Piers Morgan moderates a fierce debate between Norman Finkelstein and Alan Dershowitz regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict's origins, tracing roots from 1947 dispossession to October 7th atrocities. Finkelstein cites Benny Morris on the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians and compares their plight to Native Americans, while Dershowitz blames Arab aggression and the Grand Mufti. They clash over Gaza's blockade as collective punishment versus lawful defense against Hamas tunnels, with Finkelstein labeling settlements illegal under Article 49 and Dershowitz dismissing international courts. Ultimately, the exchange highlights deep ideological divides on accountability, context, and the legitimacy of historical narratives surrounding the region. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Displacement on Both Sides00:15:12
If you lock two million people in a concentration camp, don't react with shock at what happened on October 7th.
Are they war crimes?
They are not war crimes at all for not letting you impose a double standard on me.
No, I'm going to finish my statement.
It's an abomination to even suggest that martyrdom could justify what happened on October 7th.
Shame.
This is pure science fiction.
Everybody's listing that.
Piers Morgan has a very large audience.
Please tell them to stop.
The issue of settlements, I think, is pretty much indefensible.
There'd be one legal international legal body that says the blockade of Gaza is not collective punishment.
You would not condemn the Nazis, Hitler, Goebbels, and Gohing, because they too went through suffering after the end of the First World War.
It's despicable.
One of the things I'm told most often in debates about the Israel-Hamas war from both sides is that history didn't begin on October the 7th.
And that is true.
There's no context that justifies the Hamas terror attack that day, but it's wrong to deny that any context existed before that, six months on from the atrocity.
We're debating that context here in more detail.
There's not an argument about 3,000 years of ancestry and who got there first, but it is about the conflict of conditions over the last century that frame almost everything about the war that's raging today.
My two guests are scholars with deeply opposing views, and a feud that's well documented has its own Wikipedia page.
But they've agreed to debate with this today with me over the ideas, not the individuals.
Author of political scientist, Professor Norman Finkelstein, and the lawyer and author of War Against the Jews and former Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz.
So welcome to both of you.
I thought we'd start this because it's something that comes up all the time.
People say to me, it didn't start on October the 7th.
And of course, I realize that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is not something that began just a few months ago.
And you could argue it goes back thousands of years, but I'm not going to get into that part of the argument.
What I want to do is take as a starting point for the modern era of conflict, 75 years of 1947, where the UK turned the Palestine problem over to the United Nations, who decided to split Palestine into two different countries.
Let's take that as the catalyst for what has followed in the next 75 years.
And what I want to do is give each of you at the start two minutes or so to just outline what you think happened at the start that has basically been the catalyst for what follows.
So Norman Finkelstein, let me start with you.
Just outline from 1947, what happened then that you believe created really the problem that followed.
I think the problem that followed can be very easily summarized by two statements of the chief Israeli historian Benny Morris.
Statement number one, he said in his comprehensive history of the conflict, he states, one, that the fear of Arab displacement and dispossession was the chief motor of Arab resistance to Zionism.
His second statement is the idea of transfer, which is what the euphemism for expulsion, the idea of transfer was inbuilt and inevitable in Zionism.
That to me is the starting point.
the fear, the rational fear of the Palestinian people that should the Zionist idea be realized, it would result in their territorial dispossession and displacement.
It's no different than the fear of our own, meaning the US, Native Americans, that the success of the Euro-American enterprise in the United States would be at the expense of our native population.
The fear, the rational fear of territorial displacement and dispossession.
Okay, that's very clear.
Alan Dershowitz, would you actually disagree with that in terms of an assessment of how this made Palestinians feel?
And were they wrong to feel it?
I wouldn't just yes, and yes, they felt it and they were wrong to feel it.
I have to go back just 10 years earlier, 1947, 48, the Peel Commission was set up by Great Britain.
It recommended dividing the mandate into a tiny little sliver of land along the Mediterranean for a Jewish state where there was a Jewish majority and the Jewish majority would determine how that was governed.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the leader of the Palestinian people, rejected it.
He said there's no such thing as the Palestinians.
We're just greater Arabs.
And we don't want there to be a Palestinian state.
We just want there not to be a Jewish state.
And then in 1948, the UN divided, again, giving the vast majority of the Arab land, the land that's usable, to the Arabs.
Again, the Israelis accepted it.
The Arabs rejected it.
Again, there was a Jewish majority in the area that was set aside for Israel.
