Norman Finkelstein and the Gravity of Bad Ideas

Those who have followed my commentary for a while will know that my reading is nothing if not eclectic. I read people with whom I agree and, perhaps more importantly, people with whom I profoundly disagree—from devotees on the ideological left to zealots on the ideological right, and a bunch in between. Of late, I have pegged my nose and binged particularly heavily on the excesses of the left: Ilan Pappé, Maggie Haberman, Rashid Khalidi. Now Norman Finkelstein.

Finkelstein makes for fascinating reading against the political backdrop of New York in 2026. Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is now mayor, having been sworn in on January 1, 2026. Before his political career, Mamdani rapped in a 2017 song, “My love to the Holy Land Five”—a reference to leaders of the Holy Land Foundation who were convicted in the United States of aiding Hamas. During his 2025 mayoral campaign, he also declined to condemn the phrase “globalise the intifada,” before later saying he would discourage its use after discussions with Jewish New Yorkers about what the phrase evoked for them.

Those facts generated significant criticism of Mamdani’s judgment concerning Israel and Islamist extremism. Mamdani, for his part, has condemned antisemitism and argued that his advocacy concerns Palestinian rights rather than hostility toward Jews. The argument has not disappeared since his election. In August 2026, rabbis meeting with him told the mayor that they believed his rhetoric about Israel was making some Jewish New Yorkers feel less safe and, in their assessment, placing them at greater risk. That wider political contest provides an illuminating setting in which to read the hard left, because questions about Israel, Zionism, revolutionary violence and the boundary between explanation and justification have migrated well beyond university seminars..

Which brings us to Norman Finkelstein. He is no intellectual lightweight. Born in New York in 1953 to Jewish Holocaust survivors, he earned his doctorate from Princeton University’s Politics Department in 1987 and has spent decades writing about the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both his parents survived the Warsaw Ghetto. His mother survived Majdanek and two slave-labour camps; his father survived Auschwitz and a death march. Finkelstein has said that, apart from his parents, every member of both sides of his family was exterminated. That is an extraordinary inheritance, and it deserves respect.

Finkelstein is also clever, widely read, combative and formidable in debate. He knows his material, deploys historical references with enormous confidence and possesses the polemicist’s ability to make a complicated moral landscape suddenly appear remarkably simple. That combination matters. The people whose arguments are most worth testing are rarely fools. Finkelstein should be read seriously precisely because he is capable of making propositions many readers will find deeply objectionable sound coherent.

His best-known book, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, provides much of the template. Finkelstein argues that Holocaust memory acquired particular political prominence after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and that influential organisations subsequently exploited Jewish suffering for political and financial purposes. His argument extends into Holocaust compensation settlements and concludes with extraordinarily severe accusations about what he calls the “Holocaust industry.” It is deliberately provocative, frequently arresting and worth reading. Yes, worth reading.

Bad ideas are rarely defeated by pretending they do not exist. Intellectual confidence comes partly from reading people who make you uncomfortable and then asking whether their claims survive scrutiny. Read Marx. Read Hayek. Read Pappé. Read Khalidi. Read Beinart. Read Finkelstein. Read widely enough and the intellectual scaffolding holding different worldviews together begins to reveal itself.

My difficulty with Finkelstein is not that he criticises Israel. Israel should be criticised when criticism is warranted. Israelis certainly do enough of it themselves. My difficulty is with what I see as the moral architecture beneath much of Finkelstein’s argument. Israeli agency is magnified while Palestinian agency can progressively diminish. Israeli violence is scrutinised through the language of responsibility; Palestinian violence is repeatedly nested within explanations of dispossession, occupation, desperation and resistance. Context becomes mitigation, mitigation becomes exculpation, and eventually cause and effect begin running predominantly in one direction.

October 7 exposes the danger of that framework with extraordinary clarity. On October 7, 2023 itself, while Hamas-led attackers were killing Israelis and taking people hostage into Gaza, Finkelstein published an essay comparing what was occurring with John Brown’s armed resistance to slavery and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. He called what was unfolding “heroic resistance” and wrote that seeing those he described as Gaza’s oppressors humbled “warms every fiber of my soul.”

Finkelstein subsequently explained that he did not comprehend the scale of the atrocities when he wrote those words. That qualification matters, but so does the instinct revealed by the original response. Before the facts were known, an ideological framework was already waiting to receive them. Armed men had broken through Israel’s border and the immediate category was not: What has happened? Who has been killed? What are these people doing? It was resistance.

For me, therein lies the central intellectual problem. Context matters enormously. History matters. Power matters. Grievance matters. Human beings rarely act in historical vacuums. But context does not abolish agency. Understanding why someone does something is not the same as relieving them of responsibility for doing it. Poverty does not excuse rape. Oppression does not sanctify murder. Grievance does not transform the kidnapping of children into resistance. No historical footnote can make deliberately murdering civilians morally sophisticated.

