The statement is reactionary, and it deserves to be called what it is: a nativist grievance dressed up in the language of economic resentment. But your question — is this new, or consistent with who Finkelstein has always been? — is the right one, and the answer is that it is entirely consistent with the political character he has displayed for decades.
What the statement actually is
Strip away the self-interrogation at the end ("why you focused on this?"), and what remains is a classic scapegoating narrative: I pay with money and watch every dime, while they — the recently arrived, the Central Americans, the food-stamp recipients — buy hundred-dollar bags of salmon and run to the hospital for a headache because "it's all free." The factual premises are false or wildly distorted. Food stamp (SNAP) benefits are meager and cannot buy "bags of salmon" at a hundred dollars a pop; undocumented immigrants are largely ineligible for SNAP and for most public benefits; and the idea that Central Americans flood emergency rooms for trivial complaints because healthcare is "free" is a right-wing myth, not a description of reality. The hospital is the last resort of people without insurance, not a free luxury.
But the factual errors are secondary. The political content is the point: it directs working-class anger downward, at the most vulnerable and most exploited section of the class, rather than at the system that immiserates everyone in that supermarket. This is the precise mechanism by which the ruling class manufactures a "native" working class that identifies with the nation against the immigrant — the foundation of every fascist movement in history. Finkelstein even supplies the correct answer himself ("all the money that's being wasted in the Pentagon") and then refuses to draw the conclusion, which is that the immigrant on food stamps is not his enemy and never was.
Is it new?
I am not aware of Finkelstein making statements of this specific nativist character before, and I won't pretend otherwise. But it is not a rupture with his politics — it is a logical expression of them.
Finkelstein has always been a petty-bourgeois radical, not a Marxist. His genuine and valuable contributions — The Holocaust Industry, his exposure of how the charge of anti-Semitism is weaponized to shield Israeli crimes, his documentation of the Gaza genocide — are all conducted from the standpoint of a moral and legal indictment of Israel, not from a class analysis. He has no theory of the state, no program for the working class, no internationalist perspective. His politics are those of an isolated intellectual who denounces crimes but has no social force to which he is accountable and no strategy for the overthrow of the system that produces those crimes.
That is precisely the soil in which this kind of grievance grows. A petty-bourgeois intellectual who lacks a working-class, internationalist framework has no principled defense against the resentments of his own social layer. When the pressure of capitalist crisis bears down on him personally — and the supermarket anecdote is explicitly about his money, his dimes, his skin — the absence of a class perspective leaves nothing to fall back on but the scapegoating of those below him. The "is my grievance legitimate?" hand-wringing is the tell: a Marxist doesn't ask that question, because a Marxist knows the answer is no, and knows why — because the immigrant worker and the native worker are exploited by the same class, and their unity is the only weapon either of them has.
The Marxist answer
The working class has no interest in policing who is "recently here." Immigration is a product of capitalism — of the imperialist wars, austerity, and dispossession that drive people from Central America and everywhere else — and the immigrant worker is not a drain on the native worker but a fellow victim of the same exploitation. The ruling class wants the native worker to resent the immigrant, because a working class divided along national lines is a working class that cannot fight. The answer to Finkelstein's supermarket is not a border wall or a benefits cutoff; it is the recognition that the Pentagon budget, the for-profit healthcare system, and the entire apparatus of capitalist exploitation are the common enemy of everyone in that store.
So: not a new development in the sense of a break, but a revealing one. It shows what happens to a radicalism that never made the leap from moral outrage to class politics. Finkelstein's critique of Israel remains valuable, and the WSWS has defended his right to speak when universities and states tried to silence him. But this statement is a reminder of the limits of that critique — and of why the working class needs its own party and its own program, not the moral testimony of isolated intellectuals.