The Arabs attacked in a genocidal war and tried to destroy Israel.
The key point may have been motivated by fear, is that the Arab and Muslim people desperately didn't want there to be a Jewish entity.
For the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was religious, that under Islamic law, you can't give any land that was Muslim land over to a Jewish land.
And then since that time, 1967, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007, Israel has been willing to accept a two-state solution.
And every Arab leader has rejected it.
And Israel abandoned the Gaza Strip in 2005, took out not only every living person, but every dead person who was buried, left behind hothouses and agricultural equipment.
Yes, they had to protect their borders.
And they only had the blockade, the major blockade, after Hamas took over in the world.
We're getting a little bit ahead of where I want to get to at the start of this debate.
You've outlined your response to what Norman said there.
Norman, in 1948, we had the Nabka, the catastrophe, as Palestinians call it.
It's because the UN couldn't get people to agree to the proposal.
Israel declared itself a state.
War broke out.
Israel gained more land.
I think this is uncontestable, than the UN originally assigned.
And many Palestinians were forced out of their homes.
It's also true that at the same time, many Israelis were forced out of, or many Jewish people were forced out of their homes in Arab countries.
So there was a lot of displacement going on on both sides.
And I would ask you, if you look at that in totality, some people have said to me, you know, if you actually go back to this period in time, both sides have a legitimate cause for complaint.
Would you agree with that?
I can't agree with that because we have to stick hard and fast to the factual record.
The factual record is fairly clear on what happened in 1947 to 49 in the case of Israel and Palestine.
Roughly 750,000 Palestinians from what became the state of Israel were either expelled or fled in fear and ended up refugees.
Now it's important to keep in mind, Piers, because you and I think generously agreed to talk about the background.
Frankly, I think you're the first person I've noticed willing to talk about the background, that 200 and about 270,000 of those Palestinians who were expelled during the First Arab-Israeli war, they ended up in Gaza.
So if we want to take the point as a point of departure, 1947 to 49, the point of departure for Gaza is exactly the same.
That's how Gaza became Gaza.
70% of the population of Gaza became Palestinian refugees.
Now, as to the question of what's sometimes called a population exchange between the Arabs who resided in, excuse me, the Jews who reside in the Arab world versus the Arabs who resided in what became the state of Israel.
There really isn't.
I don't want to get involved now in a scholarly debate because it's simply not the time and place.
But there isn't any good scholarship on what happened with those Arabs, Arab Jews in 1948.
Some, like the Yemeni Jews, everybody agrees they came willingly.
The question of the Iraqi Jews, it's kind of a blur what happened.
I'm not going to take one position or another on it.
But I don't think those other aspects of the conflict ought to distract us from the fundamental question that you asked, and I think it's a very good question, to look at the background.
And the background to what happened, what happened on October 7th, it began with the expulsion of about 300,000 Palestinians into Gaza, and now they comprise about 70 to 80% of the population of Gaza and their descendants.
You're disagreeing with what you're hearing there.
Why?
Fundamentally, the Nakba was a self-imposed wound.
Ben-Gurion, when he announced the establishment of Israel, welcomed all the Arabs to stay.
He didn't want to expel a single one.
But the Arab countries engaged in a genocidal war designed to kill every Jew and destroy Israel.
It was as a result of that invasion that Palestinians left or were expelled.
Now, I happen to have studied the situation with Iraqi Jews because I was one of those people who helped draft Resolution 242 at the United Nations.
And we looked at great detail into the history of Jews in places like Iraq.
In Iraq, there was a Nazi pogrom during the Second World War.
And there were additional pogroms in other Arab countries in which Jews had no choice but to leave.
And there was an exchange of population, much as there were in Sudetenland, much as there were in Pakistan and India and every other country in the world.
The refugees were incorporated, assimilated into the society.
But UNRWA, this horrible, horrible organization, was set up to keep the Arabs refugees, to keep them in camps, to make sure there was a festering wound.
The Jews were integrated into society.
No, they weren't first-class citizens in the beginning, but now they dominate the country.
The same thing could have happened to the Arabs who left Israel.
They could have been integrated into the surrounding countries.
Instead, they were kept in camps and told that they had to destroy Israel.
They had to have a right of return.
They had to go back.
That history can't stop and you can't move forward.
You have to only move backwards.
So the sole fault for the refugees was the attack by the Arab countries designed to kill Israelis.
That's when the expulsions and the leavings occurred.
