Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End

493 Pages·2016·1.48 MB·English

by  Finkelstein Norman G.

KNOWING TOO MUCH

KNOWING TOO MUCH
Why the American Jewish Romance
with Israel Is Coming to an End
NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN
OR Books
New York ● London
© 2012 Norman G. Finkelstein
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First printing 2012.
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ISBN 978-1-935928-77-5 paperback
ISBN 978-1-935928-78-2 e-book
The typeface in which this book is set is Amalia. Typeset by Wordstop Tech-
nologies, Chennai, India.
Printed by BookMobile in the US and CPI Books Ltd in the UK.
The US printed edition of this book comes on Forest Stewardship
Council-certifi ed, 30% recycled paper. The printer, BookMobile, is 100%
wind-powered.
To Maren Hackmann-Mahajan,
editor extraordinaire

Once it was easy, when everyone had their head in the sand and didn’t
understand the situation. There are still people who want to talk only about
Exodus and “the only democracy in the Middle East,” but younger Jews,
students, grew up on other stories, and they have a very tough confl ict between
the Israel they know and their sense of Jewish ethics.
Rabbi Shira Milgrom1
I learned at Hebrew school that Israel was the “land of milk and honey” where
Holocaust survivors had irrigated the deserts and made fl owers bloom. . . . It
was only aft er I went to college, met Muslim friends, and enrolled in a Middle
Eastern history and politics course that I was challenged to reconcile my liberal,
humanist worldview with the fact that the Jewish state of which I was so proud
was occupying the land of 4.4 million stateless Palestinians, many of them
refugees displaced by Israel’s creation.
Dana Goldstein2

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xiii
PART I: LIBERAL ANGST
1/ Love Me, I’m A Liberal 5
2/ Irreconcilable Diff erences 19
PART II: IT’S NOT EITHER/OR
3/ A New Religion 35
4/ This Land Is My Land 45
PART III: UPDATING EXODUS
5/ Hair-Raising Screams 97
6/ Human Rights Revisionism 123
7/ Masters of War 155
8/ A Conspiracy So Immense 183
9/ Israel Versus The World 203
PART IV: MIRROR IMAGE
10/ History by Subtraction 253
Conclusion 299
Appendix 305
Notes 355
Index 451