Norman Finkelstein. Image from The DePaulia / Flickr.
By Lamar Hankins / The Rag Blog / November 13, 2025
Norman Finkelstein was born in New York City in 1953, a son of Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust. His mother grew up in Warsaw and survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp. And his father was a survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz. They met in a displaced person’s camp in Austria after the war and emigrated to the United States.
Finkelstein received his PhD in 1987 from Princeton University as a political scientist specializing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2020, he was named the fifth most influential political scientist in the world. He has written 13 books based on his scholarship, and has been viciously attacked for that scholarly work by apologists for the actions of the Israeli government. Finkelstein argues that “the real issue is Israel’s human rights record.”
Recently, Finkelstein has given several public lectures and interviews in which he offered the facts about the Israeli-Gaza conflict from his scholarly perspective. This article attempts to encapsulate his views, mostly using his actual spoken words, with minor editing to avoid repetition and enhance readability. I quote parts of an an AI-generated transcript of Finkelstein’s lectures and interviews.
“Do you condemn what Hamas did on October 7th?”
The British television personality and sometime friend of Donald Trump, Piers Morgan likes to begin any recent discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the question, “Do you condemn what Hamas did on October 7th?” For Finkelstein, this is a complex question “not to be answered glibly.”
“[E]vents in Gaza did not begin on October 7th. There is a long, let’s call it a prehistory. I think a logical place to begin is 1948 when Gaza becomes a distinct entity. About 300,000 Palestinians were expelled [to Gaza] from Israel. Altogether, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled. But 300,000 of those 750,000 ended up in Gaza. And that I think is the point of departure of any rational understanding of the situation there, namely 80% of the people in Gaza from October 7th forward, 80% of them, are refugees or descendants of refugees. It’s overwhelmingly a refugee population. It’s also, [by] fully half, a child population under 18 years of age.”
The Gaza concentration camp
“In the early 1950s, when Gaza was under Egyptian administration, outside observers came to Gaza, some just to see the situation, others to work there. The image that constantly recurs, [such as from] E. L. M. Burns [a Canadian], who was the senior UN official in Gaza, describes Gaza as a huge concentration camp. Bear in mind, I’m talking from the very beginning, the 1950s. Under Egyptian rule, Gaza is already being described as a huge concentration camp.”
“Most of the people in this room will remember Senator Al Gore, who ran for president in the year 2000. His father, Albert Gore, Sr. had also been a senator. In July 1967, right after the June 1967 war, when Gaza comes under Israeli rule, Senator Albert Gore, Sr., goes to Gaza. He then comes to speak before the Congress on what he saw. He said Gaza is a huge concentration camp on the sand.”
“If you fast forward to 2002, a senior Israeli sociologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Baruch Kimmerling, writes a little book. In passing, he discusses Gaza. How does he describe Gaza?– ‘The biggest concentration camp ever to exist.'”
“[In] 2004, the head of Israel’s National Security Council, [who is] still active in government or in official capacities, Giora Eiland, [has] a conversation with an American official [and] describes Gaza: ‘It’s a huge concentration camp.’ That’s coming from the head of Israel’s National Security Council.”
Hamas — 2006
“Now bear in mind, 2004, when [Eiland] makes that observation, that’s before Israel imposes the brutal medieval blockade on Gaza, which begins in January 2006.”
Finkelstein explains that in January 2006, the president of the United States was George W. Bush, who began what he called “democracy promotion.” Bush demanded that Palestinians hold elections, but at that time “Hamas did not want to participate because it felt that the elections were part of a fake process begun in Oslo in 1993, what came to be called the Oslo process, [which began] in September 1993 when Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Bill Clinton began the process that was supposed to end the conflict. It didn’t, but we’ll leave that aside. In any event, Hamas didn’t want to participate because they felt it was part of a charade or farce. But pressure was put on them to participate. They did. They didn’t expect to win, but they did. They won on a platform, not on ideology, not on trying to destroy the state of Israel. That was not their platform. They ran on a platform of reform.”
“The Palestinian Authority, [which had been in control of the Gaza Strip], it’s no secret, is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent; corrupt and inefficient. So, Hamas had at that point a decent record of honesty in the charitable organizations it presided over, and it also had a record of competence. So the people of Gaza voted in Hamas. Jimmy Carter, the former US president, was there during the election and he pronounced it completely fair and honest. In fact, it’s said to be the first fair and honest election in the Arab world.”
“What was the reaction? Israel immediately imposed a brutal blockade on Gaza. The blockade was then seconded by the U.S. and then by the European Union. Time doesn’t allow me to go through the details of the blockade, but I’ll give you one example. Israel was determined to unseat Hamas from power. So it imposed this diet on the people of Gaza. It calculated the caloric intake of every person in Gaza and it imposed what it called a humanitarian minimum or you can say a starvation plus diet. It wanted to keep — and it freely admitted it at least in private — it wanted to keep the economy of Gaza on the precipice, on the edge of collapse, so that the people of Gaza would rise in revolt and overthrow the Hamas regime from within.”
“By 2006, the Economist magazine, which is very far from a radical magazine, a very conventional conservative British publication, which in general, is reliable, described Gaza, we’re going to say just on the eve of October 7th, 2023, as, ‘a human rubbish heap.’ The International Committee of the Red Cross described Gaza as a sinking ship. The chief humanitarian official in the UN described Gaza as a toxic dump. And that was the fate and future of Gaza as of October 6th, 2023. As most of you will remember and I suspect a lot of you have forgotten because of what happened on after October 7th, Gaza had disappeared from the headlines by 2020. Nobody was any longer talking about the conditions in Gaza.”
