Dr. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist, author, and one of the world's foremost scholars on Israel and Palestine. Born in New York City to Jewish Holocaust-survivor parents, Finkelstein says that it would "betray the memory of [his] parents' suffering" to abide Israel's crimes—a decades-long position that has led to academic blacklisting, censorship, and international travel bans.   

Finkelstein sat down with Current Affairs to discuss what has changed since October 7, and how the sadism of Israeli officials differs from those who came before them.

Nathan J. Robinson

Let me start with what Benjamin Netanyahu recently said. Speaking recently at a conference hosted by a pre-military academy in the West Bank, Netanyahu said that Israel now has in its grip 60 percent of Gaza. Members of the audience then shouted that Israel should take 100 percent, and he said, "First off, 70; let's start with that." Some people may have been surprised at this blunt admission.

Let me ask you, Dr. Finkelstein, was this the plan all along, and how do we know if so?

Norman Finkelstein

The Israelis made clear their objectives in the first week after the Hamas operation on October 7. That objective was stated with as much clarity as one could expect. In fact, as compared to other genocides, the clarity of the public statements was on an altogether different level. Most genocidal regimes don't announce that they are executing a genocide, even if you take the case of the Hitler regime.

Hitler would give speeches in which he said, "In 1939 I warned the Jews that if they started the war, they would regret it." And so around 1943, he quotes that statement, and now he says, "They see I wasn't joking, that I get the last laugh"—I don't recall the exact words. But there were never any explicit public statements by the Hitler regime or the Nazi regime that they were committing a genocide. The most famous near admission was the speech by Himmler at Posen, and that's often quoted, where he says, "Poor us, poor Germans, that we have to carry out this horrible task of exterminating the Jews, that it was imposed on us, and it's obviously a sordid task that we have to carry out, but we have been appointed by history to be the executioners."

The reason it's so widely quoted is that it was the closest thing there was to a public admission by the Nazis that they were carrying out a genocide. That's not the case with Israel. Within the first couple of weeks, or I should say, within the first month, Prime Minister Netanyahu was saying, "Remember Amalek." Now, as the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem put it, every schoolchild in Israel knows what it means when you say "remember Amalek." They said it means you kill every man, woman, child, and also oxen, and so forth. It was very clear; he said it twice. Defense Minister Gallant—he was the Defense Minister at the time—said, "We are going to prohibit any food, fuel, water, or electricity from entering Gaza." That was about October 14 or 15, roughly around that. You'll forgive me for not remembering the exact dates. Well, if a hermetically sealed parcel of land is prevented from receiving any food, fuel, water, or electricity, I think the consequences are pretty straightforward. That's a genocidal order. The President of Israel, Herzog, said, "There are no innocents in Gaza." This notion of civilians in Gaza, he says, is a misnomer. They are all Hamas.

Now, of course, Israel has a defense for each statement I've quoted, but when the International Court of Justice delivered its first statement on January 29, when they stated that Israel was plausibly committing a genocide, they had reviewed each of these statements. They were very careful. As you can imagine, if you're going to claim that Israel is plausibly committing genocide, you don't want to make any missteps because of the fallout. They said they independently reviewed each of these statements. The statements, as they reproduce them—it's not a decision, but in their provisional measures—said these were the statements. So now, after those statements were made, how did Israel's defenders try to extricate themselves from these incriminating statements? What they said was it was all in the spur of the moment—the shock. They were so shocked by what happened on October 7 that they made statements that were, yes, genocidal, but they didn't really mean them.

But the problem was the statements kept coming forth, and not just the statements. It was the actions. What was most striking when I started to read the subsequent UN reports that came out one to two years after October 7, or after the first month, was that what they said they would do was exactly what they did. They started as every UN official and also EU official said: they were using starvation as a weapon of war. The Human Rights Watch said they were using deprivation of water in Gaza; they said that it was an act of extermination and an act of genocide. So the point is that everything that happened in the first weeks was prefigured exactly by what Israel was intending to do. I do not believe—it's my opinion—that Israel was intending to commit a genocide. Israel wanted to commit a massive ethnic cleansing. However, in order to achieve that massive ethnic cleansing, they used genocidal means. The genocide was a means to the end of ethnic cleansing.

