My new book, GAZA’S GRAVEDIGGERS: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places, was officially published this week. When I began writing the book, my objective was to expose pockets of corruption in the United Nations. By the time I completed the book, it had become agonizingly clear that the international system had gone into freefall. On November 17, 2025, Security Council resolution 2803—shockingly! but literally—handed the deed for Gaza to the retarded ape currently occupying the White House. My closing words in the book read: “After November 17, 2025, the UN is a rotting corpse.” Nearly a year later, I see no grounds to revisit this judgment. Whereas the resolution mandated significant humanitarian aid for and the reconstruction of Gaza, I anticipated that: “Neither will come to pass. . . . Israel won’t admit more than a ‘humanitarian minimum’ of aid, if that much and probably a lot less. . . . The reconstruction of Gaza won’t happen because . . . Israel won’t let it happen.” Alas, these predictions also do not require revision.
GAZA’S GRAVEDIGGERS is the culmination of a life’s work. I first entered the public arena while still in graduate school. I methodically demonstrated that a widely acclaimed tome on the Israel-Palestine conflict was a hoax. The exposé simultaneously made my name and sealed my fate. I was henceforth not just unemployed but—something quite different—unemployable. I would later joke that both my brothers had already retired while I was still in search of my first job.
Although never able to find gainful employment, I did not lack in a mission. Already in my early teens I had resolved to devote my life to avenging and vindicating my family’s martyrdom. What form that mission would take was, at such a tender age, still inchoate. I ended up becoming a forensic scholar: exposing fraud and revealing Truth in the service of Justice. Whereas my commitment to Justice manifestly traced back to my family history, it’s not entirely obvious why I was so fanatically committed to Truth. I imagine it’s because, as much as I was committed to Justice, I also attached supreme value to the life of the mind; and it’s impossible, I believe, to revere the life of the mind without revering Truth. Since my youth I have been wedded to a historic tradition in which Truth is not only compatible with but also a sine qua non of radical politics: “To tell the truth is revolutionary” (Gramsci); “Nothing is more destructive for revolution than illusions, and nothing benefits it more than the clear and open truth” (Luxemburg); “We must speak the truth: therein lies our strength” (Lenin).
The singular advantage of Truth is that it coheres; all the pieces fall into place; being true, it hangs together. The singular disadvantage of falsehood is that it inevitably falls apart on close, if painstaking, inspection. I have devoted my adult life to parsing texts in order to reveal their mendacity. It is common to peremptorily dismiss a text as propaganda; I endeavor to prove it. The great scholar of the Nazi holocaust, Raul Hilberg, shrewdly observed that, whereas the Nazi holocaust did happen, this was “more easily said than demonstrated.” My goal in GAZA’S GRAVEDIGGERS is to definitively debunk the mythology surrounding October 7, 2023 and the ensuing Israeli genocide: inter alia, I dispel the hoax that Hamas instrumentalized rape as a weapon of war, and I demonstrate that what unfolded in Gaza was not a war but a genocide—and why this distinction matters.
“There is no greatness without simplicity, goodness, and truth.” Although not devoid of an occasional turn of phrase and flash of wit, GAZA’S GRAVEDIGGERS is written with Tolstoy’s dictum in mind: not to rhetorically impress but, rather, to communicate important truths. Still, it is a challenging read. But I believe it’s worth the mental investment. It is the most authoritative account to date of the horror that has befallen Gaza. It is a practical textbook—my legacy, as it were, to a new generation—on how to deconstruct hoaxes. It is a testament of one’s beholdenness to rigorous Truth. To acquire the book, to have it sit on one’s bookshelf, is, finally, an act of remembrance. My very first published work was dedicated to my parents. The epigraph read: “May I never forget or forgive what was done to them.” I dispatch GAZA’S GRAVEDIGGERS into the world in the same spirit.
Norman G. Finkelstein received his PhD from the Princeton University Politics Department in 1987. He is the author of many books that have been translated into 60 foreign editions, including THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering, GAZA: An inquest into its martyrdom, and most recently, I ACCUSE! Herewith a proof beyond reasonable doubt that ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda whitewashed Israel. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It: Politically Incorrect Thoughts on Cancel Culture and Academic Freedom In the year 2020, Norman Finkelstein was named the fifth most influential political scientist in the world.
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