And Alan, before I go back to the USA.
Before I go back to Norman for response to that, from your understanding, how many Jewish people were displaced from their homes in this early period?
Because I've heard it was between 700 and 800,000 with probably a trillion dollars worth of wealth.
These were people who had lived in these countries longer than the Muslims.
They had lived there since the Babylonian exile 2,000 years earlier.
They had been full citizens.
They were demis.
They were second class because they were not Muslims.
But they lived in peace.
And once this happened, many were expelled.
Some left voluntarily.
I can see that to Mr. Finkelstein.
But many left.
About the same number were left voluntarily.
Remember, too, with the Arabs, they were told to leave and they would come back victorious after in Haifa, for example.
Many of them wanted to stay and many did stay.
But the Arab leadership said, leave, we'll come back victorious.
You'll have everything back.
This is a complex situation.
It's 75 years ago.
There is a statute of limitations on things like this, a moral statute of limitations.
Move on.
Establish yourselves in the countries that you left and went to.
Get rid of these refugee camps.
Get rid of UNRHA and become full citizens of the countries you moved to, the way my grandparents became full citizens of the United States.
Let me go back to the pogroms had made them leave Poland.
Okay, come to Norman Finkelstein.
Your response to that.
Okay, thank you, Piers.
First of all, as a general point, I agree with the notion of a statute of limitations on your claims to a parcel of land.
The first time I came across that expression was reading Arnold Toynbee's great history of the world, actually.
And he makes the point in his history that isn't there a statute of limitation on the claims of Jews to Palestine.
He said that claim was made 2,000 years ago.
And it's claimed that, even today it's claimed that, based on what happened 2,000 years ago, there's a large portion of Israeli population who believes they have title to the West Bank, they have title to Gaza because of that claim 2,000 years ago.
Isn't there a statute of limitations?
Allow me to complete my and then you can disagree.
Isn't there a statute of limitations on the claim from 2,000 to 3,000 years ago?
Now, I want to focus on Gaza.
I would like to focus on Gaza.
Getting the Facts Straight00:03:30
The population is expelled from Israel into Gaza.
Now, if you look at Benny Morris's history called Border Wars, he says that between 1949 and 1953, literally, listen closely, about 2,700 to 5,000 Palestinian expellees, that's including in the West Bank and in Gaza.
Between 2,700 and 5,000 Palestinian expellees were killed by Israel when they tried to return home.
Now, Benny Morris says 90% of those killed were unarmed.
They were what he called economic infiltrates who wanted to see their homes.
They wanted to see their land.
They wanted to see their neighbors.
They were brutally, if you believe Professor Morris, brutally murdered between those years.
In 1956, as you know, Piers, England, France, and Israel invaded Egypt, including at the time, Gaza.
What happened then?
According to Benny Morris in the book Border Wars, he said between 470 and 500 Palestinian men were lined up and shot down.
Now let's bear in mind, Piers, this is long, long before this entity called Hamas came into the picture.
Now if we fast forward to 1967, after Israel occupies Gaza, there are new assaults on the people of Gaza, this time carried on by, at the time, defense.
No, he wasn't defense, agricultural minister, Ariel Sharon.
Now, without getting sidetracked, I do have to say, Professor Dershowitz, every time I listen to you, even when we debated each other in 2003, I guess, or 2004, I can't recall, you keep escalating your claims about having written UN Resolution 242 or contributed to the resolution.
Professor Dershowitz, I understand people have fantasies, and I understand that people have failings of memory as they get older.
But Professor Dershowitz, when we had our original debate, you didn't even know who wrote UN Resolution 242.
You had all these names.
It was Lord Carradine.
Anybody who was involved in the process would know that.
So let's agree on one thing.
We both, both of us, should agree to only state facts.
And if we have any doubts about the facts, let's set them aside and try to give viewers, listeners, as accurate a record as possible.
We can disagree.
But when you engage in your fantasies, it really to me is very disturbing and disorienting.
Agreeing to State Only Facts00:15:32
Okay.
Well, let me ask Professor Dershowitz to respond.
Well, first of all, let's get the facts straight.
I was Arthur Goldberg's law clerk.
Arthur Goldberg was the United States Representative to the United Nations.
He asked me to come down.
I actually moved in with him at the Waldorf Astoria Towers and worked with him on 242.
Yes, I confused the name Carrington with something else, but I worked closely.
In fact, I was partly responsible for the words.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
I worked on the matter.