And on top of that, Israel was to this day—and when I say Israel, I mean the entire society; I don't mean just a handful of officials—determined to exact a blood revenge. It was thirsty for revenge, and so shocked were they by what happened on October 7 that revenge was limitless.

Robinson

I want to understand a little better what your interpretation of what the Israeli goal was. Beyond exacting revenge, is it to seize a certain percentage of the Gaza Strip and confine people to smaller and smaller areas? Is it to create the conditions for ultimately expelling all the surviving Palestinians? I think there was a quote where Netanyahu, at one point, said he wanted to "thin out" the population.

What is your understanding of what, to the extent there is a long-term plan beyond sort of blood lust and vengeance, that plan was and is?

Finkelstein

It's useful to clarify that, and actually, Israel coined the phrase that clarified what its goals were before October 7. Israel carried out periodically these high-tech killing sprees in Gaza, which it called its operations. The best-known ones are Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, Operation Protective Edge in July-August 2014. And the purpose of these operations was very clear. It was called "mowing the lawn." That is, periodically you have to remind the Palestinians in Gaza who are in charge, and so they launched these high-tech killing sprees.

After October 7, Israel changed its goal. Its goal was now to, for once and for all, solve the Gaza question. We're not having any more "mowings of the lawn." What did solving the Gaza question mean? Well, to preserve the image—the metaphor of "mowing the lawn"—now it was no longer cutting the blades of grass. Now it was extirpating, pulling out by the roots, every blade of grass in Gaza. They were going to empty it out. That was their goal. And you perhaps remember, in the first month or so, there was all this speculation, including by people like Antony Blinken, that they would reach some sort of agreement with Egypt and expel the entire population of Gaza into the northern Sinai, and that seemed like a realistic proposition. As it turned out, the Arab states vetoed it, and now Israel could not expect regional cooperation in its goal of emptying out Gaza.

Its goal was very clear. There's not just one statement or two statements. You could probably fill a book now with the number of statements by unofficial and official government sources saying their goal was to make Gaza uninhabitable, unlivable. And this is still the Israeli plan. Nothing has changed whatsoever in terms of the objective. The goal still is to make Gaza unlivable, in the hope and expectation—which I admit there's no clear plan, that's true—but the hope and expectation is that conditions will become so unbearable, so unlivable, that the Gazans, by hook or by crook, will figure out a way to leave. Chaim Weizmann was the first president of the state of Israel, and also the main architect of the Zionist movement, in the period before Israel was founded and was their international diplomat. When the ethnic cleansing occurred during the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, he called it—now I'm quoting him—"the miraculous clearing of the land."

Now, of course, it wasn't miraculous. What happened was, as the first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion said, there are certain things you can do in what he called "revolutionary times"—that's his expression—that you can't do in ordinary times. And what that meant as a practical matter was, come to the 1948 war, it's a war, and there are things you can get away with in a war situation that you can't get away with in a non-war situation. And so there was the war, and there was the "miraculous clearing of the land." So to fast forward to the present, the goal of the Israelis right now is to make it unlivable, uninhabitable, and maybe some miracle will occur that we can clear out the land. What that miracle will be, I don't know, and I don't think they know.

But what you certainly understand, it doesn't require knowledge of rocket physics, is Gaza was, prior to October 7, among the most densely populated places on God's earth. Now it's been reduced; that density has now been, not exponentially but massively, increased because they're now going to leave Palestinian Gazans in 30 percent of the land. That's literally a suffocating goal. It's not unlike, incidentally, if they took the walls of the Warsaw ghetto and contracted them and contracted them and contracted them. You suffocate the people in a tinier and tinier parcel of land.