“I have said many times, and I don’t say it with pride, I had given up. I had written several books on the topic. I had chronicled the situation in painstaking detail, and by 2020 it was clear nobody was any longer interested in Gaza. At that point, say between 2020 and 2023, the only talk was about whether or not the Saudis would join the Abraham Accords [agreements that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco], leaving the people of Gaza to just languish and die there. That was their fate on the eve of October 7th.”
“Mowing the lawn”
“But that’s still only part of the story because the other part is that periodically Israel launched what it called its operations in Gaza. The phrase they coined was ‘mowing the lawn.’ And what did mowing the lawn mean in practice? It meant that periodically Israel launched these high tech killing sprees in Gaza. In 2020, it was ‘Operation Cast Lead’ — 350 children killed, 6,000 homes destroyed. In 2014, it was ‘Operation Protective Edge’ — 550 children killed, 18,000 homes destroyed. And each of those operations garnered huge international headlines and indignation at what Israel had done. So you have the concentration camp-like conditions, you have the medieval siege, you have the periodic killing sprees in Gaza. As I said, it was described as a human rubbish heap.”
“Most or I should should say a significant number of the people in this room, not most, but a significant number range between the ages I would guess of 18 and 25. Among that age cohort, which also made up the age cohort of the young people who burst the gates of Gaza on October 7th, they were 60% unemployed. All they had to look forward to in each morning was to pace the perimeter of this tiny parcel of land 26 miles long, the size of a marathon, by five miles wide. That was their fate and future till their last breath. So when you fill in that background, the question of do you condemn what Hamas did on October 7th becomes rather more complicated.”
An analogy from U.S. history
“If you were to ask for an analogy, I believe the closest analogy is in our own country, but also throughout the western hemisphere where there were slave revolts, which were quite bloody. If you take the most famous of the slave revolts in the US, it was called the Nat Turner Rebellion. It occured in 1831, 30 years before the Civil War. Nat Turner gave the order to his confederates to ‘Kill all white people.’ That was his order. Kill all white people. And that’s just what they did. They went around killing men, smashing the skulls of women, smashing the skulls of children. That’s what the Nat Turner rebellion looked like in practice.”
“But there’s a question. The question is, do you condemn Nat Turner? And in our own country’s history, at the beginning, at the time of the Nat Turner Rebellion, the answer was almost universally ‘yes.’ But there was one group of Americans who refused to condemn Nat Turner. They were called the abolitionists because they wanted to abolish, to end slavery. And when they were asked the question, do you condemn Nat Turner?, their answer was, we told you so. We warned you. They were speaking to white Americans. We warned you that if you treat people this way, if you degrade them, you humiliate them, you whip them, you torture them, if you treat people this way, don’t be surprised by the Nat Turner rebellion. They acknowledged horrible things happened during Nat Turner’s rebellion. They acknowledged that. But they refused to condemn Nat Turner for a simple reason. The reason was he was born into a degraded, humiliating condition.”
“In fact, he was a very smart guy. On this there was agreement among blacks and whites. [But they asked], where did his anger come from? Why would he give an order, ‘Kill all white people’? And one historian says there was this huge chasm, a great divide between what Nat Turner aspired to be with his natural-born gifts, and what realistically he could hope to be. That is a slave. Born into slavery, living in slavery and dying a slave. His entire earthly existence squandered in that condition over which he had no control. And that in my opinion can be said exactly about the young men who burst the gates of Gaza on October 7th.”
October 7, 2023
“And in the face of that fact, I find it very difficult to condemn what happened on that day. I am willing to acknowledge horrible things happened on October 7th. I am not going to dispute that. I have studied the record carefully and I do think the order was not given to kill all Jews, but there was an order to target civilians. I don’t believe that’s a disputable question. The issue is not what happened, but trying to make sense of what happened. And I think one can legitimately condemn what happened, but not condemn the people of Gaza who breached the gate that day any more than I believe anyone in this room would find it morally acceptable to condemn a slave who goes into revolt.”
Compromise and international law
“Now, there’s still a second question. Okay, you could say the conditions were intolerable. The international community had abandoned the people of Gaza. You can say all those things, but why target civilians? Didn’t Hamas have other options? And here I believe the answer is twofold. Without going into the details, the general picture is the following. Number one, Hamas tried diplomacy. That’s a fact. Once Hamas got into power in 2006, it was sending out messages that it was prepared to compromise with Israel either in an agreement or in a hudna, a long-term ceasefire, lasting 20, 30 years. They had made those proposals. They were all rejected. It’s not as if Hamas limited itself to its charter that demanded the destruction of Israel. Whether you agree with that or not, it’s beside the point. Hamas made clear it was prepared to compromise on the political question. It got nowhere. Nobody would listen.”
“Hamas then tried — I know some people will laugh, but as the British proverb says, ‘facts are stubborn things.’ — Hamas tried international law. There were commissions of inquiry after each of Israel’s killing sprees to see who was responsible for what. They were going to investigate Israel. They were going to investigate Hamas. Each time Israel refused to cooperate with the commissions of inquiry, Hamas cooperated. It tried international law. Now, some of you might think, well, Hamas cooperated because they knew the commissions of inquiry were anti-Israel, pro- Hamas. But it’s not true. The commissions of inquiry, when they wrote up their reports, were very tough on Hamas. Very tough. In my opinion, undeservedly tough. That’s a separate question. Hamas was willing to risk the consequences of international law. It was because it thought maybe they’ll get some justice from these commissions of inquiry. What came of them? Each commission of inquiry assembled these huge reports and the reports were damning of Hamas but 10,000 times more damning of Israel because of the respective destruction on both sides.”
“What came of these reports? Did Hamas see justice done? The reports just collected dust. [Few] people read them. They just disappeared from the political agenda.”
