In an uncompromising Double Down News conversation, the political scientist and the former Labour leader argue that Gaza’s devastation cannot be separated from Western complicity, media discipline and the economic insecurity driving a new generation into political revolt
“Gaza’s gone. There’s nothing there.”
With those words, American political scientist Norman Finkelstein reduced more than two years of war, siege and mass displacement to the brutal conclusion that framed his conversation with Jeremy Corbyn. The central issue, he argued, is no longer whether Gaza can technically be reconstructed. It is whether Israel will ever permit reconstruction to take place while the Palestinian population remains on the land.
Finkelstein told the former Labour leader, now the Your Party MP for Islington North, that Gaza had been “rendered a parking lot”. Israel, he maintained, had spent two years systematically destroying the physical foundations of Palestinian life and would not now reverse course by supporting a genuine rebuilding programme. Any diplomatic proposal that assumes otherwise, he said, belongs to “fairyland”.
Corbyn’s response was equally stark. He cited an estimate of roughly ten tonnes of rubble for every person in Gaza, while Finkelstein recalled an earlier total of about 50 million tonnes and suggested that even this had been overtaken. The latest United Nations Environment Programme assessment gives an even larger figure. It reports that 78 per cent of Gaza’s estimated 250,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed, generating approximately 61 million tonnes of debris. Much of the rubble may be contaminated by asbestos, industrial waste and heavy metals, while freshwater systems, sewage infrastructure, farmland and soil have also suffered catastrophic damage.
The figures give material force to Finkelstein’s warning. Reconstruction is not simply a question of money, concrete or engineering capacity. It would require political guarantees, unrestricted humanitarian access, the removal of unexploded ordnance and contaminated debris, the rebuilding of water and sanitation networks, and, above all, recognition of the Palestinian population’s right to remain and recover. Without those guarantees, promises of rebuilding can become another way of avoiding the more immediate question of forced displacement.
For Finkelstein and Corbyn, Gaza has therefore become more than a devastated territory. It is a test of whether international law, Western diplomacy and the institutions created after the Second World War retain any restraining force when their rules collide with the strategic interests of powerful states.
Rafah and the destruction of the last refuge
Finkelstein traced the present reality back to the legal battle brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice. He recalled the successive approaches to the Court in January, February, March and May 2024, when South Africa sought provisional measures intended to protect Palestinians while its case under the Genocide Convention proceeded.
By May 2024, South Africa argued that Rafah had become the last major refuge for civilians who had already been driven south from other parts of Gaza. An Israeli offensive there, it warned, would produce further irreparable harm. On 24 May, the Court ordered Israel to halt military action in Rafah that could inflict conditions of life capable of bringing about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, in whole or in part, while also reaffirming earlier measures concerning humanitarian access and the preservation of evidence.
Finkelstein’s argument was that events after those hearings destroyed the premise that a habitable Gaza would be preserved. Rafah was attacked, while Gaza City and other areas were subjected to further devastation. From his perspective, this was not an accidental byproduct of combat but evidence of a systematic design to make normal Palestinian life impossible.
The legal distinction remains important. The ICJ’s orders were provisional and did not decide the merits of South Africa’s accusation. As of August 2026, the case remains in progress, with further written proceedings scheduled. Israel has consistently rejected the genocide allegation, arguing that it has acted in self defence against Hamas, that its military campaign targets armed groups rather than Gaza’s civilian population, and that South Africa has distorted both Israel’s intentions and its efforts to facilitate aid.
Finkelstein rejects that account. He described the prolonged assault as genocide and expressed astonishment that it had been allowed to continue in real time for two years. Even with a deeply cynical understanding of state power, he said, he had expected Western governments eventually to intervene. They did not.
That failure is at the heart of his newly published book, Gaza’s Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places. The work turns its attention away from Israeli public relations alone and towards the international officials, courts, human rights bodies, commentators and political institutions that Finkelstein accuses of diluting the evidence, weakening legal language or providing cover for the destruction.
The changing media test
The conversation also examined how television interviews and mainstream political debate have imposed a succession of what Finkelstein called “gatekeeper questions” on anyone discussing Gaza.
The first was whether a guest condemned the Hamas led attacks of 7 October 2023. When that question lost some of its power to control the conversation, he said, the approved formulation became: what was Israel supposed to do after 7 October? Later, another test emerged, requiring guests to express optimism about ceasefire or reconstruction plans before they could be admitted into the discussion at all.