Once an intellectual framework consistently provides one population with reasons and another with culpability, it risks ceasing to illuminate reality and beginning instead to rearrange it. And this is where I part company with Finkelstein not principally as an academic, but as someone whose professional life taught him to take consequences very seriously.

While I hold a number of postgraduate degrees, I do not come at Finkelstein primarily as an academic. I come at him as a retired military professional who spent more than three decades in the profession of arms—someone who has seen something of what Joseph Conrad called the heart of darkness, having served in East Timor, Bougainville, Iraq and on two tours of Afghanistan. The penny does not seem to have dropped with Finkelstein that the assumptions underpinning his comfortable intellectual world are not immutable: in a sufficiently disordered New York, he himself could be targeted and murdered simply for who he is. Whether he would be among the first or the last is beside the point. This is not rhetorical flourish. It is my professional judgment that the West may yet pass through a period of violence in which our assumptions about permanent enlightenment, inevitable progress and history somehow having “ended” will look, in retrospect, dangerously complacent. Europeans before the catastrophes of the twentieth century also inhabited societies they believed cultured, educated and increasingly civilised; few imagined that Germany—one of the most sophisticated societies on earth—could descend to what was, to that point, the very bottom of human depravity. Australians should be equally careful about believing geography, prosperity or good intentions somehow exempt us from the darker possibilities of human nature.

This is where Finkelstein becomes more interesting than merely another polemicist on Israel. He offers something psychologically seductive: a moral universe in which apparently bewildering events can be made simple once the correct oppressor-oppressed hierarchy has been identified. Complexity evaporates. Contradictions can be assimilated into the theory. Violence committed by the designated victim class becomes explicable through historical context; violence committed by the designated oppressor becomes confirmation of the original indictment. Everything fits—until it doesn’t.

The intellectual snake oil can, I suspect, feel rather like skydiving without a parachute. It takes a leap of faith to leave the fuselage. For much of the descent it may even feel exhilarating. Familiar assumptions disappear somewhere above you. The landscape looks completely different from up there. There is a delicious sensation in believing that you have penetrated the great deception—that history, morality and power have suddenly become comprehensible while the poor fools remaining inside the aircraft are constrained by bourgeois morality, Western propaganda, Zionist mythology or whatever other false consciousness is currently in fashion.

The problem arrives rather abruptly, though hardly unexpectedly, at the end. Gravity has not been abolished merely because, during the descent, somebody constructed an elegant argument against it. Cause and effect eventually reassert themselves. Which brings me to Gad Saad and his concept of Suicidal Empathy.

Saad’s broader thesis is that empathy—one of the finest qualities human beings possess—can become destructive when severed from judgment, reciprocity, boundaries and consequences. There is something important in that formulation. Empathy is magnificent, but empathy without discernment is not necessarily virtue. Understanding grievance does not mean sanctifying grievance. Understanding violence does not require romanticising violence. Showing compassion toward people from another culture does not require pretending every cultural practice is equally benign.

Nor does seeking to understand people who despise your civilisation oblige you to help dismantle the civilisation in which your capacity for such extravagant empathy was nurtured in the first place. There is another asymmetry worth noticing. Israelis have very little luxury for getting these questions wrong. They live in a region where Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Iran and its aligned forces have posed direct security threats. Their intellectual experiments eventually encounter a border fence, a rocket shelter, a kidnapped child or a funeral.

Western intellectuals encounter another seminar. That distinction matters. Israel can survive Norman Finkelstein. Israelis live close enough to the consequences of bad ideas that reality has a habit of intruding rather rapidly. The more interesting question is whether the comfortable, complacent and increasingly historically illiterate democracies of the West can survive the worldview that people like Finkelstein help make intellectually respectable.

We have inherited societies constructed painfully across generations upon the rule of law, individual responsibility, democratic pluralism, freedom of conscience, free-market economics, the emancipation of women, equality before the law and the protection of minorities. These things are not the natural condition of humanity. They are achievements. And because most of us did not personally fight to establish them, there is a peculiar temptation to imagine they are permanent—to believe that Western civilisation is simply the landscape upon which history occurs rather than an extraordinarily fragile human construction requiring maintenance, confidence and sometimes defence.

Our ancestors understood gravity. We increasingly seem to believe ourselves exempt from it. Civilisations rarely disappear because nobody loved them. They disappear when too few people remember how they were built; when compassion becomes detached from judgment; when grievance is mistaken for virtue; when those who despise liberal society are endlessly explained while those defending it are endlessly indicted; and when comfortable people persuade themselves that consequences belong to somebody else.

Read Finkelstein. Read him carefully. Then pack a parachute. Because eventually, gravity sends the bill.

Colonel Michael Scott CSC Ret’d is a former Australian army officer and the founder of The 2023 Foundation, an initiative dedicated to combating antisemitism.