I didn't work with Lord Carradin.
I worked with Arthur Goldberg.
And together we managed to get rid of the word Palestinian before refugees in order to make sure that the resolution applied both to Palestinian refugees and to...
This is pure science fiction, which is...
Now you're interrupting me.
So let me finish.
This is a detail.
It's a fact.
Now let's talk about what happened involving the Gaza Strip.
I agree there's a statute of limitations.
I'm opposed to any biblical claims on Israel.
I believe Israel has a political and moral claim to the land.
There have always been Jews living there from the time of Jesus and Muhammad to 1948.
And wisely, the British decided for a compromise plan for division.
And that plan was accepted by the Jewish and Zionist leaders.
It was rejected by the Palestinians.
And then, as you know, Israel tried to give the entire Gaza Strip over to Egypt, back to Egypt, during the Camp David Accords.
It almost caused a breakdown in the Camp David meetings because the Egyptians didn't want it.
And Israel very reluctantly held on to it.
And then in 2005, Israel abandoned the Gaza.
And only when rockets and a bloody coup occurred did Israel respond by having border controls.
Let me tell you one thing.
They weren't strong enough.
If there had been better border controls, Hamas would not have been allowed to bring in concrete, which it used to build tunnels, to bring in weapons, which it used to murder all these people on October 7th.
So Israel was not strong enough.
It should have had far better border controls as other countries had in comparable situations.
And so one more point.
Toynbee and Benny Morris both are regarded as kind of one-sided historians.
There are claims that dispute both of them, particularly Toynbee.
Toynbee was an overtly anti-Zionist historian who didn't believe that the Jewish people had any claim to Israel.
There's also a statute of limitations on that.
And so let's move forward.
And moving forward means, potentially, a solution where Hamas is no longer in control of Gaza.
Remember, too, you're absolutely right, Norman.
Terrorism began way before Hamas.
Terrorism was an essential part of the Palestinian leadership.
The U.S., the Olympic massacres that occurred way before Hamas, the terrorism on airplanes, the blowing up of airplanes, the hijacking of airplanes.
The problem is that the world rewarded terrorism and it's rewarding them again by allowing Hamas to free hundreds of people, legitimately many convicted, not all convicted, many convicted in exchange for a small number of completely innocent hostages.
You can't compare completely innocent hostages with convicted murderers.
Okay.
Look, Norman, respond to that.
But also, I also want to move on.
Once you've responded to it, also move on, if you will, to the issue of settlements, because one of the things I find hardest to have any sympathy with Israel about is the continued expansion of settlements.
I agree.
And in particular on the West Bank, and I think we may find some consensus here.
But first of all, Norman, your response to what Alan Deshu has just said, but also then move it to settlements.
Yeah, well, I would like to try to...
Yeah, well, actually, I can bring it up to the settlements on the case of Gaza.
So I would like to just continue where I left off with, so to speak, at the risk of being boring, the timeline.
I said in 1970, there were atrocities committed in Gaza against the people of Gaza by the agriculture, headed by the agricultural minister at the time, Ariel Sharon.
In 1987, as you perhaps remember, Piers, the first Intifada broke out.
was overwhelmingly, here I quote Denny Morris from his book, Righteous Victims, it was an overwhelmingly nonviolent civil resistance to the Israeli occupation.
By 1990, three years after the beginning, or really two years, because it began in December 7th, 1997, by 1990, Israel started to institute, again, I'm sticking strictly to Gaza, what it called a closure policy.
And the closure policy was basically to seal off Gaza.
Okay?
By 2002, 2003, if you read Baruch Kimmerling, he was a senior Selny sociologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He described Gaza as, quote, the largest concentration camp ever.
Now, you might say Baruch Kimmerling was a person of the left, and I will grant that.
But then we have Giora Island.
Giora Island at the time was the head of Israel's National Security Council.
He said in March 2003, and now I'm quoting him, he described Gaza as a huge concentration camp.
So you can say there is a consensus among knowledgeable people, sociologists at the Hebrew University, head of the National Security Council, that Israel had turned Gaza into a concentration camp.
In 2006, in 2006, there is an election in January 2006.
Hamas wins the election basically on the platform of reform because the Palestinian Authority is proverbially corrupt.
It comes into power.
Immediately as it comes into power, Israel institutes this brutal economic blockade on Gaza.
And at that point, there have been various descriptions.
I'm sure Piers, you wouldn't call The Economist a left-wing magazine or anti-Semitic.
