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 book’s Introduction he assertsI 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.
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 1880’s – 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 1990’s 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 anti-Semitism 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 anti-Semitic 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.
Advertisement