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January 30, 2004
Presenting the case for Israel
Author Prof. Alan Dershowitz believes in truth and the objectivity
of facts.
WILLIAM NICHOLLS SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
The Case for Israel
By Alan Dershowitz
John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey, 2003. 264 pages. $29.95
The Case for Israel, as its title suggests, is a lawyer's
defence of Israel before the court of public opinion and, more specifically,
of liberal public opinion. Prof. Alan Dershowitz, a luminary of
the Harvard law school and himself a liberal, has a distinguished
reputation as a civil rights lawyer and human rights activist.
Why should Israel need defence, especially in that court? Forty
years ago, such a publication would have been altogether unnecessary,
for at that time Israel stood high in the esteem of the enlightened
world, as a flourishing socialist democracy, in many ways a model
state. What has changed? Not much in Israel; though it now has a
government somewhat further to the right. It is still a flourishing
democracy, the only one in the Middle East, and even today more
socialist than people realize. The change has been in opinion.
Not necessarily in order of importance, several far-reaching changes
have occurred in the climate of liberal thought. Always sympathetic
to the underdog, liberals have begun to concentrate their attention
more exclusively on "victims." Since its stunning victory
in 1967 and its much more hard-won victory in 1973 against wars
of extermination, Israel no longer looks so much like the underdog.
And it is possible to regard the Palestinians, who have suffered
more from these defeats than the Arab states that instigated the
wars, as victims. Closely related to this last point is the remarkable
success of Palestinian propaganda, which has almost completely transformed
military defeat into diplomatic victory.
How has it done this? Apart from the outstanding skills of its spokesmen,
altogether unmatched on the Israeli side, it has done it by deliberately
invoking the concepts of liberalism, such as human rights, the suffering
of victims and so on, and conversely by representing Israel as the
aggressor, the occupier and oppressor of a Third World country and
as an apartheid state. Moreover, the influence of post-modernism
on the intellectual world has been operative here, too. The possibility
of reaching the truth by objective investigation is discounted in
favor of conflicting "narratives," each of which demands
equal respect.
In this last regard, Dershowitz is more of an old-fashioned liberal.
He believes in truth and in the objectivity of facts, by means of
which he leads the open-minded reader to a reality very different
from the picture presented by propaganda. But liberal opinion, with
few exceptions like Dershowitz, has swallowed the Palestinian line
uncritically and the media have largely adopted the code words of
its narrative, even when they do not necessarily embrace it as a
whole. It is also hard for the liberal mind, which generally assumes
that in a dispute there is right on both sides, to take in the reality
of a conflict in which one side is always the aggressor and the
other is repeatedly compelled to defend itself against the threat
of extermination, sometimes by harsh measures. The result is a climate
of opinion that takes it for granted that Israel is almost always
in the wrong and the Palestinians are in the right. Obviously, in
such a climate, the case for Israel is a very difficult one to make
successfully. But if it can be done, Dershowitz is the man to do
it.
Dershowitz proceeds in the manner of a legal brief. He examines
a number of the most prevalent accusations against Israel. For each
in turn he presents the accusation, documenting it with names and
sources, followed by the "reality," i.e. the grounds of
the defence, and then the proof of the defence. In the course of
the proof, he shows that the accusations, in the vast majority of
the cases, depend on falsehoods. Against these falsehoods, he presents
verifiable historical facts, incidentally furnishing the reader
with a condensed history of the whole conflict from pre-state days
to 2003.
Many readers will perhaps believe that they are familiar with these
facts. However, there are few who will not learn something new from
the mass of information assembled by Dershowitz and his research
team. The question arises, how can presumably fair-minded liberals
permit themselves to make use of historical and legal falsehoods?
In many cases, the accusers are academics, who are in a position
to know better. Part of the answer lies in the climate of opinion
described, which makes it almost inevitable to believe assertions
that correspond to one's own assumptions. Another possibly even
more powerful influence, as Dershowitz shows, is bigotry or, to
call it by its name, anti-Semitism.
Dershowitz writes as a liberal for other liberals, making the case
for Israel on the basis of a shared concern for liberal values such
as human rights. In order to do this, he concedes as much as possible
without prejudicing his own case and, whenever he can, he quotes
from his opponents. This is the strength of the book but also the
source of its few weaknesses. Sometimes, it seems to me, he concedes
too much. An example is where he argues that though Israelis must
not give up the right to live in Hebron, pragmatically they must
concede it in the interests of peace. Most religious Jews will think
that this is too high a price to pay for a doubtful peace. Sometimes
his natural disagreement, as a liberal, with the current Israeli
government, seems to lead him to present statements of opinion as
if they were statements of fact. But these are minor blemishes on
an excellent book that should be of great help to defenders of Israel,
especially in an academic or liberal milieu.
William Nicholls is professor emeritus of religious studies
at the University of British Columbia.
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