When Norman Finkelstein pronounced the Holocaust a “schmatte,” audience members familiar with Yiddish words gasped. “Schmatte” means “rag” in Yiddish.
The controversial speaker addressed an audience of more than 250 students, faculty members and guests in the Owen L. Coon Forum on Thursday night. His speech focused on Israel’s perpetuation of violence in order to maintain power in the Middle East at the event, hosted by the Northwestern chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. In his speech, Finkelstein said the atrocities committed by the Nazis were no justification for the “Israeli massacre” in Gaza last month.
“In usual language, that’s called terrorism,” he said. “The targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure.”
The current conflict in Gaza caused Finkelstein to change his speech’s topic at the last minute, tweaking it to take recent events into account.
The son of two Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein was a professor at DePaul University but left after being denied tenure.
Police officers stood at each entrance of the auditorium as a precaution, said Alan Cubbage, vice president for university relations.
But the students who disagreed with Finkelstein’s views said they were more interested in discourse than conflict. This was the goal of the event, said Hugh Roland, president of Students for Justice in Palestine.
“We want to encourage dialogue and encourage action to start a movement,” the Weinberg junior said.
Weinberg sophomore Dena Propis said she was interested to hear Finkelstein’s side of the story but will not be giving up her allegiance to Israel any time soon.
“It scares me to think that people will take the things he said at face value and not do their own research,” Propis said.
However, Propis said she thought Finkelstein’s comment on the Holocaust was out of line.
“As the grandchild of a survivor, it is never OK to refer to the Holocaust as a ‘schmatte,'” she said.
In addition to NU students and faculty, Finkelstein drew audience members from unusually far away, including a group from Purdue University.
“I sort of have a mini-obsession with Norman Finkelstein,” Kadura said. “He doesn’t get enough credit for his scholarly work. Everything is sourced and footnoted. He doesn’t pick and choose.”
Students cited Finkelstein’s meticulousness in his scholarly work, and he frequently quoted members of the Israeli government, military and news officials verbatim, employing the details to support his overall theme that Israel has not worked to promote peace but rather to generate fear.
“Israeli commentators gloated,” Finkelstein said, “‘Gaza is to Lebanon as the second sitting for an exam is to the first. A second chance to get it right.'”
He also touched on the ratio of dead Palestinians to dead Israelis, which is about 100 to one, “and a third of that is children,” Finkelstein said. He spoke in a nonchalant tone while citing surprising statistics and injected his speech with sarcasm.
“Israel likes to say it has nobody to negotiate with,” Finkelstein said. “They now have a real problem on their hands because the Palestinians wanted peace.”
Regarding the attacks in Gaza, he compared Israel’s justification of the violence to Germany’s rationalizations during the Holocaust.
“Are they so devoid of an ethical sense that they would use the kind of logic that says, ‘However many are killed, if it works in the end then it’s OK?’ ” Finkelstein said as he ended his speech. “Germany no longer has a ‘Jewish problem.’ I just think that kind of logic is sick.”
