Norman Finkelstein: Build a Majority for Palestine
Dr. Norman Finkelstein speaking to Columbia University students, April 21, 2024,From YouTube video by Mohammad Sohel
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.
On April 21, 2024, Holocaust scholar and prominent pro-Palestine activist Norman Finkelstein visited the Gaza 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.
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.