The non-violent civil resistance strategy
At this point, Finkelstein addresses a question I have asked for many years: Why don’t the Palestinians try nonviolent civil resistance, following the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.? Of course, my question is premised on my naive belief that the Israeli government is subject to humanitarian ideals, a longing for peace, fairness, and justice. I still believe in nonviolent civil resistance, but I no longer harbor any belief in the qualities I once attributed to the State of Israel. Finkelstein continues on this topic:
“Then let’s all laugh. Let’s get a hearty laugh. We all know everybody always says why doesn’t Hamas try nonviolent civil resistance? Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? Well, actually there were many Palestinian Gandhis. And among them (you can laugh till the cows come home), among them was Hamas. The Great March of Return began on March 30th, 2018. It was a very festive occasion. They brought out circus acts, music, dancing. The people of Gaza were very hopeful that this nonviolent civil resistance would succeed. What happened? We have another commission of inquiry. It produced a 250 page single-space report. What did the report find? Israel, by its own admission, lined up along the perimeter fence with Gaza its best snipers. So who were the sniper targets? According to the Commission of Inquiry, they targeted children, they targeted medics, they targeted journalists, and they targeted people with physical disabilities — they targeted double amputees. Where were these targets? According to the report, they were often 100 to 300 meters away from the perimeter fence and they were engaged in strictly civilian activities. They were picnicking. They were observing. So nonviolent civil resistance proved to be a dead end.”
The Great March of Return lasted about 21 months. It was not one protest, but a regularly-scheduled series of protests, usually on Fridays. Israel killed a total of 223 Palestinians during the early period of protests. The demonstrators demanded that the Palestinian refugees be allowed back on the lands from which they or their families were displaced in what is now Israel. They protested against Israel’s land, air, and sea blockade of Gaza, as well as the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, an action taken by president Donald Trump during his first term as president.
The Great March of Return began after a January 2018 Facebook post by Palestinian journalist and poet, Ahmed Abu Artema. He proposed the idea of a widespread protest movement to seek a return to Gazans’ pre-1948 homes, calling for weekly Friday protests. Jehad Abusalim, a Palestine-Israel program associate at the American Friends Service Committee, said, “The Great March of Return has been a grassroots social movement that included the various and diverse components of the Palestinian civil society. Political factions, NGOs, people from all across the political spectrum participated in the March.”
Though not originally involved in the protest idea, Hamas eventually joined and attempted to maintain the protest’s non-violent theme by deploying its security personnel among the protestors to prevent individual attempts to spoil the march with violence, even if by throwing rocks, or shouting hostile slogans, according to a March 30, 2018, report in YnetGlobal.
Most of the 10,000 to 35,000 demonstrators were peaceful and stayed far away from the border fence. A Middle East expert from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recognized the protest as a shift away from violence, though a few Palestinians engaged in ineffectual non-peaceful actions like rock-throwing, rolling tires toward the border, and even throwing molotov cocktails. By early 2019, an independent UN commission found that of the 489 Palestinian deaths or injuries it reviewed, only two were possibly justified as responses to danger to Israel.
It seems clear that the Gazan nonviolent resistance movement did not engage in nonviolence training like the training that occurred in the U.S. civil rights movement. However, I don’t know this. I am just inferring it based on the limited information I could find.
Options to October 7 attack
“So when you ask what were the options, I honestly don’t believe there were any options by October 7th. Now it can be argued that Hamas didn’t have to target civilians. It could have targeted only ‘legitimate military targets.’ I believe that answer is doubly problematic, meaning it has problems. Number one, whether we like it or not, Hamas wanted to transmit the message, if our civilians aren’t safe, your civilians won’t be safe. You may not like that message, but one can understand that message.”
“I don’t believe Hamas had any real options by October 7th except to languish and die in a concentration camp. That was their only, so to speak, live option at that point.”
The right of self-defense
“Now, the next question is ‘don’t you believe Israel had the right to self-defense?’ And that too is not an easy question to answer. I will just try to answer it in two ways. Number one, imagine a battered woman. She’s married to a husband who repeatedly batters her. Let’s say he batters her for 20 years. She screams, she yells, she’s in torment. She’s in agony. She’s hoping and praying that the neighbors will hear her and do something. Well, the neighbors are aware of what’s happening in that home, but they do nothing. She then at some point summons up the courage to call the police. The police come, they investigate like those commissions of inquiry that went to Gaza. They investigate. They find that what she’s saying is true.”
“They write up a report. They give the report to the district attorney. The district attorney takes the report and just puts it in a drawer to collect dust like all those UN reports. At some point one day she decides no more. Her husband approaches her ready again to batter her. She takes out or reaches for the kitchen knife. She stabs him once, twice, three times. He then reaches for his pistol and he kills her. Now, in our current state of law, if he went to court, prosecuted, he would be acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. But you have to ask yourself the question, did he have a moral right to kill that woman after tormenting her, torturing her for 20 years? Or was it the case that given his conduct over those previous two decades, he had forfeited his right to self-defense. I believe he forfeited it. And I believe Israel had forfeited its right to self-defense in light of what it had inflicted on Gaza since 1967.”
“So, there’s a second part to that answer. The second part to that answer is, and I think it’s very important to keep it in mind, Israel did not exercise a right to self-defense after October 7th. That is not what they have been doing the past two years. It is not self-defense. Israel, on October 7th realized the cliché — in every crisis is also an opportunity. So, Israel recognized, of course, October 7th was a crisis. There’s no question about that. They were shattered. Twelve hundred corpses in one day is a large number. So, we’re not going to dispute that. But also and in addition, it was an opportunity. It was the opportunity that they had been waiting for since 1967. The opportunity to once and for all to solve the Gaza question. It was the opportunity for the solution to Gaza. And that is the essence of what’s unfolded.”
