, the case before the court was not whether Israel had committed genocide, but whether Israel was plausibly committing genocide, such that we have to indicate what’s called provisional measures. And that’s simply like in the American language we call a preliminary injunction. Let’s say there is compelling evidence that a husband physically abuses his wife. Well, if there’s compelling evidence, that doesn’t mean he’s guilty. But if there’s significant enough evidence, then we have to issue a temporary restraining order to separate them. Now that’s not a conviction, it simply means, to put it bluntly, we want the party to still be alive at the time of the trial. And that’s the same thing in the genocide cases. If the state is plausibly committing genocide, then we have to issue what they call ‘indicate provisional measures’ in order to make sure there’s a population still alive when the case comes to court. The actual case, believe it or not, probably won’t come before the ICJ before 2030. Yes, believe it or not. Israel has until 2029, I believe, to respond to the memorial that’s 750 pages, 4,000 pages of document report. They have until 2029.
So, the question is, if it’s not going to come before the court until 2030, we have to make sure the population is still around when the case is adjudicated by the ICJ. So, if you look at the case she assembles, the provisional measures case, it came before the court in January, then again in February, then again in March, and then again in May. It came four times. South Africa kept coming back and saying, “The situation is getting worse. You need to indicate more provisional measures.” And so, each time the judges submitted a majority opinion, separate opinion, dissenting opinion. And if you put them all together, her arguments didn’t hold together. What she says in March contradicts what she said in January. What she said in May contradicts what she said in March. It didn’t make any sense. It was obvious that she was blowing with the political winds.
And the third part, which I go through at some length, is it’s not only that she cites Israeli sources, she’s just copying them. It was cut and paste, her submissions to the court, to the point, you might call this the limit, to the point that in one of her submissions, one of her dissents, according to a Gaza researcher who approached me – I can’t get his name – he found that she had plagiarized, literally word for word, plagiarized, 33 percent of her submission from pro-Israel hacks. And that’s very painstakingly delineated in the book, just passage, passage, passage, passage, passage, passage.
Obviously, she’s just plagiarizing, or whoever wrote it was just plagiarizing. People get lazy, so whoever wrote it forgot to delete the wiki link. So, the wiki hyperlink is in there. It was a complete disaster. And then whenever she seems like she goes out on her own, the sorts of things she says – she says that the League of Nations gave the mandate of Palestine to Britain, that’s 1922-3, depending on where you’re counting, because of trying to give refuge for Holocaust victims. 1922. The purpose of the mandate was to give refuge for Holocaust victims.
Chris Hedges:
But Norm, it does play into, and the Patten Report does this as well, it’s useful for Israeli propaganda or Hasbara, number one. And number two, I think as you have pointed out, it is useful to these people’s careers and advancement. And you mentioned the Goldstone Report. I mean they destroyed him, and he finally had to publicly disavow his own work.
Norman Finkelstein:
I think now is not the time to speculate on Goldstone. My belief was, for reasons I go through, at great length, in the book, that he was blackmailed. Everybody, even if you don’t have skeletons in your closet, somebody close to you can have skeletons in their closet. Goldstone’s daughter lived in Israel. She had relocated, what they call Aliyah. She did Aliyah and she lived in Israel. And it’s easy to imagine they get dirt on her. Maybe she was having an affair, maybe her husband was having an affair. And she goes to her father and she says,” Please, please repudiate the report. They’re going to destroy me. They’re going to destroy our family. They’re going to destroy your grandson.”
You might remember that the Jewish community in South Africa barred Goldstone from attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah. I mean they were just completely ruthless. So, that’s what I think happened in the case of Goldstone. In the case of the various characters I look at in my current book, I would say probably Pramila Patten, it was just pure careerism. She was going to defend the ‘women’s cause’ and they knew it. They knew that she would be easily susceptible to the flattery and the lure of fame. When Sheryl Sandberg produced her propaganda film entitled, “Screams Before Silence,” which claimed Hamas had weaponized rape and sexual violence as a tactic of war, who showed up at Sheryl Sandberg’s New York premier? Pamila Patten. So, in her case I just think it was kind of careerism.
In the case of Navi Pillay and the UN Commission of Inquiry…
Chris Hedges:
Let me just interrupt. She just won the Nobel Prize. But she has a mixed record, according to your book.