My mother didn't talk much about the concentration camp—she was in Majdanek—but she talked about what it was like walking in the ghetto. Everybody was dying of typhus and dysentery. Now, as I said, I'm not sure why she didn't talk about Majdanek, the concentration camp here, but she talked about the hunger in the ghetto and all the dead bodies with the flies above them to her left and to her right. And now that's what they're doing; they're gradually squeezing them tighter and tighter and laughing about it. Laughing. "We want 100 percent!" Like it's an auction. "Let's start with 70 percent." No, these are Nazis! Actually, Nazis did not carry on that way. A lot of the Nazi phenomenon, I think, is not well understood. In the case of the Nazi ideology, you were not allowed to carry out the genocide with enthusiasm. I know it's going to sound contradictory, and of course it is contradictory. You couldn't carry it out with sadism. In fact, there were a significant number of Nazis who were prosecuted because of the sadism with which they carried out their tasks. You are supposed to be objective and scientific, and as Himmler put it, it's supposed to be a burden imposed on you. And the Israelis adopted that.

Robinson

They cry when they shoot. You cry and shoot.

Finkelstein

You know what's new about the new Israel? They don't cry anymore. No, it's an interesting phenomenon. They've dropped the crying routine. Now they do it with relish, and they do it with glee, and they post it on social media. That's something new. I don't want to say—it's hard. Look, you're a bright young man. It's hard to say morally which is worse. Or to just do it gleefully and happily. But as a factual matter, it's something new. The Nazis didn't carry on like that. They did not. "We're supposed to see to this terrible burden that was imposed on us by history." The Israelis are in a class all their own. It has to be stressed.

The problem is not a genocidal regime; that's not correct. The problem is not a genocidal state; that's not correct. The problem is a genocidal society. And that's a real problem. Because I know you're a student of history, it's really not unlike the American South after the Civil War. The lynchings were popular community events. It wasn't like in the dark of night they came out in their sheets and the torches. No, when you had a lynching, you let out the factories early. Schoolchildren were dismissed from class early. The mothers packed a picnic basket. They went down to the campgrounds, and the person was incinerated. Everybody is cheering. They then auction off the body parts, and the body parts are then part of a photograph that's made for a postcard. So the culture, I think, is quite similar to the culture of the American South after the Civil War.

Robinson

There was just a profile of a young influencer, Andrey X, who moved from Russia to Israel and does a lot of profiling of the oppression of Palestinians. He said one of those striking things about moving to Israel as a Jew from Russia was he couldn't believe just how casual the racism was. It really sort of struck him immediately that when he was going to rent an apartment, someone would say, "Oh, this is a good building, because the landlord doesn't let Arabs in." And he said the openness of the racism was quite striking.

One of the things that you've pointed out a lot is that the recent public polling of Israelis, Israeli Jews specifically—obviously it differs among Israeli Arabs—said, I think, that the majority of at least religious Israeli Jews affirmed the statement that when you capture an enemy town, you should slaughter everyone in it.

Finkelstein

Now the openness is not really a new thing. I'll give you an example from David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker magazine. This is when the New Yorker magazine is beginning to make its shift, blowing with the wind and seeing what's now tolerable to say, and not losing your readership and influence. So, as he's making the shift, he recalls a conversation he had with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Netanyahu's father.

Netanyahu's father taught history at Cornell University, and his area of specialty was the Spanish Inquisition and the condition of Jews, where they were called conversos, I think, in Spanish during those years in Spain. In any event, and you could find the quote if you do the research, David Remnick says he was absolutely shocked at the racism around the dinner table—the casual racism of Netanyahu senior. These were dyed-in-the-wool racist bigots, and now that's become all of Israeli society. There used to be some liberal enclaves in Tel Aviv, but otherwise, no. The racism is at this point at least as deeply entrenched as it was in the American South.

