Alan Dershowitz

The other day at Brandeis, Alan Dershowitz, responding to Jimmy Carter, took a shot at NYU's Tony Judt because of Judt's famous call (in the New York Review of Books) to give up on the idea of a Jewish state.

"Tony Judt is in favor of the complete dissolution of the state of Israel... the total dissolution of the state of Israel," said Dershowitz.

Two comments. First, that Dershowitz should bring this up shows that those who favor a single state in Palestine have gotten the issue on the agenda. Dershowitz's line is is now the talking point. Leon Wieseltier made a similar statement about Judt, with a similarly-angry tone, in the New Republic a few weeks back.

Second, Dershowitz's characterization doesn't seem fair to me; he is using eliminationist rhetoric to suggest that Judt is a kind of Nazi or antisemite, who would sweep Jews into the sea. In fact, if you read Judt's groundbreaking essay, you understand that his position is being caricatured. Yes, Dershowitz is right; Judt's vision would result in the end of the Jewish state. But his tone is pained, realistic, and even idealistic: it is a recovery of the old Judah Magnes/Elmer Berger/Anglo-American Inquiry Commission position that partition is racialist, that Arab and Jew should learn to live together in historic Palestine—because god knows, they haven't done a very good job of living with partition.  read more »

For another point of view on this, read Elik Alhanan's two-state position (near the end of this long post). Meantime, below is an excerpt of Judt's piece:

I've just gotten a copy of a 79-page paper called "Setting the Record Straight: A Response to Critics of 'The Israel Lobby'" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The scholars began circulating the rebuttal privately in December but have not published it on-line, I gather, because they are working on a book about the lobby and are trying to keep some of their powder dry till publication. Nonetheless, the paper is getting around. I find it exciting, and will be referring to it in days to come.

On first reading, my chief response is (surprise) positive: the paper humanizes Walt and Mearsheimer, the voice is warmer and more intimate than their stunning original of last March. You have the feeling here of two minds struggling through a difficult subject. For instance, the authors say that it was former Harvard Dean Walt's decision—not Harvard's—to remove the Harvard logo from the on-line Kennedy School version of the original after newspapers began referring to the paper as "the Harvard study," but that given the great symbolism attached to this gesture, it was a mistake, and illustrates the saying, no good deed goes unpunished.

The sense of intellectual engagement here is thrilling. The tone is, Here is what our critics have said, here's our response. W&M itemize a wide range of critical arguments, and detail them, including the Forward's assertion, "In Dark Times, Blame the Jews." And while they don't give an inch, really, the respectful debate they are pursuing ennobles them and honors the contributions of Benny Morris and even Alan Dershowitz—far more than Dershowitz, who slimed these guys, deserves. For instance, there is a shocking quote in here from Dershowitz on MS/NBC, saying that W&M "copied" their words from neo-Nazi websites. Thus vilified, some people would threaten to sue. These scholars take the argument on calmly. God bless America.

Something else that humanizes the document is the section at the end titled, "Our Mistakes." O.K., a number of these are penny-ante, still the tone is humbling. "...there are places where our choice of words could have been clearer or more nuanced... although we went to some lengths to demonstrate that we harbor no animus towards Israel or its more ardent defenders in America, it is possible that some of our discussion did not make this point as forcefully as would have liked. First and foremost, we regret having capitalized the word 'Lobby' in our original article..." Etc.

The paper concludes with a moving statement about the controversy. The ferocity of the attacks "offers additional evidence of he lobby's efforts to create a climate that discourages questioning of its actions, Israeli policies, or the U.S.-Israeli relationship. This situation is not healthy for American democracy." Hear, hear.

But now the anger over their publication seems to be dissipating, and what they had hoped for is coming to pass: a discussion of the ideas on their merits. Myself, the March day that a friend first emailed me W&M's paper and I read it through at my desk with my eyelids glued open was a great day. I had long felt constrained by the lobby, it had limited my work and freedom. W&M had a liberating effect.

M.J. Rosenberg has a terrific piece on TPM about his alma mater Brandeis saying that Jimmy Carter can only speak there if he's balanced by Alan Dershowitz.

It is with real pain that I note that Brandeis is yielding to what amounts to an academic boycott of a former President for criticizing Israel.... We look like mini-Joe McCarthys and we are all being hurt by this...

Israelis themselves just laugh. How is it, they ask, that they can debate Israel-Palestine with absolute freedom but we Americans are afraid to...

Invite Carter to speak. Alone. Like any other speaker. Your students can handle it. Trust me. Trust them.