Norman Finkelstein:
Yeah, that’s absolutely correct, Chris. It’s a mixed record because the UN is ultimately, it’s a political institution, which means it’s responsive to all sorts of political pressures. Now when they issued the report on Hamas, Israel had made, for reasons we can go into if you like, it had made Hamas rape its red line. That was where it dug in its heels. And if you denied Hamas rape and Hamas sexual violence, you were then the equivalent of a Holocaust denier and you were a misogynist because they were playing into the Me Too Movement, but, you know, trust women and all of that. So, they made that the red line. And also, it was a woman’s issue. Or at least it’s being cast as a woman’s issue. Navi Pillay is a woman, so, she’s part of that whole UN institutional structure in the first place, but in the second, and not a low second, a second just below the top, it’s the UN as an institution that’s supposed to be promoting women. That’s the vanguard. That’s the cutting edge of human rights at this particular moment. So, I think she found the pressure irresistible at that particular point when she issued that report. It was early still in the Gaza genocide. So, Navi Pillay, or I should say that report, but clearly her hand is there, it was interesting because if you read what they wrote, they do not accept the Israeli evidence of rape and sexual violence. They do not. She says, “We do not have reasonable grounds to assume that Israel committed rape on October 7th.”
So, what does she do? You remember I said a moment ago that when Judge Sebutinde, when the evidence is against her, she’s forced to rely on Israel because there’s nothing there. The record is so voluminous about October 7th and thereafter by all the most credible human rights organizations and humanitarian organizations in the world. So, what does Navi Pillay do? It’s interesting what she does. She starts inventing instances of sexual violence or what they call – the technical term is ‘sexual and gender-based violence ‘ – which are positively ridiculous. Now, you might say, “Finkelstein, that’s hyperbole,” and in fact I don’t engage in hyperbole, people will be very surprised to know. It’s like what Raul Hilberg, the greatest scholar of the Nazi Holocaust, when he was coerced into commenting on my book, “The Holocaust Industry,” which he didn’t want to do publicly. Well, what his comment was, and I wish listeners would take it in before dismissing me for my hyperbole and polemical language. He said, “Finkelstein’s findings were conservative.” That’s a fact. I am so careful not to go one jot, one scratch, one iota beyond what the evidence shows. Partly it’s because of a scrupulous belief in truth, but secondly because I know if I go one jot beyond, I get hung. I get hung. “Finkelstein said this, but look what the evidence shows,” so in order to preserve my reputation, I have to be very careful about not going a jot, a scintilla beyond what the evidence shows.
So, what is what does Navi Pillay do? I’ll give you an example, though the book as you know is filled with examples on this score. When Hamas came into Gaza on October 7th, many came in on motorbikes. Two people on a motorbike. And then beyond the killings, the murder and mayhem, they take hostages. So, they take a woman hostage. They sit on their motorbikes, the two of them, and she’s between them as they’re leaving Gaza. Okay? So, what does Navi Pillay say? She says, “This is sexual violence.” Why? She calls it ‘coerced intimacy.’ That because a woman is sitting between two men, it’s sexual violence because of coerced intimacy. Now that’s just downright stupid.
She played a marvelous role during the anti-apartheid movement. I believe she was, if my memory’s right, she was Nelson Mandela’s lawyer at some point. So, I’m never going to in any way diminish her achievements. What I would say is, like most people in the UN system, and you know this better than me for sure, they are susceptible to all sorts of political pressures. And this one proved unbearable for her, and she began to make statements. As I say in the book, I go through many, many examples. You have women who are staffing a highly sophisticated piece of military technology. It’s called ‘shootkill’ or something like shootkill, the English translation of this. You know what she says? She says they were civilians. What are you talking about? This is just ridiculous.
Chris Hedges:
But Mehdi Hasan does this. I mean, if you go so far in terms of critiquing Israel in many ways in order to keep yourself from being completely pushed out, you have to demonize the Palestinians. Isn’t that what this game is about?
