I honestly think that both Fleischer and Naftali are both streets ahead of most hasbara at the moment. Hananya Naftali is a Christian, which in some ways is worse than nothing, but in other ways better. From what I understand, Fleischer is a sincere Jew, though he is not always sincere in public forums.
If Substack wasn’t lame and you could add pics in the comments, I would add the SpongeBob laughing meme to the fact you got banned from Slifkin’s blog. Tell me the story tomorrow buddy!
There's nothing to tell. Rabbi Doctor Slifkin has a fake open-comments policy in which dozens of wannabe Charedi trolls beclown themselves defending the incoherent and nonsensical positions of the community they aspire to be a part of, so he can look good. If someone writes something challenging, he quietly gets rid of them. He waited until I wrote something dumb and banned me. Fair play.
I think Slifkin is confused about whether it makes him look good or not. Sometimes he interjects in the comments that he won't ban because they make him look good, then bans them anyways, then blocks all comments on subsequent posts for a couple of weeks.
I think משכיל בינה is right that most of the comments make him look good (and bring up his ratings), but then there are some challenging ones. During the weeks when he was on a warpath against the Charedi 100-million-dollar campaign, he was nervous of being challenged so he blocked everything.
>the incoherent and nonsensical positions of the community
I am curious about this comment. Obviously, the current Charedi community (media?) takes incoherent and nonsensical positions, and they certainly need to be more productive.
However, everything you write on this blog about the demographic crisis seem to be pointing to the conclusion that the core Charedi position, as set down by the Chazon Ish and others, was the right approach.
The story goes that the Chazon Ish once sat someone down and explained to him how exponential growth works, that with a TFR of 10 (actually 10.5) a couple can have 1 million 6th generation descendants.
This was always the core of Charedi approach, and they have been quite successful, as evidenced by this studyhttps://chotam.org.il/%D7%A2%D7%9C-%D7%A1%D7%93%D7%A8-%D7%94%D7%99%D7%95%D7%9D/%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%A9%D7%90%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%A1%D7%A4%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%A4%D7%A8%D7%A1%D7%95%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%94%D7%93%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%92%D7%A8%D7%A4%D7%99%D7%94-%D7%A9%D7%9C-%D7%94%D7%93%D7%AA%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA/ . If not for the Charedim Israel may have had only 5 million Jews, with a fertility rate below replacement level similar to all other Western countries as you commented here https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/reversing-the-fertility-collapse/comment/52516723. Had the country followed the Charedi example more closely we may have had 20 million Jews in Israel and a one-state solution would be possible. (Additionally, I believe that had the country been more accommodating to the Charedi lifestyle there would be many more Western Charedi olim, and Charedim in general would be more productive.)
There are many positive things one can, and perhaps should, say about Charedim, but the official line of the community with regard to the public policy is genuinely mad and thus those who take it upon themselves to represent it just beclown themselves.
This is a little outside of my usual wheelhouse, but... even if Israel had a jewish population of 20 million, wouldn't the OSS still involve adding ~6 million arabs to the country who mostly back the "river to the sea" solution?
I mean... sure, on paper you could outvote them, but even if only 10% were committed to violence that's half a million people who want you dead, and I'm not sure I'd want to live in the same country with that. And I'm pretty sure the charedim themselves wouldn't vote for it.
Right now, implementing an OSS even with a massive majority would involve some kind of Xinjiang type of policy. Not great, but still better than what we are doing now.
However, if Jews had been able to achieve demographic dominance before 1948, everything would be totally different. A lot of people in the 1990s, even Benny Morris, thought Israeli Arabs were going to just keep getting more radical and destroy the country, but actually Israel implemented some solid policies and things got better.
I'm struggling to imagine the intersection of "solid policies" and "Xinjiang reservation", but maybe you could explain a little what happened to de-radicalise Israeli Arabs?
I'm busy these days and the Op beat me to it, but unless Trump's plan works out we are stuck with the Arabs. The first step must be to properly annex and therefore to give them at least a path to citizenship. That path definitely should include a paln for reeducation by the Israeli Education Department (including free college, especially for females, to lower their fertility rate) and strong policing until they become similar to Israeli Arabs, or even beyond that.
I agree with annexation, but I just don't think any democratic solution to this problem is feasible within the forseeable future- Israel can't absorb palestinian arabs in the numbers you'd need for a 'path to citizenship' to be more than a token gesture, and while the situation would be different if you had fifteen million charedim acting as electoral ballast the latter will have their own opinions on policy.