“In the last two years, it is not a war of self-defense. It’s a genocide. Those two things are very different. They are very different. What’s the aim of a war? A war, The aim of a war is to defeat your opponent’s army. The aim of a war is to disable your enemy. Your main objective, your main target, your main goal is your enemy’s army or military. In a genocide, the aim is not the army. You’re not trying to defeat the army. You’re trying to destroy the population, the civilian population. In the law, what’s called the laws of war, you’re only allowed to target combatants and military sites like tanks and armaments, but you’re not allowed to target civilians. So when you talk about the laws of war, the assumption is your main aim is the military. Sure. In every war they sometimes target civilians. It’s called terror bombing, for example. You’re trying to target civilians to break the enemy morale. That’s correct. But you’re trying to break the enemy’s morale in order ultimately to inflict a military defeat.”
“For the past two years, Israel has not engaged in a war of self-defense. Were that the case, I ask you a simple question. There’s a large crowd here this evening. Many of you follow developments in Gaza closely. Can a single person here name me one battle in Gaza? One battle. Has there been a single battle in Gaza? No, there can’t be. If you consider that Israel as it enters Gaza pulverizes, obliterates everything to the left of it, everything to the right of it, and everything in front of it. How can Hamas resist? Everything is obliterated. Let’s take the most recent example. On March 18th, a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel ended. In the next four months, from March until the end of August, the estimate is 50 Israeli soldiers were killed. Do you know how many Gazans were killed? The estimates are between 12,000 and 16,000. That doesn’t sound like a war. That’s not a war of self-defense. That’s an extermination. It’s a slaughter.”
Note that as of October 7, 2025 (two years into the conflict), over 70,100 people have been reported killed in the Gaza war according to the Gaza Health Ministry and Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In addition, 217 journalists and related workers, 120 academics, and over 224 humanitarian aid workers, a number that includes 179 employees of UN agencies. Scholars have estimated 80% of Palestinians killed are civilians. A study by the UN human rights office, which verified fatalities from three independent sources, found that 70% of the Palestinians killed in residential buildings or similar housing were women and children.
The genocide question
In looking at genocide, Finkelstein looks at Israeli intentions: “Every time you read in the paper or you hear in the media, they refer to the Israel Gaza war. Every time you hear a reference to the Israel Gaza war, you can know for certain that this is just government propaganda because the essence of Israel’s propaganda campaign the past two years was to classify, to describe what’s happening in Gaza, as a war. Because if it’s a war, the reasonable assumption is they’re targeting the military and that appears legitimate. If it’s a genocide, the only possible conclusion is they’re targeting not combatants, but the civilian population. And that is clearly illegitimate. So it was not Israel exercising the right to self-defense. It was Israel exercising what it took to be and what it announced from day one was a genocide.”
“Now when Israel made all of those statements in the first week, most of you will remember them. It was Prime Minister Netanyahu saying ‘You must remember what Amalek did to you says our Holy Bible,’ which was an urging to commit genocide; or it was President Herzog saying there are no civilians in Gaza, everybody is Hamas; or it was the then defense minister Gallant saying we’re not going to let any food, water, fuel, or electricity in Gaza, which is obviously a recipe for genocide if you’re preventing any of that from entering Gaza. So the argument was, ‘Well, you have to understand, they were traumatized,’ meaning the Israelis, they were shocked. ‘They were speaking in the spur of the moment.’ But you know what? Do you know what’s the most striking thing? When you look back two years later, the most striking thing is everything they said in that week after October 7th, everything they said was exactly what they did. It wasn’t spur of the moment. It wasn’t shock. It wasn’t trauma. It was determination: ‘We’re going to solve this Gaza question once and for all.’ And they proceeded.”
“They said on October 7th, ‘We’re going to reduce Gaza to rubble.’ They did. As others have pointed out, the estimate as of two months ago was that 92% of the homes in Gaza were destroyed. That was before Rafah and before Gaza City. So now it’s probably about 95%. They said they were not going to let in food. They did that. The estimate now is the entire population is facing food insecurity and one quarter of the population is facing a human-induced famine in Gaza. The current estimate coming from Israel is 83% of those killed were civilians. My guess, which obviously I can’t prove, my guess is it’s closer to 95% of those killed have been civilians. So, Israel didn’t exercise the right to self-defense, and I don’t believe it had a right to self-defense.”
Epiloge to Finkelstein’s remonstrance
Finkelstein has discussed more recent ideas from President Trump for a ceasefire, which appears to be an off-and-on affair that doesn’t even include the Gazans. Given Trump’s vacillations, no one knows what will come next.
The importance to me of Finkelstein’s remarks is that they provide a much-needed historical and moral context for what has happened since October 7, 2023, in Gaza. The Gaza Health Ministry reports that Gazan deaths are mostly civilian, half of them are women and children. The Lancet has reported nearly 100,000 traumatic injury deaths in Gaza, with the most child amputees per capita in the world.
Finkelstein rejects supporting Israel out of emotion engendered by the Holocaust, an emotion he carries as much as anyone. What is required is facing the facts honestly and boldly so that a lasting peace can be formed between Israel and its neighbors. He often quotes a portion of the definition of genocide from the 1948 Genocide Convention: acts committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” Given all that we know about Israel’s history and its intentions and actions in Gaza over more than two years, it would be intellectually dishonest not to recognize Israel’s actions toward Gaza as genocide. The acts taken by the government of Israel in Gaza are at least immoral, unconscionable, and inhumane. Nothing that may have happened in the Levant 3,000 years ago is justification for genocide today. And the United States is complicit in that genocide because we have funded and encouraged it. We should acknowledge this complicity as individuals because our government is unlikely ever to do so, no matter who is in charge.
