Cleaning the Stables

JVL Introduction

This is a review of Norman Finkelstein’s new book Gaza’s Gravediggers, published by OR books.

It engages seriously with the book and makes a number of profound criticisms.

Finkelstein, to his credit, has posted the review on his substack under the title “First Review of Gaza’s Gravediggers: (He clearly read the book so I can’t complain)”!

The reviewer finds much of enormous value in the book as an archive that will matter when conditions for accountability hopefully exist one day.

But among his criticisms he also points to what he sees as a fundamental contradiction, which is not Finkelstein’s alone:

“It reads as though the human rights bodies and the courts could have stopped the thing, if only they had applied their own procedures with sufficient rigour and courage. Behind every chapter sits a harder question he does not quite ask. Were these institutions ever designed to constrain a genocide backed by the United States?…

and, even more explicitly

“The most serious responses the left has produced to Gaza have taken the form of the legal brief, the commission report, the forensic monograph, and now this book, all of them addressed, explicitly or not, to institutions the same documents prove cannot act (emphasis added).”

This article was originally published by Anti-Capitalist Musings on Tue 9 Jun 2026. Read the original here.