This Time We Went Too Far: Truth \u0026 Consequences of the Gaza Invasion by Norman G. Finkelstein

This Time We Went Too Far: Truth \u0026 Consequences of the Gaza Invasion Reviews

• 
  Paul

  An absolute must-read for anyone interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
• 
  Brian Napoletano

  The title of Norman Finklestein's latest book on the Israeli occupation of Palestine is a direct quote from a column written by Haaretz's Gideon Levy regarding the international community's response to Israel's brutal assault on Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009. The implicit argument in Levy's column is also the central theme of Finkelstein's book: the worldwide public response to Israel's massacre of 1,400 Palestinians, 800 of whom were civilians and 400 of whom were women and children, in “Operation Cast Lead” marks a turning point away from unconditional approbation of Israel's occupation of Palestine. Prior to the massacre in Gaza, politicians and media spokespersons had been largely successful at silencing or marginalizing any criticism of Israel's militarism and of US backing for it. While the political and media establishments were still quick to rush to Israel's defense this time, they were unable to keep all criticisms out of the mainstream debate, particularly when the United Nations Human Rights Council commissioned Justice Richard Goldstone, a liberal Zionist, and a team of investigators to determine whether the laws of war were violated in Israel's assault. In “'This Time We Went Too Far,'” Professor Finkelstein examines what prompted Israel to subject a defenseless population to “22 days of death and destruction” (to quote the title of Amnesty International's first report on the assault) and how Israel's failure to silence the international outcry raises the possibility of reaching a viable solution that allows everyone to enjoy peace, security, and human dignity.
  
  Anyone remotely familiar with the recent history of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories knows better than to accept Israel's claim that “Operation Cast Lead” was undertaken in self defense in response to Hamas' rocket attacks on southern Israel. Still, the incredible disparity between Hamas' homemade rockets and Israel's sophisticated air and ground forces aside, even impartial human rights agencies frequently present these attacks as though they take place in a political vacuum. To remedy this, Finkelstein devotes the beginning of his book to the recent history of Israel's occupation of Gaza, and maintains that “Operation Cast Lead” was only a defensive conflict from the point of view of Hamas and the residents of Gaza. In addition to the slow strangulation of Gazan society with a crippling blockade, Israeli forces have repeatedly launched attacks on Gaza even after pulling out their illegal settlements in 2005. Moreover, it was Israel who first broke the ceasefire in November 2008 when it launched a bloody border raid—prior to this Hamas had refrained from launching rockets into Israel since Egypt had brokered a ceasefire in June.
  
  If the assault on Gaza was not, as Israel's apologists in the mainstream press still maintain, a defensive operation, then that leaves us with the question of what Israel's real reasons for the operation were. This is the question that Finkelstein devotes the next section of his book to, and based on statements by Israeli officials and arguments advanced by its apologists, he proposes two complementary motives behind the attacks. The first should sound familiar to those who have sought an explanation for the United States' occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan: Israel was seeking to restore its regional hegemony by demonstrating its willingness and its ability to visit terror on a militarily weaker opponent. After its humiliating defeat by Hezbollah in 2000 and again in 2006, Israeli officials began to fear that their ability to intimidate the Arab world into submitting to its whims had been compromised. Just as a neighborhood bully will try to “make an example” out of one of their weakest victims, Israel deliberately rained down fire on a defenseless population in an effort to convince its neighbors that it is still willing and able to respond to the slightest “provocation” with “disproportionate force” (a political euphemism for the “lunatic doctrine” that Bush and his cohorts were so fond of, and that Obama has yet to challenge).
  