LAMAR HANKINS / COMMENTARY / Norman Finkelstein explains the Israel-Gaza conflict
By Lamar Hankins / The Rag Blog / November 13, 2025
Norman Finkelstein was born in New York City in 1953, a son of Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust. His mother grew up in Warsaw and survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp. And his father was a survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz. They met in a displaced person’s camp in Austria after the war and emigrated to the United States.
Finkelstein received his PhD in 1987 from Princeton University as a political scientist specializing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2020, he was named the fifth most influential political scientist in the world. He has written 13 books based on his scholarship, and has been viciously attacked for that scholarly work by apologists for the actions of the Israeli government. Finkelstein argues that “the real issue is Israel’s human rights record.”
Recently, Finkelstein has given several public lectures and interviews in which he offered the facts about the Israeli-Gaza conflict from his scholarly perspective. This article attempts to encapsulate his views, mostly using his actual spoken words, with minor editing to avoid repetition and enhance readability. I quote parts of an an AI-generated transcript of Finkelstein’s lectures and interviews.
“Do you condemn what Hamas did on October 7th?”
The British television personality and sometime friend of Donald Trump, Piers Morgan likes to begin any recent discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the question, “Do you condemn what Hamas did on October 7th?” For Finkelstein, this is a complex question “not to be answered glibly.”
“[E]vents in Gaza did not begin on October 7th. There is a long, let’s call it a prehistory. I think a logical place to begin is 1948 when Gaza becomes a distinct entity. About 300,000 Palestinians were expelled [to Gaza] from Israel. Altogether, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled. But 300,000 of those 750,000 ended up in Gaza. And that I think is the point of departure of any rational understanding of the situation there, namely 80% of the people in Gaza from October 7th forward, 80% of them, are refugees or descendants of refugees. It’s overwhelmingly a refugee population. It’s also, [by] fully half, a child population under 18 years of age.”
The Gaza concentration camp
“In the early 1950s, when Gaza was under Egyptian administration, outside observers came to Gaza, some just to see the situation, others to work there. The image that constantly recurs, [such as from] E. L. M. Burns [a Canadian], who was the senior UN official in Gaza, describes Gaza as a huge concentration camp. Bear in mind, I’m talking from the very beginning, the 1950s. Under Egyptian rule, Gaza is already being described as a huge concentration camp.”
“Most of the people in this room will remember Senator Al Gore, who ran for president in the year 2000. His father, Albert Gore, Sr. had also been a senator. In July 1967, right after the June 1967 war, when Gaza comes under Israeli rule, Senator Albert Gore, Sr., goes to Gaza. He then comes to speak before the Congress on what he saw. He said Gaza is a huge concentration camp on the sand.”
“If you fast forward to 2002, a senior Israeli sociologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Baruch Kimmerling, writes a little book. In passing, he discusses Gaza. How does he describe Gaza?– ‘The biggest concentration camp ever to exist.'”
“[In] 2004, the head of Israel’s National Security Council, [who is] still active in government or in official capacities, Giora Eiland, [has] a conversation with an American official [and] describes Gaza: ‘It’s a huge concentration camp.’ That’s coming from the head of Israel’s National Security Council.”
Hamas — 2006
“Now bear in mind, 2004, when [Eiland] makes that observation, that’s before Israel imposes the brutal medieval blockade on Gaza, which begins in January 2006.”
Finkelstein explains that in January 2006, the president of the United States was George W. Bush, who began what he called “democracy promotion.” Bush demanded that Palestinians hold elections, but at that time “Hamas did not want to participate because it felt that the elections were part of a fake process begun in Oslo in 1993, what came to be called the Oslo process, [which began] in September 1993 when Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Bill Clinton began the process that was supposed to end the conflict. It didn’t, but we’ll leave that aside. In any event, Hamas didn’t want to participate because they felt it was part of a charade or farce. But pressure was put on them to participate. They did. They didn’t expect to win, but they did. They won on a platform, not on ideology, not on trying to destroy the state of Israel. That was not their platform. They ran on a platform of reform.”
“The Palestinian Authority, [which had been in control of the Gaza Strip], it’s no secret, is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent; corrupt and inefficient. So, Hamas had at that point a decent record of honesty in the charitable organizations it presided over, and it also had a record of competence. So the people of Gaza voted in Hamas. Jimmy Carter, the former US president, was there during the election and he pronounced it completely fair and honest. In fact, it’s said to be the first fair and honest election in the Arab world.”
“What was the reaction? Israel immediately imposed a brutal blockade on Gaza. The blockade was then seconded by the U.S. and then by the European Union. Time doesn’t allow me to go through the details of the blockade, but I’ll give you one example. Israel was determined to unseat Hamas from power. So it imposed this diet on the people of Gaza. It calculated the caloric intake of every person in Gaza and it imposed what it called a humanitarian minimum or you can say a starvation plus diet. It wanted to keep — and it freely admitted it at least in private — it wanted to keep the economy of Gaza on the precipice, on the edge of collapse, so that the people of Gaza would rise in revolt and overthrow the Hamas regime from within.”
“By 2006, the Economist magazine, which is very far from a radical magazine, a very conventional conservative British publication, which in general, is reliable, described Gaza, we’re going to say just on the eve of October 7th, 2023, as, ‘a human rubbish heap.’ The International Committee of the Red Cross described Gaza as a sinking ship. The chief humanitarian official in the UN described Gaza as a toxic dump. And that was the fate and future of Gaza as of October 6th, 2023. As most of you will remember and I suspect a lot of you have forgotten because of what happened on after October 7th, Gaza had disappeared from the headlines by 2020. Nobody was any longer talking about the conditions in Gaza.”
