The Real Case for Israel [View All]

[Englander]

October 12, 2005

What lies behind Alan Dershowitz’s campaign
against Norman Finkelstein?

By Neve Gordon

It is not everyday that a professor hires a prestigious law firm to threaten the University of California Press.

Yet, for months, Alan Dershowitz, Harvard’s Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, tried to stop UC Press from publishing Norman Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah. When the Press’ director Lynne Withey replied that she believed in academic freedom and would therefore go ahead with the book, Dershowitz sent letters to the university’s board of trustees and even to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, asking them to intervene on his behalf. Following both the trustees’ and governor’s decision not to get involved, one would have thought that the struggle would end. But now that the book is on the shelves, it seems that a new campaign is underway to cancel the author’s reading engagements, for example, at Harvard Bookstore and Barnes and Noble in Chicago. So what is the controversy about?

On the face of it, the conflict stems from an allegation which Finkelstein, a professor of political science at DePaul University, makes against Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel, accusing him of “lifting” information and ideas from Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine. In addition to the fact that Peters’ book has been, in Finkelstein’s words, “dismissed as a fraud,” Harvard University’s own definition—”passing off a source’s information, ideas, or words as your own by omitting to cite them”—would, argues Finkelstein, convict Dershowitz of plagiarism. After a careful examination of the documents Finkelstein presents in Beyond Chutzpah, it is difficult not to infer that the Harvard professor did indeed pass off someone else’s information as his own.

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Academically, the section discussing Israel’s human rights record raises serious questions about intellectual honesty and the ideological bias of our cultural institutions, since it reveals how a prominent professor holding an endowed chair at a leading university can publish a book whose major claims are false. The significant point is not simply that the claims cannot be corroborated by the facts on the ground—anyone can make mistakes—but that any first-year student who takes the time to read the human rights reports would quickly realize that while The Case for Israel has rhetorical style and structure, it is, for the most part, fiction passing as fact.

All of which leads me back to the question raised at the beginning: What is the controversy about? While it is in part about Dershowitz’s political investments and his intellectual veracity, its intention goes much deeper than that to expose a grave cultural distortion. On the one hand, the controversy surrounding Beyond Chutzpah seems to be a reaction to Finkelstein’s attempt to expose how elements in academia have played an active role in covering up Israel’s abuse, and by extension, the abuse of other rogue regimes, not least the United States itself. Obviously those intellectuals who do participate in this covering tactic prefer to operate in the dark. On the other hand, the heated response to his book is just another example of how the literature discussing the new anti-Semitism delegitimizes those who expose Israel’s egregious violations of international law. The major irony informing this saga is that Finkelstein’s book, not Dershowitz’s, constitutes the real case for Israel—that is, for a moral Israel.

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