Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor and one time defender of O.J. has more recently emerged as one of the toughest critics of books and authors he deems unfair to Israel. His first target was Norman Finkelstein, who was recently denied tenure by DePaul University in Chicago. I could not feel too sorry for Finkelstein whose own style is angry and polemical. I had first encountered Finkelstein when I read his attack on Prof. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s work, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. I found Finkelstein to be angry and destructive in his critique of Goldhagen which he wrote in a take no prisoners style. Evidently, not satisfied with trying to destroy the reputation of a young scholar, Finkelstein turned his guns on Dershowitz, who replied in kind. I learned little from either of them since they presented little or nothing in the way of new evidence to help me to learn more about the holocaust or Israel.
Dershowitz next attacked former President Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Before I found time to read the book, I had been e-mailed the Dershowitz critique by several friends who likewise had not read the book but now thought they knew something. In addition people I met at Jewish functions were all attacking Carter because they had read Dershowitz. Ultimately, I read both and could make my own mind up. I hate the use of the word apartheid by Carter or his publishers as much as I loath the use of terms such as “Nazi” or “genocide” by thoughtless critics of Israel. “Apartheid” was probably used in the title to promote sales but it sets off useless debates, often by people who know very little about the old South African system, and it discourages many Jews from reading or listening.
Dershowitz also usefully pointed out some serious errors in Carter’s work. However, most books have errors and that does not stop intelligent readers from learning from them. Hundreds of Brandeis University students who respectfully listened to Carter, despite these attacks, gave him a standing ovation. At the least, they and subsequent University audiences learned that the former President had not turned anti-Semite or enemy of Israel. Carter could be read or heard by those who Dershowitz had not inspired to close their eyes or ears.
Prof. Dershowitz has most recently taken on Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer whose article and now a book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
has excited many Jewish critics of varying political stripes. From my own point of view some of the criticisms have merit but I do not regard the authors’ purpose as that of dredging up an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Intelligent readers of the book and its critics can decide for themselves just how strong the Israel lobby is in the United States, and certainly its existence and power cannot be denied.
However Dershowitz sank to a new low, when he stated that Presidential candidate Barack Obama had to repudiate his new foreign policy advisor, Zbigniew Brezezinski, a former National Security Advisor. Why, because Dr. Brzezinski had written in Foreign Policy that Mearsheimer and Walt “have rendered a public service by initiating a much-needed debate on the role of the ‘Israel Lobby’ in the shaping of U.S. foreign policy.” Dershowitz characterized this as an endorsement of “a bigoted attack on the American Jewish community.” Nonsense, Dershowitz has descended into guilt by association linking the authors of The Israel Lobby to Brzezinski and then to Obama. You may be interested to know that Dershowitz supports Obama’s rival, Hillary Clinton
The pattern is clear. Books critical of Israel or of some of its American supporters are to be subjected to destructive attack. They should not be subject to balanced criticism and consideration; rather they should be effectively eliminated, not by a book burning, but in a torrent of condemnation which serves to drown out critical voices.