It described Gaza as, quote, a toxic dump.
And at that point, it had a high, slowly, just to give you one example, Piers, and your listeners, because they should have a sense of what this blockade looked like.
Israel's explicit policy, its explicit policy, was to keep Gaza on the precipice of economic catastrophe.
That's how they described their policy.
They prohibited baby chicks from entering Gaza.
They prohibited chocolate from entering Gaza.
They prohibited potato chips from entering Gaza.
They prohibited any spices from entering Gaza.
And it prohibited any exports from Gaza, except at some points, occasionally things like strawberries.
So what had happened to Gaza?
It had, on the eve of 2007, it had the highest unemployment rate in the world.
It was about 60% unemployed, 50% for the population as a whole, 60% for youth.
The people in Gaza were left to languish and die, no past, no present, no future, to languish and die in a concentration camp.
That was their prospect as of October 6, 2003.
Excuse me.
Yeah, 2023.
Sorry about that.
May I respond?
Well, I'll tell you what, yes, actually, actually, on that point, Professor Dershowitz, you respond to that point briefly if you could.
And then I want to come back to Norman Finkelstein to move it on to settlement.
So, Alan, just respond to what I'm saying, which has been cited by many people, that the conditions in Gaza in the period that Norman Finkelstein has been referring to have been described by many people as bordering on a concentration camp.
And at the very least, a form of occupation where Israel wielded far too much control over what could come in and out of Gaza, including people.
Well, they're right in the description that it was a toxic place.
It was a toxic place because Hamas took over and because Hamas robbed the people of Gaza of their food.
It took the material that was sent from Europe, from countries around the world, and took it away from the children and took it away from the hospitals, took it away from the schools, and gave it to their fighters to build 350 miles of tunnels.
Imagine what could have been done with all the resources that had been sent to Gaza.
There was plenty of food in Gaza, except that Hamas was using it.
There was plenty of material to build hospitals in Gaza, but instead Hamas was using it.
It's Hamas that turned it into a toxic, toxic place.
When Israel, in fact, occupied it, actually occupied it, it was in much better shape than when Hamas took it over.
And so it's Hamas's fault.
Hamas turned Gaza into this horrible place.
And let's remember, Israel has been prepared to give up Gaza over and over again.
It tried desperately to give it back to Egypt during the Camp David.
It tried desperately to allow for the 2007 Omer plan.
Gaza is given to a Palestinian state.
The 2000, 2002, 2001 Bill Clinton plan.
Gaza is given over.
They rejected it.
If it was a toxic concentration camp, the guards were not Israelis.
The guards were Hamas people who were throwing gay people off the roof, who were murdering Palestinian authority people, and who were denying women the right to live their lives decently.
Yes, Gaza was a terrible place, completely the fault of Hamas.
Can we reach a point of agreement on the issue of settlements?
I suspect we can.
So, Norman Finkelstein, I don't want to keep responding.
I don't want you to keep responding to each other about that.
One sentence.
What I would like you to do is give me one sentence, but then please address the issue of settlement.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, a thousand humanitarian and economic organizations have all reached the same conclusion.
It's very simple.
The main cause of the disaster in Gaza is Israel's illegal blockade of that parcel of land.
Full stop.
That's wrong.
That's false.
Who's wrong?
Who's wrong?
UNCDAD is wrong.
The World Bank is blockade.
The International Monetary Fund is wrong.
They're all wrong.
Yes.
Are they all anti-Semitic?
Is that what's going on?
I didn't say that.
I didn't say that.
They're wrong.
I happen to remember that.
So why are they all wrong?
Because the blockade was completely lawful.
It was designed to prevent the importation and then the use of rockets against Israel.
It's perfectly lawful for a country to engage in a blockade.
Let me finish.
You can't have a double- Professor.
Israel is exposed to a double standard, but we're not letting you impose a double standard on me.
No, I'm going to finish my statement, and you're not going to interrupt me.
So understand me.
The military occupation was lawful.
The blockade was lawful.
Every country has the right to defend itself from rockets, from terror tunnels, from people coming over the border, murdering and kidnapping people.
Those are all lawful.
I'm telling you that as an expert in international law and a law of war.
If you want to dispute me, get an expert who knows something about international law.
Not a fine.
Not a polemic.
Professor Dershowitz.
Okay.
Professor Dershowitz, just as a matter of fact, I teach the laws of war.