Finkelstein singled out an exchange between Mehdi Hasan and Piers Morgan in which Hasan was pressed to recognise positive elements in a proposed Gaza plan. His objection was not merely to the content of the plan but to the assumption that it would be implemented. A proposal built on commitments that the stronger party has no intention of honouring, he argued, should not be treated as a serious programme simply because television presenters demand an affirmative response.
His comments were not an attempt to deny the crimes committed on 7 October. Finkelstein explicitly said that the killing of civilians was horrible and rejected claims that Israeli forces were responsible for all or most of the civilian deaths that day. On the evidence available to him, he said, such claims were not true, although he allowed that his assessment could change if new evidence emerged.
At the same time, he insisted that recognition of atrocities committed by Palestinian armed groups cannot erase the conditions that preceded them. Gaza had been subjected to blockade, confinement, repeated military assaults, mass unemployment and the denial of a viable political future. To discuss 7 October without that history, he argued, is to transform moral condemnation into a device for excluding every fact that came before the attack and every crime that followed it.
Finkelstein said the operation itself had surprised him. He pointed to the technical sophistication required to breach one of the most intensively surveilled territories in the world, despite Israel’s advanced intelligence systems and extensive network of informers. He was also struck by the scale of Israel’s security failure, which contradicted the image of near invincibility surrounding the country’s military and technological apparatus.
None of that, in his account, diminished the crimes committed against civilians. It did, however, expose the limits of a system that had presented permanent confinement as stable and manageable. By 2020, he said, Gaza had appeared so politically isolated that its people seemed condemned to disappear gradually, much as Indigenous populations had been destroyed and displaced under settler colonial expansion in North America. Corbyn’s phrase, “something’s got to give”, captured the pressure building inside a society from which every conventional avenue of change had been closed.
A prison built across generations
Corbyn recalled visiting a university in Gaza during a less violent period and meeting highly educated students who spoke eagerly about the doctorates they hoped to pursue. They had qualifications, intelligence and ambition, but almost no realistic prospect of employment. Continued study was not merely an intellectual choice. It was one of the few paths still open inside what he described as a vast open air prison.
Finkelstein argued that this description was neither new nor rhetorical. He cited a chain of historical observers who had used the language of a concentration camp when describing Gaza. Among them was Lieutenant General E. L. M. Burns, the senior United Nations official who served in the region during the 1950s and later published the memoir Between Arab and Israeli. Finkelstein also referred to US Senator Albert Gore Sr., who visited after the June 1967 war, and to Giora Eiland, the former head of Israel’s National Security Council, who described Gaza in a 2004 diplomatic discussion as a “huge concentration camp”.
The analogy is deliberately severe and remains contested, but Finkelstein’s point was historical. Gaza’s isolation did not begin in October 2023, nor even with the blockade imposed after Hamas took control of the territory. Its present population includes refugees and descendants of refugees driven from towns and villages during the creation of Israel in 1948, after which a narrow coastal enclave became a place of concentrated displacement, poverty and political abandonment.
Corbyn located that history within what he called the broader Zionist project that rose to international prominence during the First World War and is now, in his view, being driven towards a “Greater Israel” strategy under Benjamin Netanyahu. The more closely he had studied Palestine, he said, the more anger he felt at the poverty, violence and conduct of the occupying forces.
Their exchange offered little faith in a diplomatic reset led by the same powers that armed Israel, shielded it politically and declined to impose decisive consequences as Gaza was destroyed. Finkelstein’s disbelief was personal as well as political. The son of Holocaust survivors, he said he had assumed that even hypocritical governments would eventually feel compelled to stop an atrocity unfolding before a global audience. The fact that they did not has altered his understanding of how far power can proceed when international institutions refuse to enforce their own principles.
Why Gaza has mobilised a generation
The scale of global mobilisation for Palestine led Corbyn and Finkelstein into a comparison with the defining protest movements of their youth. Both had participated in opposition to the Vietnam War and apartheid South Africa, but they identified an important difference between those struggles and the movement that has emerged around Gaza.
For young Americans during Vietnam, opposition to the war carried a direct personal stake. The draft lottery could determine whether a student was sent to fight and possibly die. Finkelstein recalled the terror within his own family when his eldest brother appeared likely to be conscripted. His mother, who had lost relatives during the Holocaust, desperately sought conscientious objector status for her son because the family could not bear another loss.
