Dershowitz V. Dershowitz

Undoubtedly Alan Dershowitz’s new book The Case for Israel deserves the praise it’s been getting. In it Dershowitz draws on his knowledge of international law, advocate’s reasoning skills, and passion for justice to refute all the standard lies and distortions about Israel that have been repeated so often by the Arab world and the liberal media that they now have the status of facts in Europe and much of America.

The book could be even stronger, though, if Dershowitz himself didn’t suffer some lapses in the direction of moral equivalency and mushy thinking. In the Introduction he asserts that “I make the case for Israel based on liberal and civil libertarian considerations.” But in fact he makes that case—trenchantly and powerfully—based on arguments that are now used almost solely by conservatives. It’s when he shows a lingering loyalty to liberal shibboleths that he unfortunately weakens his otherwise incisive presentation.

These days you don’t see many liberals, for instance, exposing the evil fraud of the “Palestinian refugee problem”; or pointing out that a Palestinian state, known as Jordan, already exists; or demolishing the foul notion of a “cycle of violence” and of moral equivalency between terrorism and self-defense against terrorism; or defending targeted assassination as entirely legal and justified—yet Dershowitz, a self-professed liberal, does all those things in this book. And these days liberals who can still be considered sympathetic to Israel generally accept the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was born and evolved in a sort of symmetry, that the sides have contending, equally valid “narratives” that need to be bridged by understanding. Yet Dershowitz shows convincingly that whereas the Zionist movement acted according to moral principles from its inception in the early 1880s—legally purchasing land from its owners without displacing anyone, developing its communities peacefully and productively, respecting others’ rights and claims and accepting compromises when they were proposed—the Palestinian and Arab side’s rejection of the idea that Jews could establish autonomous communities in Palestine was generally violent and total.

All the more’s the pity, then, that Dershowitz sometimes forgets his usual clarity and reverts to liberal notions that constitute a diplomatic, political, security, and even existential liability to Israel—most notably his advocacy of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To be sure, these days that “solution” is not favored only by liberals. But in propounding it, Dershowitz himself lapses into moral-equivalency fallacies:

"The Arab and Muslim nations of the world must . . . come to accept not only Israel’s continued existence as a fact but also its right to exist as a Jewish state in safety and security. The threats of genocide and politicide that are continually made in many quarters must end once and for all. . . . Israel, in turn, must give up any claim, as it offered to do at Camp David and Taba in 2000, over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, subject only to the kind of small territorial adjustments contemplated by U.N. Resolution 242 to assure its security.

. . . Palestinian teachers must stop teaching their children to hate Jews and Israelis, must stop publishing maps that eliminate Israel . . . . Israeli leaders must stop encouraging settlements and must discourage those who harbor the illusion of a greater Israel that includes large portions of Judea and Samaria."

Apart from the unfortunate symmetry between calls for genocide, or teaching children racist hatred, and the belief that Israel should be expanded from a width of nine miles to forty miles (taking into account—as Dershowitz himself acknowledges!—that this would not render anyone stateless, since a Palestinian state already exists in Jordan), the problem here is that for a Palestinian state west of the Jordan, backed by the entire Arab and much of the Muslim world, not to endanger Israel would require a situation in the Middle East of almost chiliastic amity, and that “small territorial adjustments” would hardly suffice to obviate such a danger. In the real world, however, eager politicians like, for instance, Shimon Peres and Bill Clinton (and arguably, George W. Bush and even Ariel Sharon as well) are likely to jump at such alluring symmetrical solutions without waiting for all of Dershowitz’s “musts” to materialize. It already happened in the 1990s, and as a result Israel is a beleaguered, endangered country that is paying a terrible price in blood.

In another place Dershowitz admits that “I . . . cannot ignore the realistic possibility that [a Palestinian] state might well continue to support, encourage, or at the very least tolerate continuing terrorism against Israeli civilians in an effort, futile as it might be, to make the Israelis give up and abandon their hard-earned state.” But as a remedy he suggests something even less reassuring than “small territorial adjustments,” namely: “concrete guarantees from the United States and the international community.” It is preposterous to suggest that Israel could forfeit its security and defensibility for promises from outside parties—even the United States, which, after all, abandoned South Vietnam to its enemy lock, stock, and barrel—that do not have an existential stake in what happens in our niche of the world.

In light of all this, it is not surprising that Dershowitz, for all his realism, respect for facts, and fervent concern for Israel, is still too attached to liberalism himself to be able to recognize how hostile and harmful to Israel it has become. In a telling passage, he explains the “irrational hatred directed so often at Israel” in terms of lingering antisemitism, the Palestinian movement’s success in demonizing the Jewish state, and the tendency of Israeli internal critics to broadcast their complaints to the world community. No doubt accurate, as far as it goes—but conspicuously lacking from the list is the systematic anti-Israel defamation perpetrated by the mainstream, liberal U.S. and European media. It is easy for an ordinary person, with no special knowledge of the Middle East, to develop powerful animosities toward Israel when he sees it constantly portrayed as a brutal oppressor of a desperate, indigent, innocent Third World people—quite without being antisemitic to begin with.