I've been teaching it for the last five years.
To my understanding, you're by...
Okay, Professor Dershowitz.
Okay, Professor Dershowitz, let's agree.
I'm completely ignorant.
Let's take that as a point of departure.
How does it come to be that every humanitarian and political body in the world has declared that the blockade of Gaza constitutes collective punishment and therefore is a violation, a breach of international law, a war crime under international law?
How did that come to pass?
They're wrong.
How is it that everyone wrong?
They're all wrong.
They're all wrong, right?
Except Alan Dershowitz.
No, no, no.
Except you're wrong in describing everyone.
Professor Dershowitz.
I'm wrong in describing every group.
There are many people.
Professor Dershowitz, name me one legal international legal body or human rights organization.
Name me one.
I'll take the pause.
Name me one that says the blockade of Gaza is not collective punishment.
Name me one.
The Lawfare Project in the United States.
The Lawfare Project.
I said name me one international legal or political body.
It is one.
It is.
Everybody's listening now.
Piers Morgan has a very large audience.
Name me one international or legal, legal or political body that says the blockade of Gaza is legal.
Name me one.
It is illegal, and every organization that I have been associated with, the Lawfare Project, the project run by a woman named Leitner, and the international project, have all concluded that the blockade is legal.
Let me finish.
The Israeli Supreme Court, which is above reproach and which is much fairer than the International Court of Justice, has also, with limits, has said that blockades designed to prevent the bringing of rockets to Israel is lawful.
Also, use your common sense.
What possible reason would there be for allowing a group in Gaza, a group of Hamas, to send rockets without trying to blockade them from bringing the rockets in and building tunnels?
Use your common sense.
Comparing Atrocities and Terrorism00:09:41
Of course it's unlawful.
Every country in the world would do exactly the same as Israel.
Listen, I think we've blocked it.
I think we've exhausted this part of the debate.
Before we run out of time, we only have about five minutes left.
I do want to get into settlements.
And I'll start with you, Professor Fengelsi.
The issue of settlements, I think, is pretty much indefensible, actually, what's been going on, and particularly in recent years on the West Bank.
But what is your overview of the settlement issue?
My overview of the settlements, as in all topics, is what international law says.
Under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, it's illegal for an occupying power to transfer its population to occupied territory.
Now, when that issue came before the International Court of Justice in July 2004, every single judge, every single judge, including the American judge, Mr. Bergenthau, they all agreed on that one point.
The settlements are illegal under international law.
Now, under the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court, those settlements constitute war crimes.
So, what we're talking about now, since the settlement activity began right after the June 1967 war, what we're talking about is a protracted war crime over a period of a half century.
And that's sometimes missed.
When we talk about what's happened to Gaza, we're talking about two decades.
If you go back to the closure in 1990, we're talking about the martyrdom of a people over three decades.
Those young men who burst the gates of Gaza on October 7th were born into, to use your phrase now, a toxic concentration camp.
They were born into it.
And that settlement activity, which under the Rome statute is a war crime, that's been ongoing for a half century.
Okay, let me get Professor Dutch.
Let me respond, please.
Let me respond.
First of all, Finkelstein and Hamas regard Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as settlements.
So you can't take them seriously about anything.
They regard all of Israel as settlements.
And yes, I disagree with settlements on the West Bank.
I have since 1970 when I debated Noam Chomsky.
I called for a two-state solution.
I agree with a military occupation designed to prevent rockets and prevent terrorism.
But I disagree with civilian settlements.
But the core point I want to mention is that ultimately we've gotten to this point.
Wait a second.
No, of course not.
They are not war crimes at all.
They are disputes over what constitutes the UN resolution to war too.
If the UN says they're illegal, where does that leave it?
The UN says a lot of things.
The UN also called Israel Zionism racism.
The UN has no authority to define international law.
The UN can give all the 15.
Who does it?
Let me please.
So remember who appoints the justices.
Countries appoint the justices.
So when Lebanon appoints a justice, it's Hezbollah's appointing the justice.
The International Court of Justice is an illegitimate court.
It is not a real court.
But I want to get to the core point.
What Hamilton finally says.
Let me finish.
Let me finish saying the settlements are illegal.
What Finkelstein is finally saying is that these people, he called them martyrs.
I was at Beira.
I was at the Nova Music Festival.
I saw the remnants of where a woman named Vivian Silver, a peacenick, who used to go over and bring Hamas and Gazan people to hospitals, was burnt to death.
