# Posted 7:26 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

DERSHOWITZ SLIPS UP: After reading the introduction to The Case for Israel, I developed a first impression of Alan Dershowitz as bombastic but not unserious. Critics warned me that Dershowitz was an extremist and a fool, or as one comment put it:

Mr. Dershowitz has proven himself to be so blinded by his bias towards Israel that to even make mention of him in an academic discussion induces mirth.

I'm not sure if that says more about Dershowitz or more about the academy, but anyhow, my opinion of Dershowitz's book has diminished considerably after reading the first hundred pages, which cover Israeli/Palestinian history from the Jewish migration of the late 19th century to the first Arab-Israeli war of 1947-1949.

The most important source Dershowitz relies on is Benny Morris' Righteous Victims, published in 1999. In fact, Dershowitz relies on Morris so heavily that The Case for Israel almost becomes a summary of Righteous Victims, or perhaps a commentary on Morris' book informed by supplementary material.

Which is not to say that Morris is a bad source. In fact, he tends to be a good one because his he still has the grudging respect of the academic left while his politics are considerably to their right. The problem is when Dershowitz cites Morris selectively in a way that downplays Israeli brutality while emphasizing that of the Palestinian Arabs.

The most important case in point is Dershowitz's chapter on the origins of the Palestinian refugee crisis, the subject of Morris' best-known research. Accordingly, 21 of 49 footnotes cites Morris' work.

The first tip-off that Dershowitz has read Morris selectively is his assertion that:

While the Arab armies tried to kill Jewish civilians and did in fact massacre many who tried to escape, the Israeli army allowed Arab civilians to flee to Arab-controlled areas. (p.79)

Yet as I summarized in a recent post about Morris' work, he believes that (especially) after the Arab invasion of Israel in May 1948, the Israeli army mounted a very aggressive effort to force Palestinians out of their homes, often by destroying their villages or worse. If Dershowitz had brought this up later in the chapter, his initial phrasing might not be a problem. But no discussion of the expulsions is forthcoming.

Among the best known of those expulsions involved the exodus of 60,000 Arabs from Lydda and Ramle. FYI, at the beginning of each chapter of The Case for Israel, Dershowitz includes a series of topical quotations from Israel's harshest critics which he intends to debunk. In his chapter on the refugee problem, he includes a quote from Edward Said who refers to the explusion from Lydda and Ramle. Yet Dershowitz never confirms that this expulsion was real, instead leaving the casual reader to assume that this incident was just one more fabrication invented by Israel's critics.

Another serious omission by Dershowitz concerns the terrorist activities of hardline Jewish organizations such as the Irgun and Lehi (both of whose leaders would later serve as Prime Minister of the Jewish state). According to Morris, Lehi and the Irgun were responsible for scores of attacks on civilian targets, which helped persuade countless Arabs to take flight as Israeli forces marched forward. (Certain Haganah attacks also straddled the line between military operations and terorrism.)

One Jewish atrocity that Dershowitz does mention is the massacre at Deir Yassin, perpetrated by Lehi and Irgun forces. Dershowitz calls it a massacre, but his account is so convoluted and fills with caveats, you would never know, as Morris writes, that:

Whole families were riddled with bullets and grenade fragments and buried and buried when houses were blown up on top of them.

That quotation is taken from page 208 of Righteous Vicitms, the same page Dershowitz relies on for his account of Deir Yassin. Not surprisingly, Dershowitz is much more lucid in his description of the retaliation for Deir Yassin in which Arab militiamen surrounded a Jewish convoy, fought off a handful of defenders, then slaughtered seventy civilian passengers, many of whom the militiamen burned alive in the buses where they were trapped.

Dershowitz is also very lucid in his description of other Arab atrocities as well taking special care to note all of those Arab leaders who called for the extermination of the Jewish race after the invasion of the Jewish state. For good reason, Dershowitz lavishes attention on Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and official head of the Palestinian community (appointed by the British).

Citing Morris, Dershowitz recounts that Husseini received direct material support from Himmler's SS and that Adolf Eichmann actually visited Husseini in Palestine. Hussieni then spent most of the war in Berlin, where he broadcast viciously anti-Semitic propaganda on Berlin Radio. Drawing on Morris again, Dershowitz also recounts that Husseini personally intervened with Eichmann on one occasion after discovering that Hungarian authorities were going to allow thousands of Jewish children to escape from the Nazis. Eichmann then saw to it that those children were sent to the death camps.

Finally, Dershowitz takes care to mention Yasser Arafat's fondness for Husseini, whom he described as his "hero" as recently as 2002. (pp.53-62)

If Dershowitz had been able to step out of his prosecutorial mindset, he might have protected his credibility by quoting Morris fairly and letting the evidence speak for itself. If Morris' history is accurate, then no friend of Israel should be concerned about Palestinians invoking the events of the 1940s to demonstrate their innocence.