  The second reason that Finkelstein proposes to explain Israel's willingness to attack the people of Gaza was an effort to head off a “peace offensive” by Hamas. The phrase “peace offensive” should also be familiar to those who are familiar with the history of the Israeli occupation, as it is frequently used by Israeli officials when they fear that Palestinian leaders may be willing to settle for the peace mandates supported by the international community, including the more unreasonable clauses that Israel has managed to introduce into the proposals (i.e. a two-state settlement with full recognition of Israel's “right to exist” as a “Jewish state”). Whenever Israel fears that support for such a settlement is growing among the Palestinian leadership or the Arab community, it attempts to undermine this support by instigating (or, failing that, initiating) armed violence in the Occupied Territories or on one of its other borders. In the past, this has allowed Israel to refuse to pursue peace negotiations while still claiming to be merely defending itself.
  
  As Finkelstein points out, Israel met with limited success in its efforts to demonstrate its military prowess and regional superiority. On the one hand, its decision to attack a population that it knew was incapable of inflicting any serious casualties among its own forces merely highlighted the nation's decline as a military power. On the other hand, the international community strengthened its calls for a peaceful termination of the military occupation, and the Palestinian leadership has thus far continued to cooperate with the United Nations. As a result, Israel has actually weakened its position and isolated itself from many of its former supporters.
  
  After reviewing the rationales behind Israel's devastating attack on Gaza, Finkelstein discusses what could be considered the “second phase” of the Israeli operation—i.e. the battle for public support. By counterpoising reports by multiple human rights organizations, impartial observers, and even statements made by Israeli officials against Israeli's claims that it adhered carefully to the laws of war and that its forces made every effort to avoid civilian casualties, Finkelstein demonstrates the near total failure of the Israeli government to conceal the reality of the massacre. In addition to intentionally targeting civilians, Finkelstein points out that Israeli forces attacked several critical elements of Gaza's already weakened infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, factories, water and sewage facilities, and numerous homes, all in the absence of any evidence that these buildings were housing armed combatants or posed any strategic threat to Israeli soldiers. This leads to the conclusion that, if the weapons and training used by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) allow anything near the level of precision claimed by Israel itself, then it must have been targeting these nonmilitary targets deliberately.
  
  The fundamental problem with Israel's propaganda efforts was not a lack of resources, Finkelstein contends, but that the scale of the massacre was too incredible to hide behind a public relations campaign. When it realized that its traditional assertions, such as claims that Hamas was using “human shields” and that the IDF is the “most moral army in the world” would not silence or marginalize its growing numbers of critics, Israel immediately began resorting to intimidation and minimization. Similar to the way the Bush administration responded to the revelation that US forces had been torturing prisoners in its prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba, Israeli officials attempted to portray their more egregious crimes as “isolated incidents” brought on by a few “rotten apples.” Additionally, officials continued to bar human rights investigators from organizations like Amnesty International and B'Tselem from entering Gaza. When the Israeli organization of IDF veterans Breaking the Silence published a report containing the testimonies of roughly thirty soldiers who participated in “Operation Cast Lead,” the Israeli foreign ministry responded by calling on the European governments who supported the organization to terminate their funding. As Finkelstein documents, neither the intimidation nor the scapegoating succeeded in stifling the criticisms of Israel's conduct. In addition to the investigation commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council, perhaps one of the most significant reports to come out of investigations into Israel's attack on Gaza was Amnesty International's description of foreign arms suppliers to Israel and Palestine that ended with an unprecedented call for a “comprehensive UN Security Council arms embargo on Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups .”
  
  After describing his personal experiences in Gaza after the massacre, where he found that the brutality of the attack had still failed to deter the people's determination to demand security and human dignity or Hamas' willingness to work with the international community to reach a peaceful settlement, Finkelstein describes the dramatic effects of the attack on worldwide public opinion. While various political leaders continued to voice their unconditional support for Israel's militarism, the public everywhere responded with an unprecedented level of outrage. Even in the United States, where both the political establishment and the mainstream media continue to serve the interests of their “Junior Partner” in the Middle East unwaveringly, Finkelstein cites a survey indicating that voters who considered themselves supporters of Israel dropped from 69 to 49 percent, while those who felt that the US should back Israel dropped from 69 to 44 percent. Finkelstein also points out important changes in the demographics of those who have begun to question Israel's claims. He notes that the organizations calling for a peaceful resolution to Israel's conflict with the Palestinian people have begun to demonstrate a great deal of racial, gender, and age diversity, including large numbers of Jewish individuals. This growing number of both Jewish and mainstream supporters of a peaceful settlement has slowly begun to undermine claims made by the likes of Alan Dershowitz and Abraham Foxman that concern for the Palestinian people is somehow linked to a “new anti-Semitism.” Even a small number of liberal Zionists have begun to oppose the “Israel lobby,” in some cases defending others who do so against charges of racism and anti-Semitism.
  
