This is a small documentary about American academic Norman Finkelstein who has made a career out of being a Jew who does not supported much of the recent Israeli policy toward Palestinians. He has been an outspoken critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East and has worked tirelessly to get the world community to see the conflict from the Palestinian point of view. As the son of Holocaust survivors, he has been an interesting voice in the debate, comparing Israeli treatment of Palestinians to his parents' treatment in the Warsaw ghetto by the Nazis.
The film briefly shows Finkelstein's roots in Brooklyn and how he made a name for himself in the early 1980s writing a piece that criticized a popular book that only took the Israeli side of the conflict. Most of the film takes place in the past few years as he went on a college campus debate tour over his latest book. In the middle of the tour, he got into a fight on the radio with Alan Dershowitz and then made it his mission to condemn Dersh and prove him to be a plagiarist. This got him into hot water with his employers, Hunter College and then DePaul University.
Finkelstein is certainly a weird guy and basically doesn't know when to shut the hell up. He is not wrong about Dersh copying footnotes from an earlier book into his recent one (I have read about this and it seems pretty clear that he plagiarized), but so what?! This is not a battle worth fighting.
At a point, Finkelstein goes even further off the rails by claiming that Hezbollah is a force for good. Certainly they are doing some money-giving work on the ground in Beirut, but it's hard to argue that they are an absolute force for good (their policy of wiping Israel off the map isn't "good", no matter how you slice it).
He seems to enjoy being a firebrand, more than being a serious public intellectual. It is interesting to see before our eyes him move from the latter to the former.
This is an interesting film, though rather wonky. You have to be interested in the Middle East and the "peace process" to even remotely enjoy or understand this. Still, it's an interesting work.
Stars: 2 of 4
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