The anti apartheid struggle that followed was connected to a wider era of national liberation movements, Third World solidarity and the Non Aligned Movement. Gaza, by contrast, is a tiny territory without the same global political architecture and, for most Western supporters, without an immediate personal stake.
Why, then, has it generated such intense identification?
Finkelstein’s answer was that young people see themselves in Gaza’s powerlessness. They are not comparing their own hardships with bombardment, famine or mass death. Rather, they recognise the structure of a small and apparently defenceless population being crushed by a remote, technologically advanced and politically protected juggernaut. In their own lives, that force appears as an economic system that destroys communities, removes secure employment, commercialises education and turns the possibility of an independent future into an unreachable promise.
Gaza becomes a moral and political metaphor: an extreme image of what unaccountable power can do when its victims possess no effective means of restraint. Students who face debt, precarious work and declining social mobility identify with Palestinians not because their circumstances are equivalent, but because they recognise a common experience of being told that no alternative is possible.
Corbyn agreed, describing cities across Britain and Europe in which teachers also work as cleaners, graduates combine several part time jobs, and workers move endlessly between insecure roles simply to survive. The old question, “What do you do?”, assumed that a person had a recognisable job or profession. For a generation assembling an income from shifts, contracts and platform work, the question no longer fits reality.
The collapse of the middle class promise
Finkelstein contrasted this insecurity with the United States of his youth. He recalled publisher Henry Luce’s claim that almost everyone in America was middle class or on the way there, a statement that concealed profound racial and regional poverty but also reflected a real period of prosperity and upward mobility for many families.
The excluded population was documented by social democratic writer Michael Harrington in The Other America, particularly poor white communities in Appalachia and African Americans denied access to the country’s expanding wealth. Yet for many working class families, including Jewish families emerging from New York’s immigrant neighbourhoods, education and stable employment offered a credible route into the middle class.
Finkelstein illustrated the point through James Madison High School in Brooklyn, an ordinary taxpayer funded public school whose former pupils included Bernie Sanders, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Chuck Schumer, alongside several future Nobel laureates. Friends who wanted careers in theatre or music could become a Broadway stage manager or an orchestra leader. Women in his childhood class aspired to medicine before universities had widely opened their doors to female students, and many became doctors.
The significance, he insisted, was not nostalgia for a perfect society. It was that the promise of advancement was realistic. A young person did not need to calculate every subject against a specific vacancy because work was expected to be available when education ended.
He contrasted that world with the very young campaigners who powered Zohran Mamdani’s movement in New York. When Finkelstein canvassed, he said the age gap between himself and the next oldest volunteer was roughly half a century. Middle aged and older voters might support insurgent candidates at the ballot box, but the activists doing the street work were often in their twenties.
The same divide had affected Bernie Sanders. Finkelstein noted that many baby boomers already had Medicare, had attended public universities without tuition fees and had never accumulated student debt. Appeals for universal healthcare and debt abolition therefore lacked the urgent personal meaning they carried for younger voters. In his account, the revolt associated with Sanders and Mamdani is rooted in the disappearance of guarantees that older generations once took for granted.
Education converted into job training
Corbyn and Finkelstein argued that this economic transformation has also changed the purpose of education. When tuition is expensive and secure work scarce, students understandably demand a direct correspondence between a qualification and a job. Philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology and languages are treated as indulgences because their economic return is not immediately measurable.
Corbyn said the pressure begins long before university. British pupils choosing GCSE subjects at 14 or 15 already think about vocational requirements, favouring business studies, marketing or design technology. By A level, many have moved still further away from history, modern languages and philosophy. Two decades later, some will occupy senior management or political positions without the intellectual grounding needed to understand societies beyond the narrow demands of their profession.
Finkelstein described this as the conversion of higher education into vocational training. He was careful not to dismiss the intelligence of his students, whom he called mentally nimble, but said their fundamental reading skills and capacity for sustained concentration had declined. Because he has refined and reused similar assignments across four decades of teaching, he believes he can compare performance over time. He now avoids assigning texts he doubts students can fully read, including John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, a work he has returned to repeatedly throughout his own life.
