A Response to Norman Finkelstein's Moral Arguments - Coleman Hughes, Michael Moynihan

Nat Turner Argument
- Finkelstein argument that you can’t condemn Oct 7th because you can’t condemn Nat Turner
- Killed a baby and others not connected to his enslavement
- Hamas leaders not suffering like slaves
- Peoples who behavior you’re excusing (Hamas) is in part responsible for the conditions in Gaza
  - Jews in concentration camps and slaves were in no part responsible for their conditions
- Nat Turner wasn’t a cause for the Civil War; didn’t cause it wasn’t a domino
- There was a fundamental divide between the North and South; it was inevitable.
Lack of moral condemnation at any level in Finkelstein’s arguments
Two Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel executed in West Bank
Yelling and screaming at hostages when their released
‘Gaza is a Concentration Camp’
- They didn’t have the capability to send rockets
- 30,000 of the liberated prisoners died within the first week
- Billons of dollars in aid
- Providing water, food
- Against own argument of calorie counting
- Condition in Gaza
  - You can paint a dishonest picture with the things you highlight and omit.
  - Finkelstein
    - Lacked electricity 16 hours a day
    - Water only once a week for a few hours and 80% unfit for human consumption
    - 1 of 2 unemployed and food insecure
    - 20% essential of drugs at zero level
    - 20% of patients cant get permits
  - Coleman
    - Life expediency at 75.6 - 46% percentile (above average)
    - Infant mortality - 14% percentile (above average)
    - Palestinian Health Survey 2010
      - Under 5 years old infant mortality - 26.8 out a 1000 (Global average 51 (today 37))
    - Gaza health statistics better than the global average
      - Middling developing country
Hama coined itself a ‘social welfare system’
- People will forgive you killing people if you provide free breakfast like the Black Panters
Hamas didn’t create economic systems, because why create wealth and wealth is given to you (aid)
International Law
- Finkelstein suffers from narrow International Law perspective
  - The start and end
- Soft law
- Moral philosophy, ethics shows that looking at just Int. Law doesn’t show you the consequences and how they compare to status quo
- International Law != ethically good
- You can’t invade a country and then demand a reset
- Idea of making an agreement with dictators, not a democracy, that someone new in power could rip up the agreement
  - Arafat saying he’d be killed by his own people if he made a peace agreement
- Only Israel is being held to the standard of Int. Law
Hamas can’t have military objectives; they have media relations objectives
- Objective for their own people to be martyrs
- Islamist
- Game Theory of putting all your troops in the heart of civilian populations
Second Intifada was the pivotal event in Israel history that killed the want of Israeli’s for a peace process
Human Shields
- People getting on roofs (commanders HQ)
- Implicit in that Israel won’t kill civilians and Hamas knows that
- Idea that its great that my enemy cares about our lives so much that we can use that against them
  - Can only think of this as Hamas through a lens of Islamist otherwise you’re saying the enemy is more moral than you
Conversation about immorality of Israel is globalized gaslighting
Camp David, Clinton Parameters
- Finkelstein
  - Camp David
    - P. made the concessions because Int. Law
  - Clinton Parameters
    - Both made 10 pages of reservations
- Coleman
  - Superficial commitment to facial accuracy
  - Painting a false picture
  - Even if was 1 page, or 10 pages, doesn’t mean their equivalent. You could write 1 paragraph that rejects them completely. Irrevelent
  - “And even though Arafat’s reservations, involving fundamental issues such as the right of return, the Temple Mount, and territorial percentages, all largely outside the parameters, amounted to a big no—Dennis Ross defined them as “deal-killers”—he still could claim that we were on equal footing in that we too had our own reservations, though they were mostly inside the parameters. In our defense I should say that Barak’s reservations were for all practical purposes eventually dropped and would not prevent us from defending the letter and spirit of the parameters when we went a few weeks later for a last-ditch attempt to save the peace in Taba. Taba did not produce an agreement precisely because we wanted to translate the parameters into a peace treaty and the Palestinians addressed them as a straitjacket they refused to work with.” Prophets without Honor - Shlomo Ben-Ami, page 225 (file not included in this release)
  - “for the first time the Palestinians themselves, and not some third party, spelled out their reservations on the parameters. “We don’t want Clinton’s boxes: we want a free-wheeling debate,” was the underlying motif in Saeb Erekat’s presentation. The document he presented us was a radical amendment to each and every single chapter of the parameters. It practically annulled them” Prophets without Honor - Shlomo Ben-Ami, page 229 (file not included in this release)