“I have said many times, and I don’t say it with pride, I had given up. I had written several books on the topic. I had chronicled the situation in painstaking detail, and by 2020 it was clear nobody was any longer interested in Gaza. At that point, say between 2020 and 2023, the only talk was about whether or not the Saudis would join the Abraham Accords [agreements that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco], leaving the people of Gaza to just languish and die there. That was their fate on the eve of October 7th.”
“Mowing the lawn”
“But that’s still only part of the story because the other part is that periodically Israel launched what it called its operations in Gaza. The phrase they coined was ‘mowing the lawn.’ And what did mowing the lawn mean in practice? It meant that periodically Israel launched these high tech killing sprees in Gaza. In 2020, it was ‘Operation Cast Lead’ — 350 children killed, 6,000 homes destroyed. In 2014, it was ‘Operation Protective Edge’ — 550 children killed, 18,000 homes destroyed. And each of those operations garnered huge international headlines and indignation at what Israel had done. So you have the concentration camp-like conditions, you have the medieval siege, you have the periodic killing sprees in Gaza. As I said, it was described as a human rubbish heap.”
“Most or I should should say a significant number of the people in this room, not most, but a significant number range between the ages I would guess of 18 and 25. Among that age cohort, which also made up the age cohort of the young people who burst the gates of Gaza on October 7th, they were 60% unemployed. All they had to look forward to in each morning was to pace the perimeter of this tiny parcel of land 26 miles long, the size of a marathon, by five miles wide. That was their fate and future till their last breath. So when you fill in that background, the question of do you condemn what Hamas did on October 7th becomes rather more complicated.”
An analogy from U.S. history
“If you were to ask for an analogy, I believe the closest analogy is in our own country, but also throughout the western hemisphere where there were slave revolts, which were quite bloody. If you take the most famous of the slave revolts in the US, it was called the Nat Turner Rebellion. It occured in 1831, 30 years before the Civil War. Nat Turner gave the order to his confederates to ‘Kill all white people.’ That was his order. Kill all white people. And that’s just what they did. They went around killing men, smashing the skulls of women, smashing the skulls of children. That’s what the Nat Turner rebellion looked like in practice.”
“But there’s a question. The question is, do you condemn Nat Turner? And in our own country’s history, at the beginning, at the time of the Nat Turner Rebellion, the answer was almost universally ‘yes.’ But there was one group of Americans who refused to condemn Nat Turner. They were called the abolitionists because they wanted to abolish, to end slavery. And when they were asked the question, do you condemn Nat Turner?, their answer was, we told you so. We warned you. They were speaking to white Americans. We warned you that if you treat people this way, if you degrade them, you humiliate them, you whip them, you torture them, if you treat people this way, don’t be surprised by the Nat Turner rebellion. They acknowledged horrible things happened during Nat Turner’s rebellion. They acknowledged that. But they refused to condemn Nat Turner for a simple reason. The reason was he was born into a degraded, humiliating condition.”
“In fact, he was a very smart guy. On this there was agreement among blacks and whites. [But they asked], where did his anger come from? Why would he give an order, ‘Kill all white people’? And one historian says there was this huge chasm, a great divide between what Nat Turner aspired to be with his natural-born gifts, and what realistically he could hope to be. That is a slave. Born into slavery, living in slavery and dying a slave. His entire earthly existence squandered in that condition over which he had no control. And that in my opinion can be said exactly about the young men who burst the gates of Gaza on October 7th.”
October 7, 2023
“And in the face of that fact, I find it very difficult to condemn what happened on that day. I am willing to acknowledge horrible things happened on October 7th. I am not going to dispute that. I have studied the record carefully and I do think the order was not given to kill all Jews, but there was an order to target civilians. I don’t believe that’s a disputable question. The issue is not what happened, but trying to make sense of what happened. And I think one can legitimately condemn what happened, but not condemn the people of Gaza who breached the gate that day any more than I believe anyone in this room would find it morally acceptable to condemn a slave who goes into revolt.”
Compromise and international law
“Now, there’s still a second question. Okay, you could say the conditions were intolerable. The international community had abandoned the people of Gaza. You can say all those things, but why target civilians? Didn’t Hamas have other options? And here I believe the answer is twofold. Without going into the details, the general picture is the following. Number one, Hamas tried diplomacy. That’s a fact. Once Hamas got into power in 2006, it was sending out messages that it was prepared to compromise with Israel either in an agreement or in a hudna, a long-term ceasefire, lasting 20, 30 years. They had made those proposals. They were all rejected. It’s not as if Hamas limited itself to its charter that demanded the destruction of Israel. Whether you agree with that or not, it’s beside the point. Hamas made clear it was prepared to compromise on the political question. It got nowhere. Nobody would listen.”
“Hamas then tried — I know some people will laugh, but as the British proverb says, ‘facts are stubborn things.’ — Hamas tried international law. There were commissions of inquiry after each of Israel’s killing sprees to see who was responsible for what. They were going to investigate Israel. They were going to investigate Hamas. Each time Israel refused to cooperate with the commissions of inquiry, Hamas cooperated. It tried international law. Now, some of you might think, well, Hamas cooperated because they knew the commissions of inquiry were anti-Israel, pro- Hamas. But it’s not true. The commissions of inquiry, when they wrote up their reports, were very tough on Hamas. Very tough. In my opinion, undeservedly tough. That’s a separate question. Hamas was willing to risk the consequences of international law. It was because it thought maybe they’ll get some justice from these commissions of inquiry. What came of them? Each commission of inquiry assembled these huge reports and the reports were damning of Hamas but 10,000 times more damning of Israel because of the respective destruction on both sides.”
“What came of these reports? Did Hamas see justice done? The reports just collected dust. [Few] people read them. They just disappeared from the political agenda.”