Digital media is part of the explanation. Corbyn suggested that instant search encourages headline answers rather than sustained analysis, while Finkelstein argued that constant switching between screens weakens the discipline required to read an argument from beginning to end.
Yet Finkelstein resisted a simplistic story in which smartphones alone destroyed attention. American social critics once made similar warnings about television, and studies in the 1950s and 1960s found families watching for extraordinary portions of the day. Television became a household babysitter long before social media appeared. Finkelstein abandoned his own set around 1970 because he wanted to read and work seriously; he later refused to buy a smartphone, partly because he did not trust himself to resist its pull.
The conversation briefly relaxed into jokes about pedestrians staring at their phones, oversized vehicles crowding cyclists from city streets and Amsterdam’s unforgiving bicycle lanes. The humour did not erase the underlying point. Technologies and cities are built around commercial choices, and those choices shape attention, movement and social life. What appears to be individual weakness is often a rational adaptation to an environment designed to fragment concentration and maximise consumption.
Four decades inside the documents
Finkelstein dated his own commitment to Palestine to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. The political path that led him there began in the movements against the Vietnam War and racial oppression in the United States, followed by a period as a Maoist.
He now acknowledges that he was wrong about many aspects of Maoism and had blinded himself to grave events. Even so, he continues to regard the Chinese Revolution as one of the twentieth century’s most consequential transformations because it created a unified state from a country weakened by foreign domination, warlords, poverty and famine, eventually providing the bridge to China’s position at the centre of the modern world economy.
When the socialist promise he associated with China collapsed in the late 1970s, Finkelstein became politically adrift. Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon gave him a new focus. Working among Jewish activists forced him to decide where he stood on Zionism, but he refused to adopt a position before studying the record. That research became his doctoral dissertation and then the work of his adult life.
He described himself as someone who does not abandon a cause when public attention moves elsewhere. The Vietnam War ended; the occupation of East Timor eventually ended; the wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador reached political conclusions. Palestine did not end, so neither did his engagement.
For more than four decades, he read human rights reports repeatedly, compared claims, checked footnotes and tried to identify what he regarded as deliberate misrepresentation. The work was narrow and at times mentally suffocating, but he believed its value lay precisely in the detail that others would not endure. Corbyn rejected the idea that such concentration should be dismissed as obsession, telling him that his knowledge had helped others and given a human warmth to an argument too often reduced to abstractions.
Finkelstein linked his method to John Stuart Mill’s proposition that developing one’s individuality can make a person more valuable both to themselves and to the wider world. His contribution, as he sees it, was not simply possessing unusual intelligence, but cultivating the discipline to examine the same record again and again until its evasions became visible.
A defining moral touchstone
The Double Down News discussion ranged far beyond Gaza, but its different subjects were connected by a single question: what happens when institutions stop offering people a credible future?
In Gaza, the answer has been confinement, resistance, mass violence and destruction on a scale that Finkelstein says he never believed Western powers would permit. In Britain, the United States and other wealthy societies, the consequences are incomparably less catastrophic, but the political symptoms are visible in student revolt, insecure employment, declining mobility and distrust of traditional media.
That connection helps explain why Palestine has become a defining moral touchstone for young people who did not live through Vietnam or the international campaign against apartheid. Gaza confronts them with the most extreme expression of unrestrained power, while the reaction of their own governments reveals the limits of the values they were taught to associate with democracy, human rights and international law.
Finkelstein ended by crediting independent programmes with making the old propaganda increasingly untenable. Without alternative media, he suggested, much of the truth about Gaza would have remained outside the permitted boundaries of public debate. His endorsement of Double Down News was therefore more than a routine appeal for subscriptions. It reflected his belief that the struggle over Gaza is also a struggle over who is allowed to describe reality, which evidence receives attention and whether political language clarifies destruction or conceals it.
For Corbyn, the response begins with sustained political organisation of the kind he has pursued for more than four decades. For Finkelstein, it begins inside the documents, where claims must be tested against evidence and no institution should be protected from scrutiny by its prestige.
Their shared conclusion was bleak, but not passive. Gaza’s physical landscape may have been shattered, and its recovery may be obstructed by the same forces that enabled its destruction, yet the attempt to erase a place is not the same as erasing its people, its history or the international movement that has formed around them. The question now is whether that movement can convert moral outrage into sufficient political power to secure Palestinian survival, return and reconstruction.
