The Case Against Israel's Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace - Softcover

Dershowitz, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0470490055 ISBN 13: 9780470490051

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2009

Synopsis

The New York Times bestselling author of The Case for Israel takes on the greatest threats faced by Israel today

In addition to Hamas, which provoked the recent war and Gaza with its rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, Alan Dershowtiz argues that Israel's most dangerous enemies include Jimmy Carter and other western leaders who would delegitimize Israel as an apartheid regime subject to the same fate as white South Africans; Israel's academic enemies, led by professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who would accuse supporters of Israel of dual loyalty and indeed disloyalty to America; and Iran, led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which threatens Israel by its development of nuclear weapons, which it has publicly threatened to use against the Jewish state.

• Persuasively argues that Jimmy Carter and other enemies of Israel are also enemies of peace, imperiling not only Israel but the rest of the world
• Sparks controversy and lively discussion across the entire spectrum of opinion on the Middle East
• Passionate and outspoken: ""As always when Israel needs to be defended . . . Alan Dershowitz speaks with great passion and personal courage.""-Elie Wiesel

Alan Dershowitz is at his outspoken, thought-provoking best in The Case Against Israel's Enemies, changing both the tone and the focus of the debate about Israel's adversaries at a time when the future existence of Israel is increasingly imperiled.

About this title

About the Author

Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is one of the country's foremost appellate lawyers and a distinguished defender of individual liberties. His many books include the "New York Times" bestsellers "Chutzpah and The Case for Israel." He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From the Back Cover

Israel's Greatest Threats Exposed By Israel's Best Defender

"As always when Israel needs to be defended . . . Alan Dershowitz speaks with great passion and personal courage."--Elie Wiesel

"This is a compelling book that unmasks the dangerous revisionism that distorts the real Israel. Dershowitz debunks former President Jimmy Carter's apartheid analogy, Walt and Mearsheimer's canard of dual loyalty, the immorality of the British boycott of Israeli academics, and the bigotry of the anti-Israel hard left and right. He also assesses the existential threats against Israel and the options available to the Jewish state. A must-read for all who care about international justice and Israel's survival in a world of biased enemies."--The Honorable Irwin Cotler, Member of Parliament and former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada; Professor of Law (on leave from McGill University)

Writing with passion and power, Alan Dershowitz challenges the claims and actions of those he views to be Israel's most dangerous enemies in the West, such as Jimmy Carter, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, Noam Chomsky, and Pat Buchanan. Dershowitz also takes on Israel's military enemies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.

Filled with brilliant analysis, telling anecdotes, and startling revelations of the motives that drive many of Israel's most virulent detractors, "The Case Against Israel's Enemies" is compelling reading for anyone who is interested in current events or concerned about Israel's future.

From the Inside Flap

Jimmy Carter declares that Israel is guilty of apartheid; Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer proclaim that the "Israel lobby" is a huge, monolithic organization whose only purpose is to manipulate American foreign policy in Israel's favor; Noam Chomsky and Richard Falk compare Israeli policies and actions to those of Nazi Germany. Are these well-known and respected figures honest critics working toward peace and justice for Palestinians and Israelis alike? Or are they peddling lies, half-truths, and false accusations in the guise of serious diplomacy and scholarship? Israel has never suffered from a shortageof enemies, but these men and others provide a patina of respectability to even the most radical and unfounded accusations against the Jewish state.

In this book, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz confronts these foes head-on. Writing with passion and power, he challenges the claims and actions of those he views to be Israel's most dangerous enemies in the West, including Carter, Walt, Mearsheimer, Chomsky, and Pat Buchanan, as well as British academic unions that are seeking to boycott Israeli scholars and researchers, and the Presbyterian Church, which has launched a divestiture campaign against Israel.

With the precision of a first-class scholar and the disciplined approach of an experienced attorney, Dershowitz presents his adversaries' statements in their own words and fully in context. He analyzes each charge and the facts that are presented to support it, along with contradictory facts that are conveniently left out of each accusation. He points out that Carter, for example, ignores the fact that 1.3 million Israeli citizens are Arabs who enjoy therights and freedoms of other Israelis, and far more than they would have in any Arab country.

Dershowitz also takes on Israel's military enemies, including suicide bombers and those who incite them; Hamas, Hezbollah, and others who launch rockets against Israeli civilians while hiding behind their own civilians; and Iran with its nuclear weapons program. He points out that Israel poses no threat to any of these groups; if they were to lay down their weapons tomorrow, peace would ensue. Then he invites any fair-minded person to imagine what would happen if Israel were to do the same.