Now, as to the poll, there have been several. Obviously, Israel is the most polled place on God's earth because the Jews are so important that when they get up in the morning, whether they want to have cereal or eggs, it's a very important polling question. And whether you want to egg sunny side up or sunny side down, we have to poll you, because we're so important, and everything we do is so important. So, they were constantly being polled, and to the extent that polling shows that, we have a decent indication of public opinion. Polling doesn't capture everything.

So, there was a series of polls. Let's start with the most basic. The most basic poll was every few weeks Israelis were asked the following question: After October 7, do you believe Israel is using too little force in Gaza, just the right amount of force in Gaza, or too much force in Gaza? Consistently, only five percent of Israeli Jews said too much force. Ninety-five percent said either "too little force" or "just the right amount of force." Of that 95 percent, 40 percent consistently said "too little force." In the midst of a genocide. This notion that they didn't know what's going on is completely crazy.

They say all the media is biased. Really. Israel has the highest per capita percentage use of the internet. If they want to know what's going on, they know what's going on. During the Vietnam War, people were saying the United States was not committing any atrocities in Vietnam, and there was a large number of people who said that, even though on the nightly news, you were privy to the fact that something horrible was happening there. My mother used to say, "Those who want to know know; those who don't want to know will never know," and the Israelis will never know, because they don't want to know.

But of course, they do know. Another poll asked a very simple question. It couldn't have been put more precisely, the one that you alluded to. The question was, when the Israeli army enters a city, should it kill everybody in the city? That was the question. When the IDF enters a city, should it kill everybody in the city? Of Israeli Jews, nearly half said yes. A few months later, there was another poll. The poll was, "Do you believe there are any innocents in Gaza?" Now, remember, for the sake of your viewers, half of Gaza's population are children. Half of Gaza's population is 17 and under. Are there any innocents in Gaza? That was asked of the whole Israeli population, including non-Jews. The answer was 64 percent said "no innocents in Gaza." If you factor away the 20 percent who are not Jewish, 70 to 75 percent of Israelis believe that the population in Gaza that's half children, there are no innocents. That's Israeli society.

Robinson

And when you talk about the roots of it, I was just reading an account from the 1920s by the American journalist Vincent Sheean, who went to what was then Palestine. He went with a Zionist newspaper, and then he started talking to Zionists, and what struck him immediately was that the Zionists in Palestine referred to Arabs the way Americans would refer to Indians. They thought of them as savages. The first thing that struck him was that he said, "This is clearly an Arab country; I don't really know how you're going to build a Jewish state in this Arab country."

And then when he started talking to Zionists, he thought they had no real conception of what the problem of that would be. They talked to him about their glorious standards of living, and he said when he would bring up "What's going to happen when you impose your Jewish state here?" they would say to him things like, "Well, Arabs will do anything for money, so we'll just buy them off, and then they'll leave." They didn't have any conception that they would have national feelings for Palestine. He just thought that the dehumanization—the lack of understanding that the people of Palestine were people—and that they would object to being ruled was setting them up for a century of conflict, and here we are. He was writing that in about 1935, and here we are in 2026.

Finkelstein

I mentioned earlier the attitudes of the Israelis resembled those of the American South after the Civil War. I would also say what you just said about the comparison with the Native Americans. It was very striking to me. I was recently reading the writings of the abolitionists, people like Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, and others. And Charles Sumner was really quite an extraordinary figure. He was titanic. No exaggeration, he delivered speeches in the Senate that lasted five hours. They were filled, replete with references to Latin—the ancients: the Romans, the Greeks, all in the original language. And brace yourself for this: he memorized the speeches. There was no reading. Forget a teleprompter. There was no reading from anything. Now these are extraordinary figures, and you cannot in any way minimize the sheer courage and commitment. The commitment of these people is breathtaking, and the decency. The decency.