  Finkelstein sees the widespread outrage over “Operation Cast Lead” and the growing willingness among mainstream commentators to question the claims made by Israel's apologists as symptoms of a major shift in worldwide public opinion. As the once unanimous support for Israel's military adventures continues to encounter larger pockets of resistance, the possibility of bringing peace and justice to Palestine becomes more real and plausible. Although the struggle to convince Israel to accept the international consensus and atone for its crimes against the Palestinian people will by no means be a minor one, the possibility of seeing both Palestinians and Jews living together in peace and fellowship is closer now than ever before.
• 
  anna (½ of readsrainbow)

  it’s a very angry book, but also a somewhat hopeful one.
  
  the book focuses on the operation cast lead of december 2008-january 2009, and the goldstone’s UN report stating that “israel” committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. (it was written before goldstone changed his mind about idf intentionally targeting palestinian civilians.) the title itself is a quote from a column by an israeli journalist gideon levy, regarding the report.
  
  it's angry in the sense that finkelstein is very obviously furious with "israel", like any sane person with a working conscience should be. he’s rude and sarcastic, yes, but that doesn’t stop him from being fair and meticulously pointing out every lie & crime of “israel”. there’s a lot of statistics and direct quotes "israeli" politicians and zionist sympathisers and from idf soldiers taking part in the massacre, but still, it's not so much a day-by-day account of what happened in gaza - rather a look at the world's response to it.
  
  and it's (cautiously) hopeful in its overall conclusion: that things are changing. that the general public’s support of “israel” is lowering, becoming less natural. that the propaganda machine is beginning to break. granted, finkelstein wrote it in 2010, and here we are in 2024, exactly three months after the start of the most recent aggression and barely a few years after the aggression of may 2021. but boycotts are losing giants billions of dollars, celebrities’ kids are wearing sweatshirts with palestine motifs, the protests around the whole world haven’t really stopped for a second since october. maybe he is right, however excruciatingly slow this change is.
• 
  Dale

  Review of This Time We Went Too Far
  
  Norman Finkelstein draws on reports from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Goldstone Report to document the war crimes committed by Israel in its December 2008 attack on Gaza. He begins with the recent history of Israeli policies, including the 1982 and 2006 invasions of Lebanon, the ongoing expansion of settlements in the West Bank, and the failed 2000 peace agreement (about which Ben-Ami, a lead Israeli negotiator at those talks later said "If I were a Palestinian, I would not have accepted the agreement, either"). He then talks about the conditions in Gaza, and the cynical withdrawal of the Israeli occupation in 2005 which was accompanied by a lock-down on commerce designed to further impoverish one of the poorest regions on earth.
  
  He addresses the claim that Israel was forced to initiate the December attack because Hamas had violated the June 2008 cease fire agreement, and shows that in fact Hamas had abided by the agreement; that the very few rocket attacks were not authorized by the Hamas leadership, and that much of the rocket fire that did occur was in response to a deliberately provocative cross-border attack by the IDF in November.
  
  In the aftermath of the December-January attack, nearly 1400 Palestinians were killed, approximately 80% of them civilians, including 300 children. 14 Israelis were killed, including 4 by friendly fire. This disparity was a result of a well-planned strategy of disproportionate force and collective punishment; a strategy that had been worked out well in advance of the attack, and that was explicitly communicated to the military commanders prior to the attack. Another part of the strategy, also well executed, was the targeted destruction of basic infrastructure. This included the utter destruction of the American International School (the best elementary school in Gaza), multiple buildings at the University, UN buildings, electrical generation plants, and so on.
  