Hey Maskil, what do you think about the book start up nation? Will you by any chance ever do a post on it? If there's any book that shows the merit of the Zionist position, and shows the miracles the Zionist ideology is capable of, it's that. When I first read it I was pretty convinced. Now I'm not so sure.
You're not convinced by a country going in 76 years from developing nation to having a larger GDP per-capita than the UK and France? Weird. What other measures do you use?
Is Zionism the cause of Israel's innovation miracles? Jews around the world are pretty notable for innovation. Nobel prizes per capita, etc. And Israel in particular has had some pressing needs to maintain an edge (their neighbors, Westerners flaking on selling advanced weapons) and sound military-industrial policy (Unit 8200). Supply and demand are both present. That is sort of an obvious recipe for a technological success story, as also seen in Taiwan and South Korea.
Some things you can attribute directly to Zionism; gathering a bunch of very smart exiles from Europe and MENA and the Soviet Union giving them freedom seems like a great way to get a boom that front-runs the economic fundamentals. (The US benefited from the same flight from the Nazis, and at the end of the war the US and USSR even got some of the Nazis.)
But also the Zionism in practice of Israel's founding was zealously socialist, and it wasn't until the deregulation of the last few decades that the tech sector started turning out unicorns. (In 1948 Israel's biggest export was oranges from kibbutzim.) At the same time, the 1990s is about when Israel officially hit "developed" status and stopped getting US development aid. In the middle you you had labs contributing key technologies to e.g. big international US-based companies, but most of the money from those developments went back to the US, until recently. And Israeli domestic sales of even the technology they make still lag way behind.
Another property of Israel that has to be seen to be believed is their tempo and casualness. One of the things that in the West seems to strangle innovation is paperwork, and Israel has a culture that is allergic to paperwork. Famously during the early days of the Covid vaccine, Israeli nurses just went out to the street and started vaccinating passers-by rather than let the remaining doses expire. Chaotic! But obviously correct.
So ... did Zionism do that? If so, it's not directly obvious how. Certainly Israel is one of the most technologically successful countries that (until a few years ago) had no known fossil fuel reserves. But it's easier to draw a line between America's founding principles and its 1800s rise and 1900s dominance than Israel's founding principles and its 1900s rise and 2000s strength.
Been thinking about this post for a while since I read it. It could be that you'll discuss this later on in future posts, but I wouldn't be so quick to equate (dumb) public defenders of Zionism and Israel with the intellectual value of Zionism itself.
I think there are a fair amount of more nuanced thinkers who support Zionism but don't bother to become a public spokesperson for it. If you're a nuanced thinker and support Israel's existence you'll either draw the wrath of Sara Netanyahu, or you'll just end up spending the majority of your time speaking with completely insane anti-Semitic people (Skyy News and Eylon Levy come to mind) who you wouldn't convince anyway. As a result, the vacuum is filled by people who are perhaps not the best representative for Zionism on the world stage.
There are a few exceptions to the rule (I like Blake Flayton and Hen Mazzig, but I suspect they are both too liberal for you), but by and large I think most people view defending Israel and Zionism to the outside world as a lost cause. That doesn't mean that they don't try to promote Zionism or Israel, though. Those people either end up voting with their money, or working for various groups that are better about strategizing and knowing when to speak and when to keep silent. Mark Mellman and Democratic Majority for Israel come to mind.
So, I think this is substantially true, but, even so, it still represents a change because it used to be the case that Zionism had both articulate public defenders and people behind the scenes bribing politicians. Another important consideration is that the younger generation aren't influenced by the behinds the scenes stuff, so this kind of Zionist advocacy will just literally stop working at a certain point.
Yesn Matti Friedman is smart, also Haviv Rettig Gur. But both of them shy away from debate, and, I think not coincidentally, are very liberal zionists.
Yes, Florida is safer for Jewish retirees. Most American crime is low-functioning ethnic groups (which in Florida includes white groups as well) shooting each other. This is a societal problem in that it makes many cities unliveable, and this in turn has perverse economic consequences. But for individuals you can just go live somewhere safe and don't visit the dangerous bits. The single biggest risk factor for being a victim of crime is being a criminal.
This by the way, is why people are wrong to say school shootings in America are not a big issue. As a proportion of total murders, they are small, but as a proportion of total murders of people who are not ghetto hooligans, they are much higher.