I saw where people were raped.
There is no justification for collective rape.
There is no justification for murdering a peacenick.
This woman was probably murdered by the very people she brought to hospitals because they knew exactly where she lived and where the hospitals were.
It's an abomination to even suggest that any kind of martyrdom, dispute over land, dispute over anything, could justify what happened on October 7th.
Shame on anybody who thinks that civilized human beings should be praised or even justified for doing what they did.
I met a man whose son had been beheaded, and Hamas then took his head, brought it back to Gaza, put it on sale for $10,000, and this father had to bury his son without a head.
That's what Hamas did.
And not only Hamas, but people, ordinary civilians in Gaza, came over the border and participated in these rapes and murders.
And shame on anybody who doesn't unequivocally condemn it.
There is no justification for what happened on October 7th, no matter what the history is.
The history is disputed.
But I want us here Norman Finkelstein say unequivocally, no matter what the history is, there is no justification for the massacres of October 7th.
We'll end with Norman Finkelstein's response and answer that question.
My response is exactly the same one I gave you the very first time I met you, Pierce.
There were atrocities, large atrocities, that occurred on October 7th.
I think it's indisputable.
You then asked me, would you consider it terrorism?
I then replied to you, I think atrocities denote terrorism.
However, I said I take the same attitude towards the perpetrators of those atrocities as the abolitionists in the United States took towards the Nat Turner rebellion.
Nat Turner, so you can honor them.
Pierce currently, Pierce, can I finish?
Can I finish?
Yeah.
Nat Turner and the slave revolt committed horrible atrocities.
The abolitionists said horrible things happened, but they never condemned Natal Turner.
What they did was the lowest point in your statement.
Please tell them to stop.
You've gotten to low points.
But this is the lowest point you've gotten to.
Please tell me.
I'm hearing these rapists.
Please tell them that.
Well, I think abolitionists are not going to be able to do that.
That is the lowest point in your history.
Let him finish what he's trying to say.
Sure.
Thank you.
By the way, Nat Turner's rebellion.
Okay.
In Nat Turner's Rebellion, they committed horrible atrocities, including beheading babies.
That's a fact.
However, the abolitionists.
They're justifying that.
They did not.
And you're justifying that.
They did not.
Please, Pierce, can you please tell them?
Let him finish the point he's making on the new response.
Okay.
Thank you so much.
However, the abolitionists did not condemn the perpetrators.
The abolitionists kept saying, we told you so.
We told you so.
We told you so.
If you treat people like that, what happened with the slave revolt inevitably would happen.
And I say, if you lock 2 million people in a concentration camp for 20 years, half of whom are children who were born into that concentration camp, don't react with shock and dismay and disbelief and indignation at what happened on October 7th.
I have spent the last 20 years, I have spent the last 20 years of my life studying what's been done to the people of Gaza.
And each time I reread what I wrote, I were more firm than ever before.
I will not condemn those people, even as I acknowledge that massive, unspeakable atrocities occurred on October 7th.
Okay, Alan Deshowitz, you'll find my last point.
Norman Finkelstein, you would not condemn the Nazis, Hitler, Goebbels, and Gohing, because they too went through suffering after the end of the First World War.
They too tried to justify what they did as inevitable because of the inflation, because of living under terrible conditions.
They inevitably voted for Adolf Hitler.
They inevitably built gas chambers.
They inevitably built concentration camps.
And you, Norman Finkelstein, who claim your parents are Holocaust survivors, you, Norman Finkelstein, by your logic, would justify every single one of the six billion Jews who were murdered because the Germans who did it don't deserve condemnation because they were victims of the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I. That's the situation you're in, Norman Finkelstein.
Finding Reasonable Shape00:00:53
It's despicable.
Okay.
Well, we started, I think, in a reasonable shape, and we ended in a place where the final word is despicable, which is a shame.
But I understand that passions run high.
I think you've both argued your case extremely eloquently and with great verve.
And I personally have sat and I've learned a lot, which is what I hope to do with these debates.
So thank you both very much indeed for joining me.
Professor Finkelstein, Professor Deschewitz, I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you, Piers.
Thank you, Piers.
As always, you were very fair.
I respect it, and I feel obliged to acknowledge it.
I appreciate that.
I try to be.
Thank you both very much indeed.
Thank you.
I agree with that.
We agree with that one thing that you're fair.
Finally, I have reached a point of consensus between the two professors, which is that I'm fair.