  In the aftermath Israel claimed that whatever slight civilian deaths had occurred were a result of Hamas using the civilian population as human shields and civilians being caught in the crossfire. None of the independent investigating agencies were able to find any credible evidence for this claim. On the contrary, both HRW and the Goldstone report found instances of the IDF using Palestinians as human shields, forcing Palestinians to remain in positions occupied by the IDF and therefore at risk of attack by Hamas forces.
  
  Defenders of Israel immediately attacked the Goldstone report as biased on the day following its release. This is odd, because the report is nearly 600 pages long. It is hard to believe that those attacking the report could have read it in the interval between its publication and the time of their denunciations. And there was certainly no time to have conducted any research to provide evidence of bias. The most adamant defenders of Israel conducted ad hominem attacks on Goldstone himself, charging him with anti-Semitism. The charge would have been risible if the context were not so tragic. Goldstone, a Jew and self-proclaimed Zionist, has been a staunch supporter of Israel his entire life. And this made both the details and the conclusions of the Report a serious matter: his commission found at least 36 instances of probable war-crimes committed by the IDF, and the report lays the blame squarely on the Israeli political and military elite.
  
• 
  Pauline

  For someone that only knows the basics about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, like me, I hoped this book would educate me and shed a light on the core of the dispute. That was too optimistic. The book reads like a university textbook. Each page has at least 5 notes and 5 more quotes, so I had to read it with a pencil and with full concentration. Only in the last two chapters, when Finkelstein writes from his experience of a visit to Gaza in 2009, I could relax and start to understand the complexity of the problems.
  He explains how in December 2008, when Israel invaded Gaza, the simmering discontent of the world with Israel reached a boiling point. Finkelstein tries to analyse the motives behind this assault and records the suffering of the people in Gaza. His goal is to inform and mobilize the public around the settlement of the conflict. I think he has succeeded in his promise to inform the public, but I am gloomy about his second goal.
  
• 
  Don

  Norman Finkelstein begins his new book—This Time We Went Too Far: Truth & Consequences of the Gaza Invasion—debunking the oft-repeated claim that Israel waged Operation Cast Lead in order to stop Hamas from firing rockets into Israeli cities. If Israel's goal had been to stop the the rockets, Finkelstein writes, then it wouldn't have broken the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire with Hamas. (Israel did this on November 4, 2008, when a group of Israeli soldiers entered Gaza and killed six Palestinian militants. Until then, Hamas had been abiding by the ceasefire agreement and had even worked to stop rogue groups from firing rockets.) Moreover, if Israel's goal had been stopping the rockets, then, instead of opting for war, it would have agreed to renew the ceasefire agreement in early December.
  
  So why then did Israel wage its December 2008-January 2009 assault on Gaza? More than anything else, Finkelstein writes that Israel, still embarrassed by its poor performance in the 2006 Lebanon War, sought to restore its deterrence capacity. In order to accomplish this, it felt the need to utterly devastate Gaza, dealing a heavy blow to, not just militants, but also civilians and civilian infrastructure. In doing this it hoped to so badly intimidate Arabs, in both Gaza and the entire region, that they would “not even conceive of challenging Israel’s freedom to carry on as it pleased, however ruthlessly and recklessly.”
  
  To demonstrate that Israel targeted the civilian population and its infrastructure, Finkelstein first describes the level of destruction resulting from the invasion: “Beyond the civilian casualties, Israel destroyed or damaged 58,000 homes (6,300 were completely destroyed or sustained severe damage), 280 schools and kindergartens (18 schools were completely destroyed and six university buildings were razed to the ground), 1,500 factories and workshops, several buildings housing Palestinian and foreign media (two journalists were killed while working, four others were also killed), water and sewage installations, 80 percent of agricultural crops, and nearly one-fifth of cultivated land.”
  
