What did it call for? It called for no further investments in Israeli industries. What are Israel’s main industries? It’s not Jaffa oranges, it’s high tech, life saving medical equipment like kidney dialysis machines. Israel per capita saves more lives than any other country in the world. I said cutting off this industry was immoral, so I challenged one of the leading pro-divestment professors at one of the Harvard colleges to debate me in front of his students. I challenged him to debate the morality of signing the petition to divest from Israel but not North Korea, not Cuba, not China, not Libya, not Iraq in those days, not the Sudan – only Israel.
This was a man who taught the Christian approaches to the Old Testament. He said to me, “Professor Dershowitz, my knowledge of the Middle East ended with the death of Moses.” I invited those students to see me, watch me, debate him or a surrogate. When nobody showed to take his position, I set the petition on a chair as a token surrogate and we had a dialogue. Many of the students who attended were not Jews and held no firm views of Israel. They all came up to me afterward and said the same three words: “We didn’t know!”
“We didn’t know Israel first offered a two state solution, a Palestinian state, but the Arabs rejected it!”
“We didn’t know that in 1967 Israel accepted Resolution 242, in which the United Nations called for the return of territories captured in exchange for full peace and secure boundaries.”
“We didn’t know it was the Arab states that rejected it,” saying “No peace, no recognition, no negotiations.”
These Harvard students didn’t know that in the years 2000 and 2001 Ehud Barak, along with President Bill Clinton, had initially offered the Palestinians everything they were asking for – a state made up of 97 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, a capital in Jerusalem, control of East Jerusalem, control of the Temple Mount, 30 billion dollars in a compensation package, and symbolic return of several thousand refugees. Instead of accepting it or coming back to the negotiating table, Arafat walked away and started the intifada and all the violence.
“We didn’t know that Prince Bandar at Taba called Arafat’s rejection of the offer a crime against the Palestinian people and against all the people of the region.”
The students just didn’t know.
I came away with a different view from that of my friend Natan Sharansky. He came away with a sense of hopelessness. When he toured American campuses, he believed that America was becoming like France. I came away with a very different, optimistic view. To be sure, 15 to 20 percent of students on college campuses – perhaps more at Berkeley, Michigan, or Rutgers, fewer at Harvard and Yale — you can’t argue with them. It’s like putting a dollar in the soda machine and the soda doesn’t come out and neither does your dollar. You just can’t argue with them. You want to kick the machine but you can’t do that.
Look, I know there are people outside claiming they are Jews for Palestine. I suspect many of you in the auditorium are Jews for Palestine. We favored a Palestinian state in ’37, in ’47, and we favored Resolution 242. Many offers of statehood were made by Ehud Barak. It was not we who turned them down. It was Yasir Arafat. It’s not we who stole money from the Palestinian people, not we who turn Palestinian children into suicide bombers. Yasir Arafat’s primary victims have been the Palestinian people. He has stolen his people’s lives from them.