Filled with brilliant analysis, telling anecdotes, and startling revelations of the motives that drive many of Israel's most virulent detractors, The Case Against Israel's Enemies is compelling reading for anyone interested in current events or international affairs and a must-have for friends of Israel concerned about the future of the Jewish state.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Case Against Israel's Enemies

Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of PeaceBy Alan Dershowitz

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-49005-1

Chapter One

The Case against President Jimmy Carter

I've known Jimmy Carter since February 12, 1976. That was the day the then obscure presidential candidate sent me a handwritten note from "Plains, Georgia," telling me that he had been "impressed with [my] ideas on crime and punishment," which I had expressed in a recent New York Times Magazine article. He asked for my help with "other ideas" that would be "very valuable to [him]" in his campaign. A "cc" on the bottom of the page to "Stu" indicated that he had sent a copy to Stuart Eisenstadt, his chief domestic assistant and a former student of mine. Stuart, who was a committed Zionist and an active member of the Atlanta Jewish community, had served as an important adviser to Carter when he was governor of Georgia. Stuart was then a leading figure in the former peanut farmer's unlikely run for president.

When I received the letter, I barely knew who Carter was, but I had always liked Stuart, who in addition to being a brilliant student was a great basketball player. So when Stuart called and told me that Carter was coming to speak at Harvard and wanted to meet me, I agreed. We met in one of Harvard's undergraduate houses, where he repeated his request for my assistance on criminal justice matters.

I immediately liked the gracious Southerner and agreed to work on his campaign. In June of that year, Newsweek ran a cover story on "Carter's game plan" that included a page on "the Carter brain trust." I was featured in that story, with my photograph (beard, long hair, and aviator glasses) and a report that I was a key part of the brain trust and a member of Carter's "task force on criminal justice." Following Carter's election and inauguration, my name was included on several lists of lawyers the president was considering for Supreme Court appointments if any vacancies were to occur. (None did.)

When Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky was arrested in the Soviet Union in March 1977 and charged with spying for the United States, I was asked by his wife and his mother to represent him. I went to the White House to urge Carter to formally deny that Sharansky had ever spied for us. Stuart advised me that it would be a difficult sell, since no president ever admits or denies that anyone was an American spy. But after considerable efforts on Stuart's part and mine, President Carter agreed to issue an unprecedented denial, saying he was "completely convinced" that Sharansky was innocent. Carter repeated his denial after Sharansky's conviction in July 1978, declaring that the charges were "patently false."

Several years later, I closely followed the Camp David meetings between Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat. My friend Aharon Barak was Israel's chief legal adviser at the talks, Stuart was an important adviser to Carter, and another former Harvard Law student, Osama El-Baz, was one of the leaders of the Egyptian negotiating team. Once peace was finally achieved, I was invited to the White House ceremony on March 26, 1979.

I campaigned for Carter during his losing reelection campaign in 1980, and I considered myself a friend and a supporter during his years of active retirement and good works. I was not then aware of some of Carter's lapses of judgment, such as his failed intervention on behalf of an ex-Nazi SS guard. In 1987, the former president forwarded a letter from the daughter of Waffen-SS guard Martin Bartesch to the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigation, which had deported Bartesch and taken away his citizenship. Bartesch had been a guard at the Mauthausen death camp whose involvement in the murder of prisoners had been documented by the Nazis themselves. After the war, he lied about his past to gain entry to the United States. His daughter's letter to the government claimed that Bartesch had "no control over his destiny" during World War II. Carter attached a note in his own hand: "I hope that, in cases like this, that special consideration can be given to affected families for humanitarian reasons. Jimmy Carter." It was the first of many humanitarian actions by Carter, siding with those who murdered Jews over those who protected Jews from being murdered.

Carter's "humanitarianism" seems to go in one direction only. His latest humanitarian intervention has taken the form of support for Hamas, which fires rockets at civilians in Sderot and other populated Israeli areas, rather than support for the victims of terrorism. On April 9, 2008, it was announced that Carter would visit Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, in Damascus. He was strongly advised against doing so by the U.S. State Department, but he said that he felt "quite at ease" meeting with the leaders of the terrorist group. Before his visit with Hamas, Carter had never visited Israeli victims of Hamas rockets, but he made a point of stopping briefly in Sderot to show support for victims before his meeting with Meshal. But his shallow show of support for the victims of Hamas terrorism did not stop him from calling on the European Union to break from the United States and recognize the legitimacy of Hamas, despite that group's continuing terrorism and refusal to accept Israel's existence.