Norman Finkelstein:
Well, we all know the expression, a ‘false equivalency,’ a ‘false balance.’ So, if you’re going to accuse, as they do, as the Commission of Inquiry did, if you’re going to accuse Israel of rape and sexual violence, you have to accuse Hamas. But I think that that was one aspect. The other aspect, as I’ve already said, is that’s where Israel drew the red line. And it was clever in drawing there the red line because they capitalized on the woke moment and the fact that if you in any way question what these so-called ‘witnesses’ said on October 7th about rape, then you become a misogynist and complicit in male patriarchy and whatever else. So, it was a red line which was very difficult to question, to raise doubts about.
My initial feeling was I didn’t believe the allegations were true, but there was certainly a possibility that they were true. I didn’t believe it for various personal interactions with Gazans, which made me skeptical, but I certainly didn’t dismiss the charges out of hand. But the more I went through the record, I mean, where does it leave you? For your listeners’ sake who haven’t read the book or haven’t read what I’ve recently written about that particular subject, the rape and sexual violence, let’s just take one piece of I would call compelling, acontrarial evidence, namely evidence which is contradicting the official claim. So, let’s take one piece of evidence. There’s this Israeli Civil Commission on Sexual Violence and Rape and so forth. And it says, “We have amassed 10,000 photographs and digital segments on October 7th.” Ten thousand. It goes on to say, “It would take 1,800 hours to go through all of this photographic and digital evidence, digital segments. 1800 hours.” So, a little quick arithmetic, 1,800 hours. If you, Chris, were to sit down and very assiduously, conscientiously go through the photographic and digital evidence. Let’s say you worked eight hours a day, seven days a week. You know it would take you more than seven months to go through that evidence. Then we’re told the evidence consists of CCTV, traffic cameras, body cams, dash cams, iPhones, and in the case of the Hamas militants from whom they seized their digital evidence and include dash cams, body cams, and GoPros. So, it’s a large spectrum of technology. And then we’re talking about the relatively confined area, it’s the Gaza envelope. Okay? So now here’s the question. There isn’t one image of rape or sexual violence. Not one. Not one of the 10,000 photographs and digital segments. Not only do they not show rape, they don’t show sexual violence. There’s nothing there. Now how can you account for that fact?
The Civil Commission, its central thesis of its report, which runs to 286 pages, the central contention of its report is that Hamas instrumentalized rape and sexual violence in order to psychologically and emotionally shatter Israeli society. That was its goal. That was its objective. It was going to post all of the sexual violence, including rape, in order to psychologically and emotionally shatter the Israeli national esprit, the Israeli national psyche. Well, if they didn’t post any images of rape and other forms of sexual violence, the only possible conclusion is it’s because they didn’t have any. If their goal was to disseminate these images in order to shatter the Israeli psyche, then if they didn’t post any, it means they didn’t have any. And if they didn’t have any, that must mean because it didn’t happen.
Take the other example: the case of the hostages. They have people in their custody, if the goal of the sexual violence was to shatter the Israeli psyche, then why didn’t it post images of raping the hostages? There’s only one possible reason, because they didn’t have images of raping the hostages, and if they didn’t have the images, it didn’t happen. In my opinion, there’s no other possible conclusion from their own premise. I’m starting from their premise: the purpose of the rape and sexual violence was to inflict emotional, psychological harm or to terrorize Israeli society. If you start from that premise, as I wrote in what I posted on the web, then their findings are the most compelling proof we have to date that the sexual violence didn’t happen.
Chris Hedges:
I want to close by talking about the United Nations, especially the Security Council endorsement of the Trump “Gaza Peace Plan.”
Norman Finkelstein:
The United Nations has entered into a period of steep decline, and UN Security Council Resolution 2803 from November 17 25 was one data point of that steep decline because the essence of the UN Security Council Resolution was to whitewash, eliminate, pretend as if it weren’t there. Eighty years – it’s kind of mind-boggling – of UN jurisprudence, UN law, law parts of which were validated in the course of International Court of Justice advisory opinions. One was in July 2004. The second was in July 2024. It negated 80 years of UN law on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
For those of your viewers who have never looked at a UN resolution on the subject, UN resolutions typically begin with what are called ‘preambular paragraphs,’ preamble paragraphs. And the preambular paragraphs recite the whole legal history of the conflict. So, they typically go back to November 1947, the UN Partition Resolution. And then they go from the Partition Resolution, then to the resolutions passed right after the 1947-49 war, which sometimes called the First Arab-Israeli War. Then they go to 1967, UN Resolution 242, then they go to 1973, UN Resolution 338. And then they go through all the UN resolutions on the illegality of the settlements, all of the UN resolutions on the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza being occupied territory. So, believe it or not, these preambular paragraphs sometimes take between four and seven pages. It’s such a long history.