The non-violent civil resistance strategy
At this point, Finkelstein addresses a question I have asked for many years: Why don’t the Palestinians try nonviolent civil resistance, following the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.? Of course, my question is premised on my naive belief that the Israeli government is subject to humanitarian ideals, a longing for peace, fairness, and justice. I still believe in nonviolent civil resistance, but I no longer harbor any belief in the qualities I once attributed to the State of Israel. Finkelstein continues on this topic:
“Then let’s all laugh. Let’s get a hearty laugh. We all know everybody always says why doesn’t Hamas try nonviolent civil resistance? Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? Well, actually there were many Palestinian Gandhis. And among them (you can laugh till the cows come home), among them was Hamas. The Great March of Return began on March 30th, 2018. It was a very festive occasion. They brought out circus acts, music, dancing. The people of Gaza were very hopeful that this nonviolent civil resistance would succeed. What happened? We have another commission of inquiry. It produced a 250 page single-space report. What did the report find? Israel, by its own admission, lined up along the perimeter fence with Gaza its best snipers. So who were the sniper targets? According to the Commission of Inquiry, they targeted children, they targeted medics, they targeted journalists, and they targeted people with physical disabilities — they targeted double amputees. Where were these targets? According to the report, they were often 100 to 300 meters away from the perimeter fence and they were engaged in strictly civilian activities. They were picnicking. They were observing. So nonviolent civil resistance proved to be a dead end.”
The Great March of Return lasted about 21 months. It was not one protest, but a regularly-scheduled series of protests, usually on Fridays. Israel killed a total of 223 Palestinians during the early period of protests. The demonstrators demanded that the Palestinian refugees be allowed back on the lands from which they or their families were displaced in what is now Israel. They protested against Israel’s land, air, and sea blockade of Gaza, as well as the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, an action taken by president Donald Trump during his first term as president.
The Great March of Return began after a January 2018 Facebook post by Palestinian journalist and poet, Ahmed Abu Artema. He proposed the idea of a widespread protest movement to seek a return to Gazans’ pre-1948 homes, calling for weekly Friday protests. Jehad Abusalim, a Palestine-Israel program associate at the American Friends Service Committee, said, “The Great March of Return has been a grassroots social movement that included the various and diverse components of the Palestinian civil society. Political factions, NGOs, people from all across the political spectrum participated in the March.”
Though not originally involved in the protest idea, Hamas eventually joined and attempted to maintain the protest’s non-violent theme by deploying its security personnel among the protestors to prevent individual attempts to spoil the march with violence, even if by throwing rocks, or shouting hostile slogans, according to a March 30, 2018, report in YnetGlobal.
Most of the 10,000 to 35,000 demonstrators were peaceful and stayed far away from the border fence. A Middle East expert from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recognized the protest as a shift away from violence, though a few Palestinians engaged in ineffectual non-peaceful actions like rock-throwing, rolling tires toward the border, and even throwing molotov cocktails. By early 2019, an independent UN commission found that of the 489 Palestinian deaths or injuries it reviewed, only two were possibly justified as responses to danger to Israel.
It seems clear that the Gazan nonviolent resistance movement did not engage in nonviolence training like the training that occurred in the U.S. civil rights movement. However, I don’t know this. I am just inferring it based on the limited information I could find.
Options to October 7 attack
“So when you ask what were the options, I honestly don’t believe there were any options by October 7th. Now it can be argued that Hamas didn’t have to target civilians. It could have targeted only ‘legitimate military targets.’ I believe that answer is doubly problematic, meaning it has problems. Number one, whether we like it or not, Hamas wanted to transmit the message, if our civilians aren’t safe, your civilians won’t be safe. You may not like that message, but one can understand that message.”
“I don’t believe Hamas had any real options by October 7th except to languish and die in a concentration camp. That was their only, so to speak, live option at that point.”
The right of self-defense
“Now, the next question is ‘don’t you believe Israel had the right to self-defense?’ And that too is not an easy question to answer. I will just try to answer it in two ways. Number one, imagine a battered woman. She’s married to a husband who repeatedly batters her. Let’s say he batters her for 20 years. She screams, she yells, she’s in torment. She’s in agony. She’s hoping and praying that the neighbors will hear her and do something. Well, the neighbors are aware of what’s happening in that home, but they do nothing. She then at some point summons up the courage to call the police. The police come, they investigate like those commissions of inquiry that went to Gaza. They investigate. They find that what she’s saying is true.”
“They write up a report. They give the report to the district attorney. The district attorney takes the report and just puts it in a drawer to collect dust like all those UN reports. At some point one day she decides no more. Her husband approaches her ready again to batter her. She takes out or reaches for the kitchen knife. She stabs him once, twice, three times. He then reaches for his pistol and he kills her. Now, in our current state of law, if he went to court, prosecuted, he would be acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. But you have to ask yourself the question, did he have a moral right to kill that woman after tormenting her, torturing her for 20 years? Or was it the case that given his conduct over those previous two decades, he had forfeited his right to self-defense. I believe he forfeited it. And I believe Israel had forfeited its right to self-defense in light of what it had inflicted on Gaza since 1967.”
“So, there’s a second part to that answer. The second part to that answer is, and I think it’s very important to keep it in mind, Israel did not exercise a right to self-defense after October 7th. That is not what they have been doing the past two years. It is not self-defense. Israel, on October 7th realized the cliché — in every crisis is also an opportunity. So, Israel recognized, of course, October 7th was a crisis. There’s no question about that. They were shattered. Twelve hundred corpses in one day is a large number. So, we’re not going to dispute that. But also and in addition, it was an opportunity. It was the opportunity that they had been waiting for since 1967. The opportunity to once and for all to solve the Gaza question. It was the opportunity for the solution to Gaza. And that is the essence of what’s unfolded.”
