By Ali Fathollah-Nejad
March 03, 2010 “PalestineChronicle” — Norman Finkelstein, an internationally renowned scholar of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, was due to talk about the state of the decades-old conflict and the situation in Gaza one year after the Israeli assault last week in Munich and Berlin. As part of a European speaking tour which would have led him to Germany for the first time since 2002, Finkelstein has been invited to speak in Prague at a number of prestigious institutions, such as the Institute of International Relations Prague, the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts at Charles University in Prague.
One of Finkelstein’s Berlin lectures was initially planned to be sponsored by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, an institution affiliated to the German Green Party. The event was scheduled to take place at the Protestant Trinitatis Church. In a statement announcing its decision to cancel the event, the church “regrets to have been implicated, against its will and its publicly known stances, in anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli polemics”. Soon thereafter, on 9 February, the Böll Foundation announced its pullback stating “Due to inattention, insufficient investigation and trust in our cooperation partners, we have made a severe mistake. In our judgment, Finkelstein’s behavior and his theses do not remain within the limits of legitimate critique.” It finally “thanked the many notes and interventions pertaining to this event.”
The other Finkelstein lecture was scheduled at the headquarters of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (RLS), a German institution affiliated to the Left Party. But on 17 February, the Left Party think-tank also withdrew its support. It stated to have underestimated the event’s “political explosiveness”, saying further that for the sake of guaranteeing a “controversial and pluralistic debate” its proposition to provide for a counterpart to Finkelstein has been rejected by the organizers. Aside from the unusual insistence to invite a “counterpart”, Doris Pumphrey from the organizing committee stated that the RLS had not wanted to name this counterpart.
Finkelstein’s projected two lectures in Munich, one of them at the America House Munich, were likewise cancelled.
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