The last time I saw Carter in person was in January 2006, when we were both invited to speak at the Herzliya Conference in Israel. Following his talk, I asked the first question from the audience. Although my question had a somewhat critical tone, Carter's response to me could not have been warmer or more personal. We met and talked after the session, and he told me he was going to observe the Palestinian parliamentary elections the following day, as I was also. Carter assured me that Hamas would be soundly defeated, because most Palestinians wanted peace. We parted amicably, with mutual regards to and from Stuart. Carter did not tell me that he was about to publish an explosive book titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Nor did he tell Stuart, his dear friend and adviser, or most of his other Jewish friends and supporters. I first learned of the title of the book from a journalist who called me for a comment. I said I didn't believe Carter would have written such a book. The journalist then e-mailed me a press release.

When I told Stuart about the forthcoming book and its incendiary title, he, too, expressed surprise and disbelief. Stuart said that he would call Carter and try to persuade him to change the title. Several other friends and colleagues did as well, to no avail. The book was published amid great fanfare and controversy, which assured its ascent on the best-seller lists. Carter announced that he had written the book and had deliberately included the explosive word apartheid in the title to "stimulate discussion [and] debate." It was only natural that Carter would be expected to participate in that debate.

So when some hard-left professors at Brandeis University invited Carter to discuss his book on campus, the president of Brandeis, Jehuda Reinharz, proposed a debate, at Stuart's suggestion. Stuart, a member of Brandeis's Board of Trustees, also put my name forward as the appropriate person to debate Carter. I had worked for Carter, admired him, and had written the first main-stream review of his book-a respectful review in which I wondered why Carter, "generally a careful man," had allowed so many errors to mar his book. Carter adamantly refused to debate me, saying, "I don't want to have a conversation even indirectly with Dershowitz. There is no need for me to debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about the situation in Palestine." That was, of course, untrue, as Carter well knew, since we had discussed my several visits to the Palestinian Authority during our conversation only months earlier in Herzliya.

Following is part of an op-ed piece I wrote for the Boston Globe:

You can always tell when a public figure has written an indefensible book: when he refuses to debate it in the court of public opinion.... Carter's refusal to debate wouldn't be so strange if it weren't for the fact that he claims that he wrote the book precisely so as to start debate over the issue of the Israel-Palestine peace process. If that were really true, Carter would be thrilled to have the opportunity to debate. Authors should be accountable for their ideas and their facts. Books shouldn't be like chapel, delivered from on high and believed on faith.... When Jimmy Carter's ready to speak at Brandeis, or anywhere else, I'll be there.

To its credit, Brandeis came up with a compromise under which Carter spoke first, left the stage, and then I followed-about half an hour later. Most of the students remained, although some from the hard left walked out on my talk. C-SPAN carried both of our talks sequentially, turning it into the functional equivalent of a virtual debate, although questions from the audience to Carter were selected in advance and filtered through a group of his supporters. During my lecture, I took live questions from the audience, including several hostile ones, and allowed each person the chance to follow up his or her question with a rebuttal.

Carter's talk at Brandeis bore little resemblance to his book and to his many television and radio interviews. It was conciliatory in tone and compromising in substance. It had all the hallmarks of having been drafted by Stuart Eisenstadt. Carter backed away from some of his claims and apologized for "improper and stupid" wording in a passage that appeared to condone Palestinian terror. I had prepared to rebut what Carter had said in his book, and so I had to quickly change my approach. "Had he written a book which was similar to what he said from the stage," I told the audience, "I do not believe there would have been much controversy." I acknowledged that Carter supported the two-state solution and the peace process but noted that his book had done Israel-and peace-much damage.

I proceeded to point out specific misstatements in his book, all of which were against Israel. I criticized the former president for supporting Yasser Arafat's decision to walk away from the Clinton-Barak offer of Palestinian statehood in all of Gaza and more than 95 percent of the West Bank. I accused Carter of having become an advocate for the maximalist Palestinian view, rather than a broker for peace. That, to my mind, was the true tragedy of a decent man who worked so hard for peace and who now in effect was pressuring the Palestinians not to accept reasonable compromise and reasonable peace.

