Israel Not So Bad

The Case For Israel
Alan Dershowitz
(John Wiley and Son, 2003, 272 pages $21.95)

"Israel is the prime example of human rights violators in the world".  So said a representative for Students Allied for Freedom and Equality at the University of Michigan in 2002.  The student spoke at an Israeli "divestment" conference, a type that was sweeping the US at the time.  Harvard, MIT and other major universities, and the Noam Chomskys and Pat Buchanans led the charge to end university investment in Israel and to boycott Israeli speakers and academics.  Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz wrote this book as a counter to the divestment campaign and toured campuses to tell his side of the story.

The divestment campaign makes the Sydney Peace Prize (organised by the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at Sydney University) look very tame, but its ignorance is as profound.  It creates a moral equivalence between the rights of a democratic state to protect its people, and in so doing causes the unintended deaths of innocents, and promotes the rights of a people to destroy a state and purposefully attack innocents:  the Peace Brigade is so casual about deliberate killings.  Disturbing, too, in Australia, is the recent remark to Barry Cohen, former Labor Minister, by a very senior member of the NSW ALP Right, "amongst the people I mix with, I'm the only one who supports Israel".

Dershowitz's book was written for campaign purposes and, in particular, for a student audience.  It consists of 32 short chapters and a conclusion.  Each chapter is arranged in the following manner.  First, "The Accusation", for example, "Is Israel a colonial, imperialist state?"  Second, "The Accuser(s)", for example, "A Jewish state in Palestine could only emerge as the bastard child of imperialist powers ... (M. Shahid Alam)".  Third, "The Reality", for example, "Israel is a state comprising primarily refugees and their descendants exercising their right of self-determination ..."  And fourth, "The Proof", for example, "Those who absurdly claim that the Jewish refugees who migrated to Palestine in the last decades of the nineteenth century were the “tool” of European imperialism must answer the following question:  For whom were these socialists and idealists working?  Were they planting the flag of the hated czar of Russia or the anti-Semitic regimes of Poland or Lithuania ...?"

Some of the material is familiar, for example, we are well acquainted with the UN-sponsored World Conference Against Racism in Durban, which descended into a "racist conference against Jews".  The ignorance of the delegates to the UN Commission on Human Rights is almost commonplace, but I had not realised that every year for 30 years they have spent more time on Israel than on any other country, and that Israel has been the only state subject to an entire agenda item every year.  No resolution in the history of the Commission has ever been passed on Syria, China, Saudi Arabia or Zimbabwe.

We are aware that until the recent elections in Iraq, and the vote for the Palestinian leader after Arafat's death, that there was no semblance of democracy in the Middle East, nor any government that operated under the rule of law.  Less well known is the strength of the Israeli Supreme Court in controlling the Israeli military, and the ability of individuals, including Palestinians, to petition the Court.  The attempts by Europeans to subvert the Israeli processes by using the International Court of Justice to have Israel dismantle its wall on the West Bank is no proof of a greater love by these others of the rule of law.  It is more likely a device to weaken Israel by making it less easy to defend itself and, incidentally, in a less violent manner than has often been resorted to.

In these and many other ways, Dershowitz answers all of the questions fed to students by Israel's detractors.  No doubt, there will be rejoinders, but there is a propensity among Jews to debate these matters openly and vigorously.  This is presumably what occurs on Australian campuses, though one has one's doubts.  Dershowitz's book is an excellent primer, the pity is that he had to write it.  Perhaps the latest round of negotiations will succeed in the establishment of a Palestinian state, and he will not have to publish an update.