Video: Finkelstein on Hamas, current crisis, Lebanon, Hezbollah

An Excellent Presentation

Transcript included; here is an excerpt:

""There is this claim that the obstacle is that Hamas won't recognize Israel... all of those UN resolutions I mentioned, and I can go through a quite copious documentary record, the Palestinians always supported it. It's true, a new element entered the picture with Hamas being elected in January but it's simply not true that were it not for Hamas, there would be a settlement."

Here is another:

"So let's just take a couple of examples. If Hamas targets a bus in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv and blows it up, and then afterwards, says, "well, we didn't really wanna kill the civilians, we just wanted to destroy the bus," people would laugh, that's ridiculous. So if Israel drops a one ton bomb on a densely populated area of Gaza, as it did in July 2002 in order to "kill" a Palestinian leader, a fellow named Shahade, and then they said "well, yes, it's true, 14 others were killed (9 of them babies) but we didn't intend to. we intended only to kill the Palestinian leader." The argument seems to me as silly and unacceptable as the argument of a hypothetical Hamas claim that "we wanted to just blow up the bus." "

And one more:

"Ok, I'm willing to acknowledge that that's an ambiguous position on their part. But now let's look at the other side of the equation. The other side of the equation is pretty straight forward. In fact, it's not complicated at all. Since 1967 no Israeli government, no Israeli political party, no Israeli senior official has ever recognized a Palestinian State within the June 1967 borders. Now, it is true that they've recognized, recently, since roughly the case of the Likud Party...[inaudible]... '97, the case of Sharon, roughly.. early 2001, they've recognized the right of Palestinians to a State. That has no bearing and no reference to a State as it's understood by the international community."

And one last:

"Ok, some of you don't trust the goyim, so read what Gideon Levy has to say, the chief Israeli correspondent in the Occupied Territories for Haaretz newspaper. He wrote ("Gaza's darkness," Haaretz, 09.03.2006) a couple of weeks ago "Gaza has been reoccupied. It is in its worst condition ever. The Israeli army has been rampaging through Gaza -- there's no other word to describe it -- killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately.... In large parts of Gaza nowadays, there is no electricity. Israel bombed the only power station in Gaza... There's hardly any water. More than ever, Gaza is also like a prison.... This is disgraceful and shocking collective punishment.""