He’s a very careful student, and he started checking the references-and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked: probably it had been put together by some intelligence agency or something like that.

He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. That was the big intellectual hit for that year: Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, everybody was talking about it as the greatest thing since chocolate cake.Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. And there was all kinds of demographic analysis in it, and a big professor of demography at the University of Chicago authenticated it. Here was this book which proved that there were really no Palestinians! Of course, the implicit message was, if Israel kicks them all out there’s no moral issue, because they’re just recent immigrants who came in because the Jews had built up the country. And it was very popular-it got literally hundreds of rave reviews, and no negative reviews: the Washington Post, the New York Times, everybody was just raving about it. It was a big scholarly-looking book with lots of footnotes, which purported to show that the Palestinians were all recent immigrants.

How many of you know about Joan Peters, the book by Joan Peters? There was this best-seller a few years ago, it went through about ten printings, by a woman named Joan Peters-or at least, signed by Joan Peters-called From Time Immemorial. I’ll tell you another, last case-and there are many others like this. The Fate of an Honest Intellectual Noam Chomsky Excerpted from Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, pp.

Understanding power by noam chomsky