Norman Finkelstein

Norman Finkelstein began the work that made his name as a graduate student at Princeton, going through Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial line by line and concluding that its demographic case for an empty Palestine did not survive checking. That grew into Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, published in 1995, which reads the standard accounts of 1948 and after against the archival record. Both his parents came through the Warsaw ghetto and the camps, and he has said his position starts there. DePaul University denied him tenure in 2007 after his department and a college committee had voted in favour, the dean wrote against, and the university board followed the dean; Alan Dershowitz, whose own book Finkelstein had attacked in print, lobbied against him. His critics call the tone contemptuous and his defenders say the sourcing has held. He has held no academic post since.