The Boston Herald reports that the Dershowitz act was dreamed up by Brandeis trustee Stuart Eizenstat, a former Carter adviser, along with Brandeis Prez Jehuda Reinharz. Just like when the New York Theatre Workshop decided it could only put on Rachel Corrie's show last spring if it was suitably "contextualized," with pro-Israel voices. These paroxysms speak to the same lesson: the Israel lobby isn't a control room in Washington, it's a general climate of fear about Israel's future that clouds the minds of goodthinking liberals who are empowered—with the ability to shut off debate. Even a former president lacks standing.

But watch out. The success of Carter's book, the contract to Walt/Mearsheimer, the Corrie run at the Minetta Lane, the Iraq Study Group's hail Mary to Syria—the world is changing.

I was reading Alan Dershowitz's autobiography, Chutzpah, the other night when I came to some lines on page 16 that I found shocking:

My generaton of Jews was too young to fight against Nazism or for Israeli independence, too American to make aliyah (emigrate to Israel), too comfortable to put our bodies on the line for anything Jewish. Instead, we observed, contributed... We became part of what is perhaps the most effective lobbying and fund-raising effort in the history of democracy. [my emphasis]

I say shocking because when Walt and Mearsheimer published their bombshell paper on the power of the Israel lobby in March, the Harvard Law Professor was their leading attacker. He said the scholars had "destroyed their professional reputations" (a disgraceful statement that Zbig Brzezinski would appear to include when he talks in Foreign Policy of "self-demeaning" attacks by critics of Walt and Mearsheimer) and three weeks after their paper was published, rushed a response onto Harvard's Kennedy School website, saying that speed was "essential" "because of the attention the original paper has received."

In fairness to Dershowitz, a good part of his rebuttal focuses on what he regards as bad research methods by Walt and Mearsheimer and their allegedly false view of Israeli history, which leads him to question their motives and imply that they are antisemitic. "I challenge Mearsheimer and Walt to look me in the eye and tell me that because I am a proud Jew and a critical supporter of Israel, I am disloyal to my country," the rebuttal ends throbbingly.

But in criticism of Dershowitz, a lot of his rebuttal rejects the idea of a vaunted Israel lobby. "The so-called lobby," he calls it, and asks, contemptuously, "Who belongs to 'the Lobby?'" He says that "there are many lobbies that support diverse approaches to the Arab-Israeli conflict," and generally, "thousands of other groups that maintain powerful lobbies in Washington." Yes, AIPAC "to its credit, has been an influential lobby." But he presents AIPAC as the Israel lobby. Everyone else who supports Israel in government and the press and thinktanks does so because they all independently believe that Israel and the U.S. share interests.

Oh, and also: "the most powerful lobby is AARP." But I guess it's not "perhaps the most effective lobbying and fund-raising effort in the history of democracy".

I've two responses to Dershowitz's hypocrisy. The first is that he's an advocate, and a great one, a verbal swordsman. He intimidates people (I remember talking to a pro-Palestinian professor of the Classics not long ago who begged me not to use his name, lest Dersh go after him), but he's not reflective. The guy was a high school and college debating star in Brooklyn; he's still that, rushing a thrown-together argument to the public within days of Walt and Mearsheimer's 18-months-long-prepared article, so he can do his flamenco in their spotlight. I have that disconnect with Dersh one has with many lawyers: The contradiction in his statements makes me wonder what he really thinks when he's not making a heated righteous argument. (Apropos of that lack of subtlety, I'd note that elsewhere in his book, he states that two uncles of his did emigrate to Israel. Yet he says his generation was too American to do so. It's not thought-through.)

Was he really trying to get people to the truth about the Israel lobby, an important issue? Or was he venting his anger?

That's my second point about Dershowitz; I think anger fed his attack on Walt and Mearsheimer. Read Chutzpah (I'm on page 100 or so now) and you see how much his views were shaped by the antisemitic discrimination he experienced on leaving the Brooklyn nest in the late 50s. Notwithstanding his great grades at Yale Law School, Dershowitz was rejected by white-shoe law firms in New York again and again, including Cravath and Paul, Weiss (the latter wouldn't accommodate his Sabbath-observance). Despite his subsequent achievements, in 1991, when he wrote the book, he was still extremely angry at all the Harvard deans and presidents who thru the 20th century rationalized discrimination against Jews. Again and again he calls these liberal leaders "bigoted." "A pack of dishonest bigots unworthy of respect or emulation... awful men whose names are memorialized [on buildings]..." Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell "should be honored by no one other than the Ku Klux Klan." He insists that President Derek Bok (soon-to-be-interim President again) sees Dershowitz as a "shtetl Yid" whose "breath smells of herring."

Later in the book he says that Shaw, Mencken, Henry Adams, Dreiser, and T.S. Eliot suffered "a disease of the soul": antisemitism, which can only be explained by the study of "abnormal psychology."