It's also the case that almost all travel in America is by car, you can even visit the dangerous bits without an issue. And even work there. The main issue is living there (it's also not a good idea to shop there- but some stuff you can *only* buy there 😉).
You should join those Jewish retirees, no? Violent crime and other causes of death are higher in the US, and the happiness metrics of Israel even during war are higher than the US and almost all OECD countries. The life expectancy in Israel is higher too. But really, Zionism failed you, everybody but you is an idiot, you should join the high IQ antizionist and progressive Jews in the US. You're doing yourself a disservice.
I don’t know your background but you sound like you come from an English speaking county. If all the survivors in DP camps and all the people kicked out of the Middle East and North Africa could have come to the US, Israel would probably not exist today. But they couldn’t then, and in fact they can’t now beyond a small percentage. So “Zionism” today is, at baseline, the belief that a minority in the Middle East will not survive without a strong state to protect them, and they have nowhere else to go.
I think it’s more than that too but you don’t need anything more.
Since you're talking about magical realism, let's deal with reality. In reality, Israel is the backstop preventing Jews around the world from becoming stateless. That's happened multiple times in the last hundred years, and Israel has absorbed millions of Jews, while at the same time the US and others shut the doors on immigration of Jewish refugees multiple times.
I think the main driver is education polarization in the US which is likely driving it elsewhere as well. Most educated people are left wing, that trend is getting worse, and supporting Israel is right wing for real substantive reasons. First, on the left you can no longer believe that a state being well run and western makes it better or more deserving of support - in fact, it’s the opposite if anything. Second, in the absence of any kind of threat to the west in many decades, serious use of force is viewed with suspicion and even hatred. The war on terror just reinforced the belief that if you feel threatened and respond with force, it’s a mistake. Third, nationalism and patriotism are viewed negatively on the left. Support for Ukraine is not processed as support for Ukrainian nationalism, but rather support for the rules based international order of “invading countries bad” (unless you’re Palestinian). That’s before bringing in the more well know frameworks of oppressor vs oppressed and brown vs white, which of everyone is now familiar with. There are more issues, but if you are an intelligent person who reads other intelligent people, nearly everyone is left wing and the left is primed to dislike Israel for substantive reasons.
I used to respect him a lot back in my leftist/third-worldist days, and to be honest, I still do. But yeah. I think his entire body of work crumbles once you understand the difference between an empirical claim and a normative claim. Finkelstein starts with a normative premise- Israel shouldn't really exist- and attempts to bolster it with a deluge of empirical claims. But that only distorts his reasoning because it's always the other way round, with normative claims being tailored to empirical reality. Israel does exist and will exist for the foreseeable future and your arguments must proceed from there, something he can't, or refuses to, grasp, which is the source of his derangement. You'd think after decades of not making a difference, there'd be some reflection, but alas.
In that respect he's not any different from the nutty revanchists that make up the bulk of the pro-pally side, but where he's different is that he's the only guy who attempts to tackle the problem in a 'realistic', sensible manner (law, stats, policy) instead of churning out terrible poetry or academic papers on settler colonialist pine trees. You can actually learn things from his books and they're well-written to boot. That's why he's the go-to expert on the issue -- much to the resentment of the very people he's tried to help.
That last part is pretty sad. The Western arab/muslim academic world hates him for his supposed 'moderation' and prior to Oct. 7 and the need for an on-hand expert, the more generic leftists had dropped him for his sensible critiques of troonery. Imagine dedicating your life to helping people only to wind up hated by them. Tragic. But he's a principled guy, which is admirable in and of itself.
How has this aged? I think it's aged better as Israel is out of the news cycle. I also think that in you will have a lot of prestigious people praising Israeli tech and so on.
There is no contradiction here. It attracts dumb people because it is cringe.
People who use the word "cringe" multiple times each article and obsess with "cool" after the age of 25 are pretty cringe.
Douglas Murray is in fact cringe.
You're right, Shellenberger isn't Jewish. Edited.
I think classic pure Herzlian Zionism was pretty cool.
No way, he's an 8 at least. Ask a woman.
I honestly think that both Fleischer and Naftali are both streets ahead of most hasbara at the moment. Hananya Naftali is a Christian, which in some ways is worse than nothing, but in other ways better. From what I understand, Fleischer is a sincere Jew, though he is not always sincere in public forums.
What kind of nationalism is groovy though?
Ukrainian nationalism is pretty fashionable.
Right on brotha!…uhm bro-et?
https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-military-has-new-transgender-spokesperson-1817334
Whateves go Azov Brigade go!
