Norman G. Finkelstein: “Israel Is Now a Lunatic State”

 

Norman G. Finkelstein: What happened with the Gaza flotilla was not an accident.  You have to remember that the Israeli cabinet met for fully a week.  All the cabinet ministers discussed and deliberated how they would handle the flotilla.  There were numerous reports in the Israeli press, numerous suggestions, numerous recommendations about what to do.  At the end of the day, they decided on a nighttime armed commando raid on a humanitarian convoy.  Israel is now a lunatic state.  It’s a lunatic state with between two and three hundred nuclear devices.  It is threatening war daily against Iran and against Hezbollah in Lebanon.  Hezbollah in Lebanon has already stated on several occasions: if Israel attacks it will retaliate in kind.  Things are getting out of control.  We have to ask ourselves a simple, basic, fundamental question: can a lunatic state like Israel be trusted with two to three hundred nuclear devices when it is now threatening its neighbors Iran and Lebanon with an attack?


Norman G. Finkelstein is the author of ‘This Time We Went Too Far’: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion; Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History; The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering; Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict; A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (with Ruth Bettina Birn); and The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years.  This video interview was released by Russia Today on 31 May 2010.  The text above is an edited partial transcript of the interview.




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