  Israel also destroyed 30 mosques, one of the Gaza’s three flour mills, and a chicken farm that supplied one-tenth of the Strip’s eggs. Noting that the destruction of the chicken farm resulted in the death of 65,000 chickens, he writes: “After the invasion was over Israel alleged that the death and destruction appeared indefensible only because ‘there is a limit to the amount of intelligence it can share with commissions of inquiry without compromising operational capabilities and intelligence sources.’ If the world only knew what was in those chickens….”
  
  Finkelstein proceeds to point to statements by Israeli officials who claimed that Israel used “sophisticated precision weapons” during the conflict, that it possessed an “intelligence gathering capacity” that “remained extremely effective,” that “99 percent of the firing that was carried out [by the Air Force] hit targets accurately,” and that it only struck one building in error. “In other words,” Finkelstein writes, “Israel was able to pinpoint its targets on the ground and, by its own admission, could and did hit these designated targets with pinpoint accuracy. It thus cannot be said that the criminal wreckage resulted from mishap or from a break in the chain of command. What happened in Gaza was meant to happen—by everyone from the soldiers in the field who executed the orders to the officers who gave the orders to the politicians who approved the orders.”
  
  Lest his readers have any lingering doubts, Finkelstein continues to pour on the evidence. In one heavily footnoted chapter after another, he details how numerous IDF soldiers confessed to seeing their fellow soldiers commit war crimes, how Israel continually hampered the efforts of relief organizations, and how it targeted minarets, “which, being too narrow for snipers to ascend, had no military value.” He also devotes a chapter to the allegation that Hamas used civilians as human shields, noting that this claim is based solely on the tortured confessions of Palestinian detainees and has been contradicted by the investigations of numerous human rights organizations. Pointing to an Amnesty International report, he then notes that Israeli soldiers, on the other hand, “used civilians, including children, as ‘human shields,’ endangering their lives by forcing them to remain in or near houses which they took over and used as military positions. Some were forced to carry out dangerous tasks such as inspecting properties or objects suspected of being booby-trapped” (Amnesty’s words).
  
  Much of This Time We Went Too Far is simply a distillation of what has already been made known by the Goldstone Commission, human rights organizations, and numerous Israeli soldiers. But this is precisely the book’s strength; by condensing this information, Finkelstein has provided activists with an incredibly potent weapon for peace. Making use of such documents as the 550-page Goldstone Report can be a daunting task, but Finkelstein has done the work for us, giving us an accessible, 143-page analysis of the invasion.
• 
  Kevin

  Though the Alan Dershowitz-led witch hunt may have robbed him of his academic position at DePaul University in Chicago, Finkelstein has fortunately refused to fade into obscurity (in fact, Dershowitz’s infantile campaign may have raised Finkelstein’s profile).
  
  Per his usual standards (though largely without, and I note this with some degree of sadness, his typical acerbic wit), Finkelstein’s latest work ably dissects the rationales, realities, and outcomes of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s wanton, Washington-backed flattening of the Gaza Strip in late 2008-early 2009.
  
  Especially valuable is his research into reports from human rights group, as well as that of the famed international jurist Richard Goldstone. Though the staying power of the U.S.-Israeli project to subjugate the Palestinian people does not inspire optimism, one is tempted by Finkelstein’s conclusion that the UN-sponsored Goldstone Report, produced in response to Israel’s intentional and wholesale destruction of Gaza , marks “the end of an apologetic Jewish liberalism that denies or extenuates Israel’s crimes” – and, hopefully along with it, that of U.S. opinion-makers as a whole.
• 
  Yassir Morsi

  It is amazing, yet tragic how much of the history of Gaza repeats ...
  
  Written a decade and a half ago, Finkelstein primarily focuses on the 2008-2009 Gaza War, also known as Operation Cast Lead and provides a critical analysis of the motives behind Israel's assault on Gaza and chronicles the events and aftermath of what Amnesty International called "22 days of death and destruction."
  