Although Dershowitz does in some places refer to anti-Israel attitudes among “progressive intellectual communities” and in the “U.S. academic and religious left,” elsewhere he confesses that “I cannot for the life of me understand why peace-loving people committed to equality and self-determination should favor the side that rejects the values they hold dear and oppose the side that promotes these values.” Well, he should consider the fact that the people he’s describing sound suspiciously like liberals—people who for a few decades have been showing a strange tendency to blame the democratic side in conflicts with terrorist or totalitarian forces, and who, by and large, decidedly do not behave like Alan Dershowitz, who not only writes books and articles but travels all over the world passionately defending a democracy against a sea of lies and malice.

David is a writer and translator living in Jerusalem who has published recently in FrontPageMagazine.com, the Jerusalem Post, IsraelInsider.com, IsraelNationalNews.com, and the Jewish Press. He can be reached at: pdavidh2001@yahoo.com

Yes, here's a link to a showdown between Dershowitz and Finkelstein. Here's an excerpt:

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I appreciate Alan Dershowitz's seriousness at least in these remarks. I have no intention whatsoever of getting involved in an ad hominem debate with Mr. Dershowitz. I'm interesting in the facts. I was asked to come in and discuss his new book. I went home, purchased one copy, in fact I purchased two copies. I read the book very carefully. I did what someone serious does with a book. I read the text, I went through the footnotes. I went through it very carefully. There's only one conclusion one can reach having read the book. This is a scholarly judgment, not an ad hominem attack. Mr. Dershowitz has concocted a fraud. In fact Mr. Dershowitz has concocted a fraud which, amazingly, in large parts, he plagiarized from another fraud. I found that pretty shocking, shocking coming from a Harvard professor. I find it shocking coming from any professor.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: We have to cut off I just want to warn everybody here that although I'm not a litigious person when you make allegations . . .

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I'm proceeded to . . .

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: When you make allegations of plagiarism that's a . . . It has great legal implications. And I can't obviously sit quietly by and . . .

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I agree. Well that's -- Let's look at the evidence.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: . . . of plagiarism . . .

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Let's look at the evidence. In the first two chapters of your book you extensively reproduce all of Joan Peters' pages in her book. I read it carefully. In 1984 . . .

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Show me one sentence.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I am going to show you I think I have . . .I made available the charts to you.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: You've shown me nothing. Let's start with that. That's a categorical lie. What you're hearing now on radio is a claim that Mr. Finkelstein made available to me certain charts. That is a lie.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Mr. Dershowitz, I think you had about five minutes' time I wasn't looking at the clock. If we're going to have a civil debate you're going to have to remain . . .

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: It's not going to be about me, let me be very clear about that.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I have no interest in you, Mr. Dershowitz. None at all. I'm interested in the scholarship, I'm interested in the facts, I'm interested in your book. In 1984 one Joan Peters published a book called From Time Immemorial, the book was universally recognized by serious scholars to be a fraud. Without wanting to toot my own horn I'm widely recognized as the person who exposed the fraud. I know that book inside out. I read it at least four times, I went through all 1854 footnotes. I started to read your book, Mr. Dershowitz, I then came to chapter one footnotes 10, footnote 11, footnote 12, footnote 13, footnote 14, footnote 15, footnote 16, all of the quotes are from Joan Peters. They're so from Joan Peters that you have a long quote here from Mark Twain on pages 23 to 24. I turned to Joan Peters page 159 to 60, identical quote from Twain with the ellipses in the . . .

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Is the Twain quote wrong?

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: . . . with the ellipses . . . let me finish sir. They're in the same places. The identical quote from Twain with the ellipses in the same places.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: It's been quoted, as you know.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Mr. Dershowitz, I . . .

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: What's your point?

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Let me finish . . .

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: I would ask you a question. Is it a direct quote? Is it an accurate quote of Twain? Did Twain say . . .

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Dershowitz the way we can have a civilized discussion here is that each person will get a chance to make their point and won't be cut off.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: You have a nearly full page quote from one William Young, a British consul from May 1839.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Is it an accurate quote?

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I'm going to finish, sir. On page 18 of your book. I turn to Joan Peters, page 184, the identical quote with the ellipses I'm holding it up for the camera perhaps they can see this is the length of the quote.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Is it an accurate quote?

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: It's in the identical place. Last point. I'm not going to go through chapter two where there are 29 plagiarisms from Joan Peters.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: To be very clear, it's not plagiarism to quote Mark Twain correctly.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Except that you cite Mark Twain not Joan Peters. I'm a professor, sir. I know what plagiarism is.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: And plagiarism is . . . What is your definition of plagiarism?

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: We're not going to get involved in that now.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: You're using a word you're not going to tell us what you mean by it?

- end of excerpt

By the way, I've read hundreds of books on the Middle East and the Israel/Palestinian issue, and I've seen the Twain quote in 99% of them, with authors from Friedman to Netanyahu to La Guardia.

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