This is high-school rhetoric. It's the same moral vehemence that would erase all Jefferson's or Washington's achievements because they owned slaves. Grownups who study history should be a little more sophisticated. Think about it, how should people who dismissed Palestinian human rights be regarded a generation on?

When Brandeis shut down an exhibit of Palestinian art last week, the organizer promptly found a new home for it across town at MIT. Then this week a group of Brandeis faculty started a petition drive to have the exhibit brought back to Brandeis. They have gotten 90 signatures, including many Jews. I've posted it below. Yes the art was censored, but it's up again, with a ton of attention.

The support underscores something Alan Dershowitz says—that universities are hotbeds of leftwing thought. I agree. The question is why? Why are leftwing ideas that are marginalized elsewhere in the culture doing fine at universities?

I think the answer is, There's nowhere else for these ideas to go; and they are less dangerous in universities than, say, in Washington. Consider the alternatives. It's virtually impossible to be a leftwing intellectual in the Washington thinktank community: you don't get funded. Yes there's George Soros, but he's the exception that proves the rule. It's fine to be a leftleaning liberal in the Maistream Media, where everyone is a Democrat who supports abortion and has murmurous questions about Iraq; but you can't be too outspoken about it, or again you'll get marginalized. Weekly opinion magazines are also not very hospitable to lefties, and it can't be easy to be a leftwing analyst in the Executive Branch staff positions that help form policy. All those Arabists at State, for instance, keeping their heads down. Colleges are the only game in town.

It is a conservative-dominated country. Big business plays a huge role in our public life. It funds the thinktanks and the media. It funds campaigns. There are tons of privileged Americans with leftwing views, but not many places for them to actually apply their thinking. The universities are deemed harmless enough. There these thinkers will only educate young people, in places far from Washington.  read more »

The sad part for the left is that its braintrust is so unengaged in the real world. Its idea-people are alienated, and don't have a practical bone in their bodies. They get to hold forth at dinner parties.

Alan Dershowitz continues to play a shameful role, vigilante of the pro-Israel lobby, by telling the Washington Post that two leading scholars have "destroyed their professional reputations" by questioning the power of the Israel lobby over American policy-making. See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/02/AR2006040201039.html?referrer=emailarticle Dershowitz's comments are shameful because they seek to smear and intimidate anyone who has an unconventional opinion on the Middle East-- e.g., the U.S. should have a more evenhanded policy toward the Palestinians. Marvin Kalb also damages himself in this debate, by taking up the cudgels against these authors, seeking to undermine their scholarship, rather than asking, What is the truth of this bold paper? Kalb and Dershowitz are both acting out of a nervous desperation: the tide is turning. More and more Americans are beginning to question the identification of our country's interests with Israel, and demonstrating that it is not antisemitic to do so. That you can be for Israel's existence and yet demand that it change its ways (it's the occupation, stupid). The tide is turning because of a simple fact: neoconservatives, for whom Israel's security looms as large or larger than American security, played a key part in the Iraqi war party, helping to lead America into a disaster. So now you see these questions emerging everywhere: last night on C-Span, when Brian Lamb gave an audience to Pentagon analyst Karen Kwiatkowski. The truth is that Walt and Mearsheimer put their reputations on the line to change the debate. Their reputations will actually grow from that brave decision.

"Where's Giff?" was the question heard most frequently in the press section at Sunday's conference at Columbia University, elaborately titled, "The Middle East & Academic Integrity on the American Campus," which was attended by the Observer's real estate correspondent Michael Calderone.

According to the event's erroneous program, Speaker Miller was listed as a speaker set to address the conference after a video-taped lecture from Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz. As the tape ended, Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff — highly critical of President Bollinger's response — walked up to the lectern in front of about 250 attendees.

Two hours passed, and conference organizers were befuddled. According to his spokesperson, Giff was invited to the event, but never confirmed that he would speak. Around 5 p.m., Manny Behar, hired last spring as Giff's liaison to the Jewish community, read a statement on behalf of him that addressed academic freedom and a proposal for an independent investigation into anti-Semitism among the faculty signed by 35 of 51 City Council members. Here are excerpts from the statement:

"We at the City Council are very concerned about reports that that is not what is happening here at Columbia...

"But what we got back from President Bollinger was a letter that rejected our proposal for an independent investigation out of hand and that didn't even address the other issues we raised.

"We will no accept that as the final answer."

Earlier in the afternoon, Councilman David Weprin spoke to the crowd.

"Nestled in the middle of the country's largest and most diverse city—the city of New York—Columbia University has for a long time lived in fluctuating, ambivalent relation to the world outside....."  read more »

"Why, then, in this pluralistic city, flushed with so many different cultures, do we still find room for hate?"

In Search of American Jewish Culture , by Stephen J. Whitfield.  read more »