Ever since you were banned from Slifkin's blog, I always thought you should have your own blog, you're a great writer.
If Substack wasn’t lame and you could add pics in the comments, I would add the SpongeBob laughing meme to the fact you got banned from Slifkin’s blog. Tell me the story tomorrow buddy!
There's nothing to tell. Rabbi Doctor Slifkin has a fake open-comments policy in which dozens of wannabe Charedi trolls beclown themselves defending the incoherent and nonsensical positions of the community they aspire to be a part of, so he can look good. If someone writes something challenging, he quietly gets rid of them. He waited until I wrote something dumb and banned me. Fair play.
I think Slifkin is confused about whether it makes him look good or not. Sometimes he interjects in the comments that he won't ban because they make him look good, then bans them anyways, then blocks all comments on subsequent posts for a couple of weeks.
I think משכיל בינה is right that most of the comments make him look good (and bring up his ratings), but then there are some challenging ones. During the weeks when he was on a warpath against the Charedi 100-million-dollar campaign, he was nervous of being challenged so he blocked everything.
>the incoherent and nonsensical positions of the community
I am curious about this comment. Obviously, the current Charedi community (media?) takes incoherent and nonsensical positions, and they certainly need to be more productive.
However, everything you write on this blog about the demographic crisis seem to be pointing to the conclusion that the core Charedi position, as set down by the Chazon Ish and others, was the right approach.
The story goes that the Chazon Ish once sat someone down and explained to him how exponential growth works, that with a TFR of 10 (actually 10.5) a couple can have 1 million 6th generation descendants.
This was always the core of Charedi approach, and they have been quite successful, as evidenced by this studyhttps://chotam.org.il/%D7%A2%D7%9C-%D7%A1%D7%93%D7%A8-%D7%94%D7%99%D7%95%D7%9D/%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%A9%D7%90%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%A1%D7%A4%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%A4%D7%A8%D7%A1%D7%95%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%94%D7%93%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%92%D7%A8%D7%A4%D7%99%D7%94-%D7%A9%D7%9C-%D7%94%D7%93%D7%AA%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA/ . If not for the Charedim Israel may have had only 5 million Jews, with a fertility rate below replacement level similar to all other Western countries as you commented here https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/reversing-the-fertility-collapse/comment/52516723. Had the country followed the Charedi example more closely we may have had 20 million Jews in Israel and a one-state solution would be possible. (Additionally, I believe that had the country been more accommodating to the Charedi lifestyle there would be many more Western Charedi olim, and Charedim in general would be more productive.)
Perhaps you'll eventually get to this discussion.
The next article BN will be about Israel's TFR.
There are many positive things one can, and perhaps should, say about Charedim, but the official line of the community with regard to the public policy is genuinely mad and thus those who take it upon themselves to represent it just beclown themselves.
I agree with you. For this reason, I have recently taken it upon myself to present this side of Charedim.
This is a little outside of my usual wheelhouse, but... even if Israel had a jewish population of 20 million, wouldn't the OSS still involve adding ~6 million arabs to the country who mostly back the "river to the sea" solution?
I mean... sure, on paper you could outvote them, but even if only 10% were committed to violence that's half a million people who want you dead, and I'm not sure I'd want to live in the same country with that. And I'm pretty sure the charedim themselves wouldn't vote for it.
Right now, implementing an OSS even with a massive majority would involve some kind of Xinjiang type of policy. Not great, but still better than what we are doing now.
However, if Jews had been able to achieve demographic dominance before 1948, everything would be totally different. A lot of people in the 1990s, even Benny Morris, thought Israeli Arabs were going to just keep getting more radical and destroy the country, but actually Israel implemented some solid policies and things got better.
I'm struggling to imagine the intersection of "solid policies" and "Xinjiang reservation", but maybe you could explain a little what happened to de-radicalise Israeli Arabs?
I'm busy these days and the Op beat me to it, but unless Trump's plan works out we are stuck with the Arabs. The first step must be to properly annex and therefore to give them at least a path to citizenship. That path definitely should include a paln for reeducation by the Israeli Education Department (including free college, especially for females, to lower their fertility rate) and strong policing until they become similar to Israeli Arabs, or even beyond that.
I agree with annexation, but I just don't think any democratic solution to this problem is feasible within the forseeable future- Israel can't absorb palestinian arabs in the numbers you'd need for a 'path to citizenship' to be more than a token gesture, and while the situation would be different if you had fifteen million charedim acting as electoral ballast the latter will have their own opinions on policy.