UN resolution 2803, there are no preambular paragraphs. The whole legal history was annulled. And instead, what happened, for the sake of your listeners who don’t want to go through the whole sordid and squalid unfolding of events, it’s very hard to believe, it’s difficult to assimilate. It took me about a week of cursing in the street until I finally was able to provisionally reconcile myself to it. It gave Gaza to Donald Trump. Gaza was handed to Donald Trump. They created this thing called a ‘Board of Peace.’ Donald Trump was declared the head of the Board of Peace. The Board of Peace does not have any power that Donald Trump cannot veto. He can veto any initiative coming from the Board of Peace. And the only requirement the UN Security Council put on Donald Trump is that every six months he should, not he must, every six months he should report back to the Security Council on progress in Gaza. That’s it. He literally, he himself, can do as he pleases with no internal or external restraint or constraint. That’s UN Resolution 2803. There are no limits on his power. None. None whatsoever.
And in fact, when Jared Kushner was asked, he said, “We are going to treat Gaza as if it’s a private property.” That’s what he said, “We will treat Gaza as if it’s a private property,” which was, to the credit of that colossal nitwit, it happened to be true. The UN Security Council gave the deed to Gaza to Trump Inc. It’s now just another property in the portfolio of Trump Inc. That’s true. It’s revoltingly true, but it’s true. There is no historical analogue to that, except for when the Congress of Berlin effectively gave the Congo to King Leopold of Belgium. It was treated by him, and subsequent to the Congress of Berlin, it was validated, that the Congo was King Leopold’s property and in the course of his presiding over the Congo between ten and 15 million Congolese were killed in the ivory and the rubber trades. Ten to fifteen million, a number very hard, as Oprah would say, to wrap your mind around. Ten to fifteen million Congolese were killed.
And at one point, Jared Kushner, that sack of distilled feces, he said, “If Hamas doesn’t disarm, we’re going to give Israel the green light to finish the job.” To finish the job. Who is this guy? Who is he? Every attainment in his life was bought for him by his father. He’s just a kind of a kind of freakish product of affirmative action for rich people. And he carries on, he walks so erect in his Ralph Lorenz suits, like he’s important. He’s like this guy Marco Rubio, with a Napoleon complex who carries on. All of them, they carry on like they’re so important. No, it’s really a painful sight to behold. And then there is Nikolay Mladenov. He calls himself ‘the high representative of Gaza.’ He’s the low scrotum of Gaza. They all carry on. “We’re going to let Israel finish the job, finish the genocide.” “I’m the high representative of Gaza.” No, you’re not. You’re a low life sack of shit. And believe me, I’ve been criticized for it, but I’ll say it 10,000 times. If they meet the same fate as, say, Heydrich did and the other ‘high representatives’ of the Reich, I certainly won’t shed a tear, let alone a salty tear, for them.
If those people in Gaza have not suffered enough since 1948 to now be given over to the care of Mr. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Mladenov, as I call him the ‘vomitrocious Mr. Mladenov,’ then if they meet an expeditious fate at the hands of those they’ve tormented, far be it from me to question the wisdom of that fate. As Mr. Tony Blair, another monster who’s involved in Gaza, yes, he gave the first report to the UN. He’s on that Gaza Board of Peace. As Tony Blair said when Saddam Hussein, was he hung? I can’t remember…
Chris Hedges:
Yeah, he was hung.