  The book looks at the impact of the war on the people of Gaza, human rights violations, the use of propaganda, and the decline in support for Israel, offering a comprehensive exploration of the conflict and its implications.
  
  It is structured into six chapters, all of which critically examine the conflict in such a way that challenges the narratives often presented in the mainstream.
  
  The opening chapter, "Self-Defense," sets a firm tone, questioning Israel's justification of self-defence and labelling the invasion a violation of international law. Finkelstein doesn't hold back in depicting the suffering inflicted upon Gazans
  
  In "Their Fear and Ours," the author critically discusses Israel's apprehensions about Palestinian statehood and the severe impact of the invasion on Palestinian civilians, underlining the urgent need for peace and solidarity across communities.
  
  "Whitewash," the third chapter, accuses Israel and its defenders of manipulating public perception and downplaying the extent of civilian suffering. Finkelstein's critique of military analyst Anthony H. Cordesman is particularly incisive
  
  The fourth chapter, "Of Human Shields and Hasbara," further investigates Israel's narrative strategies, particularly the disputed claim of Hamas using human shields. Finkelstein's careful analysis highlights the disparity between Israeli claims and the grim realities uncovered by human rights investigations.
  
  "Inside Gaza" offers a personal touch, with Finkelstein sharing his experiences and observations from his visits to Gaza. The stark images and testimonies he presents are a poignant reminder of the human cost of the conflict and the dire situation in Gaza.
  
  Finally, "Ever Fewer Hosannas" discusses the shifting global perspectives on Israel, particularly in the U.S. and Europe. Finkelstein notes a growing pro-Palestinian sentiment, especially among younger generations, and increased critical voices within Jewish communities (this is particularly an interesting read in the current context with debates around gen z and Palestine)
  
  Finkelstein's book is an unflinching critique of the Gaza invasion, offering a perspective that challenges the reader to reconsider widely held beliefs about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how much of what Israel is currently doing has precedence.
  
  
  #FreePalestine.
• 
  Piotr

  How was this massacre fuckin' possible?
  I wish this book was written in a more straightforward, up-to-the-point way instead of meandering in endless footnotes but its emotional impact is still huge.
• 
  Aimee Warrington

  This book is a poorly written compilation of information gathered from numerous sources. By "poorly written" I simply mean the narrative from the author's own voice is missing beyond the introduction and the quotation after quotation, citation after citation, made this a very dry, painful, difficult to finish read for me. The book assumes a good familiarity and understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict of it's reader (which I admittedly have not). The book is blatantly pro-Palestinian (anti-Israeli), which is fine, but I think that makes it more of a "preaching to the choir" kind of book. As I said, I'm not educated enough regarding the Israeli-Palestinian reality and I'm sure I didn't gain as much insight or food-for-thought as I would have reading a less propaganda-y book.
• 
  Reza Putra

  Akhirnya, kita tidak bisa lagi menggunakan embel-embel seperti paham kebangsaaan, agama, dan/atau status sosial untuk membedakan yang benar dari yang bathil.
  
  
  http://masihij4u.blogspot.com/2010/09...
• 
  Gabriel

  excellent!
• 
  Martha

  how the 2008 Gaza attack and the flotilla attack have pushed international opinion close to the tipping point
• 
  Sham Issa

  كتاب تم بحثه بصورة جيدة، ويلفت النظر لأشياء معينة. غير أنه يسنهدف الجمهور الغربي الغائب المغيب عن حقيقة ما يحدث بفلسطين بسبب إعلامهم السيء.
• 
  Nikita Jayswal

  tantalizing facts about the 2008 invasion.
• 
  Fred Grube

  This book is both informative and believable. I would consider it a must read for anyone interested the holy land and humanitarian issues.
• 
  Joel

  Probably Finkelstein's most readable work, and well-documented, as always.
• 
  Chriss W-t

  How it happened. Why. And what's to come.