In the weeks and months following the Brandeis debate, Carter's tone became more shrill and his substantive accusations against Israel more one-sided, even bigoted. He went so far as to publicly deny that he had been invited to debate me. Speaking to an audience at George Washington University several weeks after the Brandeis event, he said that he had "never received any invitation to debate, contrary to what a Harvard professor has said."

Reportage in the Boston Globe-which Carter has never challenged-makes it clear that he was lying: "Last month, the former president told the Globe he had declined an invitation from a university trustee to speak at Brandeis, because it came with the suggestion he debate Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School who has criticized Carter's book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid."

Carter was also well aware of the numerous invitations to debate that I had issued in newspapers, on television, and over the radio. He simply lied in order to protect his views from scrutiny. If a lawyer engaged in such mendacity in court, he would be disciplined, if not disbarred, especially if the lie was part of a pattern of lying, as is the case with Carter. On April 22, 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Carter of a similar falsehood: Carter had denied that the State Department told him not to meet with Hamas leaders. Rice was "blunt in her account" that it had. "We counseled President Carter against ... having contacts with Hamas," Rice insisted.

Carter claimed to have been the victim of an orchestrated campaign of vilification, which was designed to quash any criticism of Israel. In fact, no one had objected to mere criticism of Israel, only to the support he had given to the delegitimization of the Jewish state by using the explosive and incorrect term apartheid.

The accusation of apartheid-an accusation Carter has never apologized for or retracted-is no mere exaggeration. It associates the Jewish state with an evil system that was declared a "crime against humanity." That phrase, used against apartheid South Africa in the 1970s, was first applied by the Allies to describe the Armenian genocide in World War I and was subsequently used by the Allies against the Nazis in World War II. To accuse Israel of apartheid is therefore to strike at the foundations of the state itself. It implies-and many of those who make the accusation declare openly-that Israel is illegitimate, racist, and deserving of destruction. Just as the apartheid system in South Africa had to be dismantled entirely, the analogy posits, "apartheid Israel" must be utterly destroyed. It also suggests that academic boycotts and divestment campaigns, the tools used against apartheid South Africa, are appropriate for use against Israel.

Carter, despite the title of his book, offered no shred of evidence to prove that Israel practices apartheid. Search through the pages carefully, and you will find the word apartheid mentioned only three times. Carter does not even define what the term means. Jeffrey Goldberg, reviewing Carter's book for the Washington Post, accused Carter of using "bait and switch" tactics, by failing to prove what he alleges. Sometimes you really can tell a book by its cover, or at least by its phony title. Carter even admits, toward the end of his book, that the term apartheid is problematic: the situation in Israel today "is unlike that in South Africa-not racism, but the acquisition of land." He does not add that Israel gained control of that territory in a defensive war, that it has long offered to trade land for peace, and that it has pulled its settlers and soldiers off much of these lands in genuine good faith.

The Israel-apartheid analogy is a fraud, one that Carter perpetuates by citing imaginary sources. At Brandeis, he claimed that South Africa's Nelson Mandela had "used the same description." Carter appeared to be citing a fake memorandum from "Nelson Mandela" that was written by Arjan El-Fassed, an Arab journalist living in the Netherlands. Anti-Israel activists often circulate the memorandum, pretending it is authentic, as does Carter, who has personal access to Mandela and has to know that the quote was made up.

What is most striking about Carter's use of the word apartheid is his refusal to apply such labels to countries that actually deserve it. The Arab dictatorship in Sudan, for example, has murdered hundreds of thousands of black Muslims in the western province of Darfur. Its government-backed militia, the janjaweed, has displaced millions of people and used systematic rape as a weapon of terror. Yet when Carter visited Darfur in October 2007, he vehemently objected to the use of the term genocide to describe what was happening in Darfur. He said, "There is a legal definition of genocide and Darfur does not meet that legal standard. The atrocities were horrible but I do not think it qualifies to be called genocide." He said this in the presence of a "group of elders," including Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Carter added, "If you read the law textbooks ... you'll see very clearly that it's not genocide and to call it genocide falsely just to exaggerate a horrible situation-I don't think it helps." Carter was wrong. The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 defines genocide as killing "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Clearly, that is precisely what is happening in Darfur, but because the slaughter is being conducted with the support of Arab governments, the hard left that Carter has come to represent has refused to condemn it as genocide. Experienced prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in the Hague have a different view of the law.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Ltd
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0470490055
• ISBN 13: 9780470490051
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304