Norman Finkelstein:
When Tony Blair said, “I am against capital punishment.” “However,” he said, “I think the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein.” And I say, “Ditto to you, Tony Blair, should you meet that fate. And ditto Mr. Kushner and Mr. Mladenov, if they meet that fate.” So, for me, I want to just say for the sake of your listeners who may want to know a little background, the question is: why did that happen? The vote in the Security Council for Resolution 2803 was 15 to 0. And as every listener knows, or at least listener of your program knows, the Russians and the Chinese sit on the Security Council. The Russians and the Chinese have a veto. Why didn’t they exercise their veto power? And the answer was given by the Russians and Chinese. And you know what the answer was? Every Muslim and Arab state supported the resolution. Everyone from Indonesia to Pakistan to Turkey. And then the usual suspects Egypt, Jordan, Saudi, Qatar, Algeria, brace yourself, including the state of Palestine, supported the resolution. So, the Russians and the Chinese said, “We’re facing a dilemma. We think the resolution is terrible. But if we veto it…” The threat was Trump would end the ceasefire and unleash the Israelis again. And they said, “We would be blamed because we would be blamed for exercising the veto.” And so, they said, now I’m using my words, the American expression, “We can’t be more pious than the Pope. If all the Arab Muslim states support it, then we have to.” They didn’t vote for it, they abstained, but the Russians said two things. They said number one, “This is a black day in the history of the United Nations.” And number two, their last words were, “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.” They knew exactly what’s going to happen. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. And for me, I said at the very end of the book, the last words were, “On November 17th, 2025, the UN had turned into a rotting corpse.” For those of you who know socialist history, communist history, when the German Social Democratic Party on August 4th, 1914, voted war credits to the German government to support the government in World War I, Rosa Luxemburg famously said on August 4th, 1914, “The German Social Democratic Party became a rotting corpse.” And that’s how I felt about the UN system after that resolution and then it was simply confirmed when Israel and the United States launched the most brazen, flagrant breach of the UN Charter when it attacked Iran and there was no Security Council condemnation.
At that point, in my opinion, the laws of war were defunct. They no longer were valid arbiters of international law. It was over. That being the case, Iran had every right to do anything in order to preserve its national independence, territorial integrity. It had no obligations to anybody. Don’t talk to me about Iran say violating international law by attacking the Gulf states and even attacking at some point civilian sites in the Gulf states. No. My question to the Gulf states, “Did you condemn the attack on Iran? Did you?” If you didn’t, cry me a river. There’s no international law anymore. Cry me a river. Iran has the right to do whatever it needs to do in order to preserve its national independence and territorial integrity. So, between that Security Council Resolution on Gaza and its total silence after the US-Israeli aggression on Iran, the UN is dead. It is.
Now, people who agree with my analysis, and who I respect a lot, still hold out hope that it can be revived, resurrected, rejuvenated. Maybe. I don’t want to eliminate that possibility, but as of this moment, it’s dead. It’s dead. Gutierrez left his term of office, Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez. His term of office ends this December, and I would say it’s a very sad ending. He wasn’t terrible throughout the Gaza genocide, but there were moments when he was terrible. And I go through those moments in the book where what he did was totally shameful, made me so angry, not only because of the act, but because it was so shamelessly dishonest what he did. So shamelessly cowardly what he did.
And I’ll just give the one last example. Many of us, and probably you as well, were gripped by the scene on January 26th 2024 when the ICJ was going to deliver its determinations on the case brought by South Africa that Israel was plausibly committing genocide, and therefore the court has to indicate provisional measures to make sure that the people of Gaza are still alive if it ever comes to court.
Here I always like to admit my errors. I couldn’t have been more wrong. When people talked about bringing the case before the ICJ, I said, “Are you kidding? You really believe a court with the US, the UK, France, Britain, Germany, China, with its problems regarding Tibet and the…” What’s the name of the Muslim minority in in China?
Chris Hedges:
The Uyghurs.
Norman Finkelstein:
Uyghurs. “Do you think these countries are going to vote for a resolution saying Israel is plausibly committing genocide? That’s ridiculous. That’s never going to happen.” Well, guess what? You ready for this? And it makes me choke even now. The vote was fifteen to two. The only two dissenters were Israel, because Israel was entitled to a representative on the court because the case was specifically directed against it, and Sebutinde, the Israeli agent. 15 to 2. It was a moment to remember.