“In the last two years, it is not a war of self-defense. It’s a genocide. Those two things are very different. They are very different. What’s the aim of a war? A war, The aim of a war is to defeat your opponent’s army. The aim of a war is to disable your enemy. Your main objective, your main target, your main goal is your enemy’s army or military. In a genocide, the aim is not the army. You’re not trying to defeat the army. You’re trying to destroy the population, the civilian population. In the law, what’s called the laws of war, you’re only allowed to target combatants and military sites like tanks and armaments, but you’re not allowed to target civilians. So when you talk about the laws of war, the assumption is your main aim is the military. Sure. In every war they sometimes target civilians. It’s called terror bombing, for example. You’re trying to target civilians to break the enemy morale. That’s correct. But you’re trying to break the enemy’s morale in order ultimately to inflict a military defeat.”
“For the past two years, Israel has not engaged in a war of self-defense. Were that the case, I ask you a simple question. There’s a large crowd here this evening. Many of you follow developments in Gaza closely. Can a single person here name me one battle in Gaza? One battle. Has there been a single battle in Gaza? No, there can’t be. If you consider that Israel as it enters Gaza pulverizes, obliterates everything to the left of it, everything to the right of it, and everything in front of it. How can Hamas resist? Everything is obliterated. Let’s take the most recent example. On March 18th, a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel ended. In the next four months, from March until the end of August, the estimate is 50 Israeli soldiers were killed. Do you know how many Gazans were killed? The estimates are between 12,000 and 16,000. That doesn’t sound like a war. That’s not a war of self-defense. That’s an extermination. It’s a slaughter.”
Note that as of October 7, 2025 (two years into the conflict), over 70,100 people have been reported killed in the Gaza war according to the Gaza Health Ministry and Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In addition, 217 journalists and related workers, 120 academics, and over 224 humanitarian aid workers, a number that includes 179 employees of UN agencies. Scholars have estimated 80% of Palestinians killed are civilians. A study by the UN human rights office, which verified fatalities from three independent sources, found that 70% of the Palestinians killed in residential buildings or similar housing were women and children.
The genocide question
In looking at genocide, Finkelstein looks at Israeli intentions: “Every time you read in the paper or you hear in the media, they refer to the Israel Gaza war. Every time you hear a reference to the Israel Gaza war, you can know for certain that this is just government propaganda because the essence of Israel’s propaganda campaign the past two years was to classify, to describe what’s happening in Gaza, as a war. Because if it’s a war, the reasonable assumption is they’re targeting the military and that appears legitimate. If it’s a genocide, the only possible conclusion is they’re targeting not combatants, but the civilian population. And that is clearly illegitimate. So it was not Israel exercising the right to self-defense. It was Israel exercising what it took to be and what it announced from day one was a genocide.”
“Now when Israel made all of those statements in the first week, most of you will remember them. It was Prime Minister Netanyahu saying ‘You must remember what Amalek did to you says our Holy Bible,’ which was an urging to commit genocide; or it was President Herzog saying there are no civilians in Gaza, everybody is Hamas; or it was the then defense minister Gallant saying we’re not going to let any food, water, fuel, or electricity in Gaza, which is obviously a recipe for genocide if you’re preventing any of that from entering Gaza. So the argument was, ‘Well, you have to understand, they were traumatized,’ meaning the Israelis, they were shocked. ‘They were speaking in the spur of the moment.’ But you know what? Do you know what’s the most striking thing? When you look back two years later, the most striking thing is everything they said in that week after October 7th, everything they said was exactly what they did. It wasn’t spur of the moment. It wasn’t shock. It wasn’t trauma. It was determination: ‘We’re going to solve this Gaza question once and for all.’ And they proceeded.”
“They said on October 7th, ‘We’re going to reduce Gaza to rubble.’ They did. As others have pointed out, the estimate as of two months ago was that 92% of the homes in Gaza were destroyed. That was before Rafah and before Gaza City. So now it’s probably about 95%. They said they were not going to let in food. They did that. The estimate now is the entire population is facing food insecurity and one quarter of the population is facing a human-induced famine in Gaza. The current estimate coming from Israel is 83% of those killed were civilians. My guess, which obviously I can’t prove, my guess is it’s closer to 95% of those killed have been civilians. So, Israel didn’t exercise the right to self-defense, and I don’t believe it had a right to self-defense.”
Epiloge to Finkelstein’s remonstrance
Finkelstein has discussed more recent ideas from President Trump for a ceasefire, which appears to be an off-and-on affair that doesn’t even include the Gazans. Given Trump’s vacillations, no one knows what will come next.
The importance to me of Finkelstein’s remarks is that they provide a much-needed historical and moral context for what has happened since October 7, 2023, in Gaza. The Gaza Health Ministry reports that Gazan deaths are mostly civilian, half of them are women and children. The Lancet has reported nearly 100,000 traumatic injury deaths in Gaza, with the most child amputees per capita in the world.
Finkelstein rejects supporting Israel out of emotion engendered by the Holocaust, an emotion he carries as much as anyone. What is required is facing the facts honestly and boldly so that a lasting peace can be formed between Israel and its neighbors. He often quotes a portion of the definition of genocide from the 1948 Genocide Convention: acts committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” Given all that we know about Israel’s history and its intentions and actions in Gaza over more than two years, it would be intellectually dishonest not to recognize Israel’s actions toward Gaza as genocide. The acts taken by the government of Israel in Gaza are at least immoral, unconscionable, and inhumane. Nothing that may have happened in the Levant 3,000 years ago is justification for genocide today. And the United States is complicit in that genocide because we have funded and encouraged it. We should acknowledge this complicity as individuals because our government is unlikely ever to do so, no matter who is in charge.