Why do I mention it? If you read Sumner, if you read Frederick Douglass, they are always very disparaging of the Native Americans. Always very disparaging. Frederick Douglass was terrible. Same thing with Sumner. I wouldn't say Sumner was terrible, but he was definitely bad, and there wasn't a word uttered in their defense. Not a word uttered. There were obviously some like Helen Hunt Jackson, who wrote this wonderful book, A Century of Dishonor, but in general they were terrible. And you might ask the question, why were they terrible about Native Americans when, when it came to African Americans, they were sublime? Sumner and Garrison risked their lives. I repeat the famous story for the audience, not for you. Sumner was totally vicious in his attacks on the South, comparing them to rapists, and the Southern senators were so offended that one of them—he wasn't a senator, he was a House of Representatives congressman—went over in the senate and beat him and beat him with a club. Beat him and beat him and beat him just shy of death, and all the Southern congressmen and senators to the last one supported him beating Sumner. Sumner came back. It took him many months to recover, but he came back, and he fought the good fight. So, you might ask the question, how could somebody with such deep-seated moral probity when it came to the African Americans not see it with the Native Americans? Why didn't he see it?

And the only conclusion I can reach is that emancipating African Americans wouldn't fundamentally undermine the American project. Respecting the rights of Native Americans would significantly restrict your territorial goals, objectives, and aims. They did stand in the way. Teddy Roosevelt, in his five-volume work called The Winning of the West, had to address that problem, that the Native population was wiped out. And his answer was, "Would you have preferred that this vast land be preserved as a game preserve for squalid savages?" Would you have preferred that? Now you might smile at that, but you know what? That's really a tough question. He thought we were bringing civilization to this continent. It wasn't "the dark continent," it was another, as it were, "dark continent." And he said, "Had we not progressed, we would not have progressed." As in, had we not progressed all the way across the continent.

I always remember the phrase, even though I read it 20 or 30 years ago: "Would you have preferred that this be a game preserve for squalid savages?" And often I ask my students, who are very woke and progressive, how do you feel about that? Let us say it's true. The alternative is the New York skyline or teepees across the continent. Which do you prefer? And it gives pause. It gives pause. I suspect the Israelis think the same thing.

I remember once, if you'll forgive a tiny digression, but it's relevant, my late mother testified at a trial for guards from the Majdanek concentration camp in 1979, and I accompanied. It was in Düsseldorf, Germany. And before the trial began, we met with some of the Jewish community in Dusseldorf, and there was one Jewish guy; his name was, believe it or not, Karl Marx. That was his name, Karl Marx. And one night we're talking, and the Israel-Palestine conflict came up. I don't recall in what context. This is 1979, so it's a while ago. And he said, "What did the Arabs ever invent except camel shit?" That's what he said. And I remember I turned to my mother and our eyes connected, but we weren't going to be the skunk at the garden party. Now, of course, I would say something. I was a kid. But that's the Israeli other.

"We Israelis won; we're at the cutting edge of technology," this and that, and "what have the Arabs done, except invent camel shit?" And that was Theodore Roosevelt's "squalid savages." To make my own point of view clear, I'm going to just give you two examples. So, you've looked at the manuscript of my forthcoming book, Gaza's Grave Diggers, and in chapter three I have a very long chapter. It runs to about 100 pages on the Vice President of the International Court of Justice, Julia Sebutinde, in which I argue that she's either in the pay of, or being blackmailed by, the Israelis.

So when I was reading her submissions to the court during the genocide case, and also another case, it was obvious to me that there's plagiarism going on here, but I didn't know the magnitude. I couldn't figure out the magnitude. So I post something on my Twitter website—on my Twitter, whatever it is. I don't know anything about Twitter. I have a web manager. I post something. I said, "If you're a techie and you can help me track down something, please help." And about 20 people came forward, and I explained the task: Can you find the plagiarism in these submissions by Vice President of the International Court of Justice, Julia Sebutinde? So one person sends me five examples, another person sends me six or seven examples, and then there's this fellow from Gaza, and he sends me back 30 pages. Thirty pages. He said one-third of her submissions are plagiarized. I'm thinking to myself, here's this guy from Gaza who's in a, so to speak, competition with all these top computer people who volunteer to help do this for me, and he completely outshines them.