I’m not sure if you listened to it. If you did, the presentations by the South Africans were deeply moving. It was that rainbow coalition. There were two old white men, John Dugard and the guy from Oxford, his name. It’ll come back to me. And then there was an Indian woman from South Africa, there was an Irish woman, there was an African man, a black African man, a black South African man. It was beautiful as a composition. And then the presentations were so deeply moving. They were so emotionally and factually compelling. It was a stirring moment. A stirring and a sterling moment. And then the president of the court was Joan Donoghue, who was the American on the court. She read the verdict. Okay? So, for a moment, you could believe in this thing called justice, even as articulated by the highest judicial body in the world, which is the last place you should look for justice, because it’s the condensation of all the politics in the world, all the politics of the world reaches its climax in the highest judicial body in the world. There’s no way they’re going to do that, but they did it. And it was deeply stirring when it was done. You could breathe fresh air. Even in the dankest of places, you could, even in prisons. I’m sure inmates who heard that verdict felt some sense of exhilaration. And then what happens? Four months later, Judge Donoghue had already stepped down from the court because her term of office ended. She goes on this British program, which has since been suspended, called HARDtalk. And do you know what she says in HARDtalk? She says, “We never said Israel plausibly committed genocide in Gaza.”
What was that? Or as the young people like to say WTF? You read the verdict. What are you talking about? Why did she do it? It was obvious. She was no longer on the court. She needed a job. And she had the albatross of that verdict hanging around her. So, to get a job in a US law firm, you had to disown, repudiate the verdict. And she just shamelessly, shamefully, just lied. Lie. Flat out lie. If I’m not telling the truth, Joan Donoghue, I’m saying you’re a liar. A flat out liar. Sue me for libel. I would love to go to court on that. Well, I already did my own mini court. I went through the whole court record, very painstakingly, in 58 pages in the book. I saved it for the last chapter because it was so difficult, so painstaking, so technical, because of all the idiotic legalese, all these idiotic phrases, they use like ‘plausible rights.’ I go through it. I saved it for the 4th chapter because I knew unless you were really intrepid, you could not get through that chapter. It’s a tough chapter. But I think John Dugard read it, the South African, he was a senior representative. By the way, the British lawyer, I said there were two old guys. The other was Vaughan Lowe from Oxford. When you get old you have delayed memory. It always comes back but it takes time.
John Dugard read it, and he did say it was an incredible piece of work. Yeah, it was very difficult. I struggled. I knew what she said was a lie. But as Raul Hilberg once said, and it’s a line, you’re a serious writer, Chris, so it’s a line worth pondering. Raul Hilberg was in the class all his own when it came to the Nazi Holocaust. It was kind of scary how much information was lodged in his skull. It was really breathtaking. In any case, he once said, and now I’m quoting him, he said, “The Holocaust did happen, but proving it is not so easy.” And it’s true. It took him three of the dullest volumes ever written in the history of humankind. There are no adjectives. There are no adverbs. There’s nothing. It’s just dry text intersprinkled with incomprehensible diagrams, which I still struggle with when I reread it. Proving it is not easy.
Now I knew she was lying, but proving it was not easy. And I say for the book, for me, now that I’m coming to the end of my life, these sorts of things are like a Rubik’s Cube. It’s a game. How do you prove that’s not true? Believe me, okay, I’m not a genius, but my mind is reasonably competent. It is mentally so exhausting, mentally so taxing. There’s no relief, no respite. When I’m in the streets. When I’m jogging, I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with that argument. What’s wrong with that argument? There’s something wrong there.
So, the book is difficult, but it’s a mental game. If you want to see how to unpack a lie, but not by juxtaposing the true evidence versus the lie. No. It’s going into the lie itself to prove it doesn’t hold together. It’s a lie. And that’s what I did with Judge Joan Donoghue. That’s what I did. I went inside the lie, and I showed what she’s saying by her own terms. It can’t be true. I’m not saying this, but this judge said this, and that judge said that, and judge that, no. That’s a legitimate form of argument, but it’s not nearly as devastating as an internal implosion of the argument. And that’s what I do, and that’s what I’ve always done. That’s what I did with John Pierce…
Chris Hedges:
I know.
Norman Finkelstein:
Forty years ago. Everybody else said, “Oh, that’s just Zionist propaganda,” which it was, but that doesn’t prove it’s not true. You have to go inside the argument and show the pieces don’t fit together. There’s something shady going on here. And that’s the book.
Chris Hedges:
Well, it’s a magnificent work. “Gaza’s Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places.” It does everything you say it does and more.
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