|
|
September 10, 2010
Dershowitz to speak
Famed lawyer opens Federation campaign.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
One of the best-known criminal lawyers in the world, and certainly one of the most articulate and intelligent defenders of Israel, will be the keynote speaker at this year’s Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver campaign launch.
Prof. Alan Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, has defended clients such as Anatoly Sharansky, O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson. He has published hundreds of articles and more than two dozen fiction and non-fiction works, been awarded several honorary doctor of laws degrees and been honored by the New York Criminal Bar Association for his “outstanding contribution as a scholar and dedicated defender of human rights.” And this doesn’t even begin to document his many achievements, or his charitable work, which includes taking about half of his cases pro bono.
Dershowitz has been defending Israel’s right to exist within safe, defendable borders for decades, long before his book, The Case for Israel (John Wiley and Sons, Inc.), was published in 2003, and to this day. His latest blog posts, which can be found on his website (alandershowitz.com) and on huffingtonpost.com, are “How Goldstone is making peace more difficult” and “Three myths about the peace process.” He also writes on several other topics, including a recent article entitled “Anti-Defamation League should not oppose mosques at Ground Zero.”
On his website, Dershowitz indicates optimism that there eventually can be a peaceful two-state solution in the Middle East. However, there are significant hurdles to overcome. He writes, “extremists on both sides must give up what they each claim are their God-given or nationalistic rights. Israeli extremists must give up their claimed right to all of biblical Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), and their claimed right to maintain Jewish settlements on, or to continue the military occupation of, disputed areas that would be allocated to the Palestinian state. Palestinian extremists must give up their claimed right to all of ‘Palestine,’ including what is now Israel, as well as the alleged right of millions of descendants of those who left or were forced out of what is now Israel during the war of 1947-1949 to ‘return’ to their ‘ancestral homes’ in Israel.”
On the question of Israeli-Palestinian peace, he concludes, “The remaining disputes – and there are many – will be much easier to resolve if agreement is reached on these fundamental issues.”
Dershowitz did not seem as optimistic when he was interviewed by the Independent last week.
“The nature of the debate regarding Israel has changed dramatically over the half century in which I have participated in it,” he said. “The sides have become much more extreme. The hatred has become more irrational and the role of fact and logic are much more marginal. When I read some of the anti-Israel rhetoric, I’m reminded of that old commercial that shows a beautiful egg identified as the brain, and then a scrambled egg identified as ‘this is your brain on drugs.’ Brains often get scrambled when Israel is the focus of discussion and logical arguments have little impact.”
This is the situation despite the fact that supporters of Israel have tooled and retooled Israel advocacy messaging over the years.
“First, the defence of Israel has become far more complicated than it used to be,” explained Dershowitz. “The Israel I defended when I was a young man was the Israel of the War of Independence, the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the [1976 rescue from terrorists of more than 100 Jewish hostages from the airport in] Entebbe, and the surgical attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor. The Israel my children and grandchildren are defending is the Israel of civilian settlements, of the invasion of Lebanon, of the intifadas, of the operation in Gaza and of the raid on the flotilla. It’s much more complicated and much more challenging. Moreover, the hard left has turned stridently against Israel. And, in Europe and parts of Canada, even the centre left has turned against Israel. The peer groups of young people include many on the left, and so defending Israel comes with a cost in peer pressure.”
While North American advocates for Israel have managed to build strong alliances with Christian Zionist groups, such connections to other communities seem not to exist. When asked about this, Dershowitz said, “At Harvard, we work very hard to build alliances with people of Asian background, with Baha’is, with gays, with feminists and with other natural allies. We should never give up because extremists within these groups tend to grab the microphone and speak most loudly. Nor should we reject alliances with Christian Zionists, though we should not accept those parts of their substantive message with which we disagree.”
The Independent also asked Dershowitz – an avid defender of free speech – about how to counter Israel’s detractors, in particular those Jews who claim to love Israel, but accuse it of almost every injustice and join rallies against, for example, “Israeli apartheid.”
“Among the greatest enemies of Israel today are so-called Jews who invoke their Jewishness only to gain credibility in order to attack Israel,” he said. “These people range from Noam Chomsky to Normal Finkelstein to Richard Goldstone. They do not love Israel. Neither do many post-Zionist Israelis, such as Ilan Pappe, Neve Gordon and others, who never offer constructive, comparative or contextual criticism of Israel, but only thoughtless and irrational attacks against the Jewish state. They are not Jews of conscience. They are opportunists who lack a conscience and use their hatred of Israel for self-promotion, academic advancement and self-righteousness. They should be exposed and answered in the marketplace of ideas.”
He stressed, “I do not believe that Israel-haters should be subjected to censorship of any kind,” adding that those who support Israel must learn how to respond to such critics and to defeat their arguments.
As to whether he thought that the Israel-Arab conflict could be resolved, Dershowitz said, “I think it is possible that Israel and the Palestinian Authority will make peace in our lifetime, but as long as Iran and its surrogates, Hezbollah and Hamas, continue to threaten Israel’s existence, the only kind of peace we will achieve is that described by the prophet [Jeremiah]: ‘Shalom, shalom, v’eyn shalom.’ (‘Peace, peace and there is no peace.’)”
Dershowitz will speak in Vancouver on Monday, Sept. 20, 7:30 p.m., at the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts, 777 Homer St. Federation is encouraging community members to submit questions in advance when they purchase tickets online at jewishvancouver.com. Tickets are $22 and can also be purchased by calling 604-638-7281.
^TOP
|
|
