Norman Gary Finkelstein ( born December 8, 1953) is an American
political scientist,
activist, former professor, and author. His primary fields of research are the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the politics of the
Holocaust. He is a graduate of
Binghamton University and received his
Ph.D. in political science at
Princeton University. Born of Jewish parents who survived the Nazi genocide, Finkelstein has said of his parents that "they saw the world through the prism of the Nazi Holocaust. They were eternally indebted to the Soviet Union (to whom they attributed the defeat of the Nazis), and so anyone who was anti-Soviet they were extremely harsh on".
They supported the Soviet Union's approval of the creation of the State of Israel, as enunciated by
Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko, who said that Jews had earned the right to a state,
but thought that Israel had sold its soul to the West and "refused to have any truck with it".