Palestine

In 1984, when he was a doctoral student at Princeton, Finkelstein investigated the sourcing of a celebrated new book by the journalist Joan Peters called From Time Immemorial. Peters argued that Palestinians didn’t actually exist and that Zionist colonization had lured non-native Arabs into the region, where they started waging war on the Israelis. It was mostly a fabrication, Finkelstein discovered, based on fudged demographic data, but a consensus had already formed that this was a monumental work; it was gushed over by the likes of Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel. Initially, no U.S. publication would touch Finkelstein’s findings (In These Times eventually published them), nor would any American academic except for Noam Chomsky, who became his mentor. “You’re going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it,” Chomsky warned his protégé. “And they’re going to destroy you.”