Hey Maskil, what do you think about the book start up nation? Will you by any chance ever do a post on it? If there's any book that shows the merit of the Zionist position, and shows the miracles the Zionist ideology is capable of, it's that. When I first read it I was pretty convinced. Now I'm not so sure.
Book reviews are a good idea. I have a backlog of articles in my head, but once I'm done with them, I will start on them.
You're not convinced by a country going in 76 years from developing nation to having a larger GDP per-capita than the UK and France? Weird. What other measures do you use?
Is Zionism the cause of Israel's innovation miracles? Jews around the world are pretty notable for innovation. Nobel prizes per capita, etc. And Israel in particular has had some pressing needs to maintain an edge (their neighbors, Westerners flaking on selling advanced weapons) and sound military-industrial policy (Unit 8200). Supply and demand are both present. That is sort of an obvious recipe for a technological success story, as also seen in Taiwan and South Korea.
Some things you can attribute directly to Zionism; gathering a bunch of very smart exiles from Europe and MENA and the Soviet Union giving them freedom seems like a great way to get a boom that front-runs the economic fundamentals. (The US benefited from the same flight from the Nazis, and at the end of the war the US and USSR even got some of the Nazis.)
But also the Zionism in practice of Israel's founding was zealously socialist, and it wasn't until the deregulation of the last few decades that the tech sector started turning out unicorns. (In 1948 Israel's biggest export was oranges from kibbutzim.) At the same time, the 1990s is about when Israel officially hit "developed" status and stopped getting US development aid. In the middle you you had labs contributing key technologies to e.g. big international US-based companies, but most of the money from those developments went back to the US, until recently. And Israeli domestic sales of even the technology they make still lag way behind.
Another property of Israel that has to be seen to be believed is their tempo and casualness. One of the things that in the West seems to strangle innovation is paperwork, and Israel has a culture that is allergic to paperwork. Famously during the early days of the Covid vaccine, Israeli nurses just went out to the street and started vaccinating passers-by rather than let the remaining doses expire. Chaotic! But obviously correct.
So ... did Zionism do that? If so, it's not directly obvious how. Certainly Israel is one of the most technologically successful countries that (until a few years ago) had no known fossil fuel reserves. But it's easier to draw a line between America's founding principles and its 1800s rise and 1900s dominance than Israel's founding principles and its 1900s rise and 2000s strength.
Been thinking about this post for a while since I read it. It could be that you'll discuss this later on in future posts, but I wouldn't be so quick to equate (dumb) public defenders of Zionism and Israel with the intellectual value of Zionism itself.
I think there are a fair amount of more nuanced thinkers who support Zionism but don't bother to become a public spokesperson for it. If you're a nuanced thinker and support Israel's existence you'll either draw the wrath of Sara Netanyahu, or you'll just end up spending the majority of your time speaking with completely insane anti-Semitic people (Skyy News and Eylon Levy come to mind) who you wouldn't convince anyway. As a result, the vacuum is filled by people who are perhaps not the best representative for Zionism on the world stage.
There are a few exceptions to the rule (I like Blake Flayton and Hen Mazzig, but I suspect they are both too liberal for you), but by and large I think most people view defending Israel and Zionism to the outside world as a lost cause. That doesn't mean that they don't try to promote Zionism or Israel, though. Those people either end up voting with their money, or working for various groups that are better about strategizing and knowing when to speak and when to keep silent. Mark Mellman and Democratic Majority for Israel come to mind.
So, I think this is substantially true, but, even so, it still represents a change because it used to be the case that Zionism had both articulate public defenders and people behind the scenes bribing politicians. Another important consideration is that the younger generation aren't influenced by the behinds the scenes stuff, so this kind of Zionist advocacy will just literally stop working at a certain point.
Finally, Hen Mazzig ... bro, no.
Oh also Matti Friedman! I maintain that Hen Mazzig is much better now than when he first started, but we can agree to disagree.
Yesn Matti Friedman is smart, also Haviv Rettig Gur. But both of them shy away from debate, and, I think not coincidentally, are very liberal zionists.
I’m sympathetic to your argument, but - is Florida so much safer? 2022 murder rate in Israel 1.6/100000. Florida is 10.3/100000
Yes, Florida is safer for Jewish retirees. Most American crime is low-functioning ethnic groups (which in Florida includes white groups as well) shooting each other. This is a societal problem in that it makes many cities unliveable, and this in turn has perverse economic consequences. But for individuals you can just go live somewhere safe and don't visit the dangerous bits. The single biggest risk factor for being a victim of crime is being a criminal.
