This is the first book I’ve attempted to read about the Israel-Palestine conflict. I heard of Norman Finkelstein after reading some books by Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky. I’ve finished three chapters, and so far I am impressed. Finkelstein is painstaking in detail yet still human with the occasional sarcasm or exasperation. I watched his recent interviews on The Real News Network, and on Democracy Now!, and I hope his book is able to have a wider impact immediately than having to wait a hundred years the way A Century of Dishonor by Helen Hunt Jackson did.
Thank you, Professor Finkelstein. There’s at least one other person here in Utah I know who has ordered the book. After we finish reading, we look forward to discussing it and sharing your findings with our Mormon friends and neighbors who, for the most part, know nothing about what is going on in what they call “The Holy Land.”
This passage from the final page moved me deeply:
Perhaps one day in the remote future, when the tenor of the times is more receptive, someone will stumble across this book collecting dust on a library shelf, blow off the cobwebs, and be stung by outrage at the lot of a people, if not forsaken by God then betrayed by the cupidity and corruption, careerism and cynicism, cravenness and cowardice of mortal man. “There will come a time,” [Helen Hunt] Jackson anticipated, “when, to the student of American history, it will seem well-nigh incredible” what was done to the Cherokee. Is it not certain that one day the black record of Gaza’s martyrdom will in retrospect also seem well-nigh incredible?
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