Labels: Alan Dershowitz, Benny Morris, Israel, Palestinians

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# Posted 7:11 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

THE CASE FOR (AND AGAINST) ISRAEL: I have decided to lay my opinions on the table and subject them to critical scrutiny. I am firmly pro-Israel, but have come to recognize that my cursory knowledge of the situation on the ground prevents me from engaging at a higher level in the ongoing debate about Israel and the Palestinians. For challenging me to rise that higher level, the credit goes to my colleague P, who has a remarkable amount of knowledge about this subject at her fingertips.

As I mentioned last week, one priority of mine is to read up on the origins of the Palestinian refugee crisis. However, my attention has been diverted from that subject by two passionately argued books about the conflict. The first is Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel. The second is Norman Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah, which is devoted in no small part to refuting Dershowitz.

This post will focus on the introduction to Finkelstein's book. Later, I will turn to Dershowitz. But for the moment, I would like to point out two critical similarities between the two authors and their books. The first is that both men are unequivocally committed to the peace process and to the two-state solution to the ongoing conflict. That is good news. The second similarity is that both men have total, unflinching confidence in their diametrically opposed evaluations of the facts on the ground. This is a problem.

In general, there seems to be a consensus that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is extraordinarily complicated. Men and women on both sides of the line have suffered greatly at the hands of the other. Men and women on both sides make powerful arguments for the justice of their cause. But Finkelstein will have none of it. He writes on the second page of his book that:

Looking back after two decades of study and reflection, I am struck most by how uncomplicated the Israel-Palestine conflict is. There is no longer much contention among scholars on the historical record... [emphasis in original]

My sense is that scholars like Efraim Karsh, Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe are still at each other's figurative throats, but that is a secondary point for the moment. The bigger question is this one:

Yet if, as I've suggested, broad agreement has been reached on the factual record, an obvious anomaly arises: what accounts for the impassioned controversy that still swirls around the Israel-Palestine conflict? To my mind, explaining this apparent paradox requires, first of all, that a fundamental distinction be made between those controversies that are real and those that are contrived.

So which are real and which are contrived? (pp.6-7)

Most of the controversy surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict is, in my view, contrived. The purpose of contriving such controversy is transparently political: to deflect attention from, or distort, the actual documentary record. One can speak of, basically, three sources of artificial disagreement: (1) mystification of the conflict's roots, (2) invocation of anti-Semitism and The Holocaust, and (3) on a different plane, the vast proliferation of sheer fraud on the subject.

These issues deserve attention, but my mind immediately raced ahead to a subject that seemed to be the cause of a very real controversy: suicide bombing. As a supporter of Israel, I stand by the position that the intentional and unrepentant murder of civilians is morally depraved and absolutely never justifiable. But I don't dismiss out of hand as depraved or dishonest the argument that such atrocities cannot be considered apart from questionable Israeli methods that also result in great suffering.

The issue here is morality, not facts. Even if both sides were to agree on the facts, their moral significance would remain the subject of debate. Yet Finkelstein explicitly refuses to acknowledge that supporters of Israel even have a legitimate point to make about Palestinian atrocities. He writes that:

In the course of resisting European encroachment, Native Americans committed many horrendous crimes. But to understand why doesn't require probing the defects of their character or civilization. Criticizing the practice, in government documents, of reciting Native American "atrocities," Helen Hunt Jackson, a principled defender of Native Americans writing in the late 19th century, observed: "[T]he Indians who committed these 'atrocities' were simply ejecting by force, and, in the contests arising from this forcible ejectment, killing men who had usurped and stolen their lands...What would a community of white men, situated precisely as these Cherokees were, have done?"

To apprehend the motive behind Palestinian "atrocities", this ordinary human capacity for empathy would also seem to suffice. (p.14)

This kind of logic strikes me as extremely dangerous. Although Finkelstein doesn't explicitly condone suicide bombing, he tells us that it is pointless to condemn such acts, because the Palestinian cause is fundamentally justified. After all, what would a community of white men, situated precisely as these Palestinians were, have done?

Although Finkelstein seems to endorse the concepts of international law and human rights, his position on Palestinian "atrocities" is equivalent to an unmitigated assertion that those with a just cause (according to what standard?) can disregard both what is legal and what is right. In essence, Finkelstein wants to have it both ways. He wants to condemn Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights but write off Palestinian violations as a natural response to an unpleasant situation. As someone who believes that we are all responsible for the morality of our behavior, especially in matters of life and death, I disagree with Finkelstein fundamentally.

Perhaps the more immediate question is whether Finkelstein would consider my disagreement to be legitimate, or whether he would dismiss it as a contrived position designed to distort the factual record. While respecting the right of others to disagree with my argument, I would be extraordinarily suspicious of someone who sought to triviliaze my point by insisting that I have dark, ulterior motives.

I must admit that after reading only twenty pages of Finkelstein's book, I am approaching the conclusion that its author has been so consumed by partisanship that few of its contents can be trusted without extensive verification. But I will finish the book. Finkelstein is cited so often by advocates of the Palestinian cause, that I think it is simply necessary to read his work in order to enter the debate.

More importantly, my experience indicates that even the most committed partisans often have a fair amount of legitimate criticism to offer. To be continued...

Labels: Alan Dershowitz, Israel, Norman Finkelstein, Palestinians

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