This by the way, is why people are wrong to say school shootings in America are not a big issue. As a proportion of total murders, they are small, but as a proportion of total murders of people who are not ghetto hooligans, they are much higher.
It's also the case that almost all travel in America is by car, you can even visit the dangerous bits without an issue. And even work there. The main issue is living there (it's also not a good idea to shop there- but some stuff you can *only* buy there 😉).
You should join those Jewish retirees, no? Violent crime and other causes of death are higher in the US, and the happiness metrics of Israel even during war are higher than the US and almost all OECD countries. The life expectancy in Israel is higher too. But really, Zionism failed you, everybody but you is an idiot, you should join the high IQ antizionist and progressive Jews in the US. You're doing yourself a disservice.
I don’t know your background but you sound like you come from an English speaking county. If all the survivors in DP camps and all the people kicked out of the Middle East and North Africa could have come to the US, Israel would probably not exist today. But they couldn’t then, and in fact they can’t now beyond a small percentage. So “Zionism” today is, at baseline, the belief that a minority in the Middle East will not survive without a strong state to protect them, and they have nowhere else to go.
I think it’s more than that too but you don’t need anything more.
I agree with that.
Since you're talking about magical realism, let's deal with reality. In reality, Israel is the backstop preventing Jews around the world from becoming stateless. That's happened multiple times in the last hundred years, and Israel has absorbed millions of Jews, while at the same time the US and others shut the doors on immigration of Jewish refugees multiple times.
I think the main driver is education polarization in the US which is likely driving it elsewhere as well. Most educated people are left wing, that trend is getting worse, and supporting Israel is right wing for real substantive reasons. First, on the left you can no longer believe that a state being well run and western makes it better or more deserving of support - in fact, it’s the opposite if anything. Second, in the absence of any kind of threat to the west in many decades, serious use of force is viewed with suspicion and even hatred. The war on terror just reinforced the belief that if you feel threatened and respond with force, it’s a mistake. Third, nationalism and patriotism are viewed negatively on the left. Support for Ukraine is not processed as support for Ukrainian nationalism, but rather support for the rules based international order of “invading countries bad” (unless you’re Palestinian). That’s before bringing in the more well know frameworks of oppressor vs oppressed and brown vs white, which of everyone is now familiar with. There are more issues, but if you are an intelligent person who reads other intelligent people, nearly everyone is left wing and the left is primed to dislike Israel for substantive reasons.
Side note but you should read Tzarich Iyun if you don’t already read it.
I used to, but I stopped during Covid when they posted all these articles whining about Charedim not being hypochondriac enough.
Go back, there are new good ones.
"I won’t deny that this updated version of the Zionist message has no emotional appeal at all"
Double negative. should be just "has emotional appeal"
Thoughts on Finkelstein?
I think he is a very disturbed and narcissistic person.
I used to respect him a lot back in my leftist/third-worldist days, and to be honest, I still do. But yeah. I think his entire body of work crumbles once you understand the difference between an empirical claim and a normative claim. Finkelstein starts with a normative premise- Israel shouldn't really exist- and attempts to bolster it with a deluge of empirical claims. But that only distorts his reasoning because it's always the other way round, with normative claims being tailored to empirical reality. Israel does exist and will exist for the foreseeable future and your arguments must proceed from there, something he can't, or refuses to, grasp, which is the source of his derangement. You'd think after decades of not making a difference, there'd be some reflection, but alas.
In that respect he's not any different from the nutty revanchists that make up the bulk of the pro-pally side, but where he's different is that he's the only guy who attempts to tackle the problem in a 'realistic', sensible manner (law, stats, policy) instead of churning out terrible poetry or academic papers on settler colonialist pine trees. You can actually learn things from his books and they're well-written to boot. That's why he's the go-to expert on the issue -- much to the resentment of the very people he's tried to help.
That last part is pretty sad. The Western arab/muslim academic world hates him for his supposed 'moderation' and prior to Oct. 7 and the need for an on-hand expert, the more generic leftists had dropped him for his sensible critiques of troonery. Imagine dedicating your life to helping people only to wind up hated by them. Tragic. But he's a principled guy, which is admirable in and of itself.
How has this aged? I think it's aged better as Israel is out of the news cycle. I also think that in you will have a lot of prestigious people praising Israeli tech and so on.