 First edition cover | |
| Author | Alan Dershowitz |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | John Wiley & Sons |
Publication date | 2003 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 264 |
| ISBN | 978-0-471-46502-7 |
The Case for Israel is a 2003 book by Alan Dershowitz, a law professor at Harvard University. The work is a response to common criticisms of Israel. The Case for Israel was a New York Times bestseller. [1]
The book is divided into several chapters, each of which addresses what Dershowitz identifies as being particularly strong accusations and myths about Israel, such as "Israel is the 'prime' human rights violator in the world" and "Israel is the cause of the Arab–Israeli conflict." Each chapter is divided into several sections. "The Accusation" states a common criticism of Israel, "The Accusers" lists several quotations from critics supporting the accusation, "The Reality" contains a short statement contradicting the accusation, and "The Proof" contains Dershowitz's explanation of his viewpoint. Edward Said and Noam Chomsky are among the critics that he quotes the most heavily. The research assistants mentioned in the book's acknowledgements include Natalie Hershlag, the birthname of Israeli-American actress Natalie Portman. [2] [3] [4]
Dershowitz has released a sequel in 2005 championing the two-state solution. The book, The Case for Peace , explains what he believes is needed to be done in order to achieve peace in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
The political scientist Norman Finkelstein has claimed the book is a "hoax" [5] and that some of its citations are plagiarized from From Time Immemorial , a 1984 book by Joan Peters. [6]
After a heated exchange between the two on Democracy Now! , in which Finkelstein repeatedly accused Dershowitz of plagiarism and questioned his credentials to teach at Harvard University, [7] Finkelstein released a book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, whose second part is about The Case for Israel. The book lists many examples of text that Finkelstein claims Dershowitz to have lifted from Peters. A Harvard Law School investigation led by former Harvard president Derek Bok found the plagiarism charges to be without merit. Finkelstein later agreed to delete all references to "plagiarism" from his book, instead writing that Dershowitz "lifted" or "appropriated" text from Peters, but said he only did it to avoid a lawsuit. [8] [9]
According to Avi Shlaim, Finkelstein's charge of plagiarism "is proved in a manner that would stand up in court." [10] In response to the feud between Dershowitz and Finkelstein, Frank Menetrez, a former editor-in-chief of the UCLA Law Review , published an analysis of the charges made against Finkelstein by Dershowitz, finding no merit in any single charge, and that, on the contrary, "Dershowitz is deliberately misrepresenting what Finkelstein wrote". [11] In a follow-up analysis he concluded that he could find "no way of avoiding the inference that Dershowitz copied the quotation from Twain from Peters's From Time Immemorial, and not from the original source", as Dershowitz claimed. [11]
The political scientist Michael Desch wrote:
Not only did Dershowitz improperly present Peters's ideas, he may not even have bothered to read the original sources she used to come up with them. Finkelstein somehow managed to get uncorrected page proofs of The Case for Israel in which Dershowitz appears to direct his research assistant to go to certain pages and notes in Peters's book and place them in his footnotes directly (32, col. 3). [12]
Although repeatedly being approached by third parties to debate the book, Dershowitz refused on the ground that he had a "longstanding policy against debating Holocaust deniers, revisionists, trivializers or minimizers". [13]
The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering is a book by Norman Finkelstein arguing that the American Jewish establishment exploits the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for political and financial gain and to further Israeli interests. According to Finkelstein, this "Holocaust industry" has corrupted Jewish culture and the authentic memory of the Holocaust.
The Dershowitz–Finkelstein affair was a public controversy involving academics Alan Dershowitz and Norman Finkelstein and their scholarship on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in 2005.
From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab–Jewish Conflict over Palestine is a 1984 book by Joan Peters, published by Harper & Row, about the demographics of the Arab population of Palestine and of the Jewish population of the Arab world before and after the formation of the State of Israel.
Joan Peters, later Caro, was an American journalist and broadcaster. She wrote the 1984 book From Time Immemorial, a controversial book that wrongfully claimed that modern Palestinians were not indigenous to Palestine.
New antisemitism is the concept that a new form of antisemitism which developed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, tends to manifest itself as anti-Zionism and criticism of the Israeli government. The concept is included in some definitions of antisemitism, such as the working definition of antisemitism and the 3D test of antisemitism. The concept dates to the early 1970s, although the identification of anti-Zionism with antisemitism has "long been de rigueur in Jewish communal and broader pro-Israel circles".
Alan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer and law professor known for his work in U.S. constitutional law and American criminal law. From 1964 to 2013, he taught at Harvard Law School, where he was appointed as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993. Dershowitz is a regular media contributor, political commentator, and legal analyst.
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is a book by John Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, Professor of International Relations at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University, published in late August 2007. It was a New York Times Best Seller.
Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History is a book by Norman Finkelstein published by the University of California Press in August 2005. The book provides a critique of arguments used to defend Israel's stance in the Israel-Palestine conflict, including the use of the allegation of anti-semitism to deflect criticism of Israel. The book also compares Alan Dershowitz's earlier book, The Case for Israel, with the findings of mainstream human rights organisations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. It includes an epilogue entitled Dershowitz v. Finkelstein: Who’s Right and Who’s Wrong? by Frank Menetrez, a former Editor-in-Chief of the UCLA Law Review.
The Case for Peace: How The Arab–Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved is a 2005 book by Alan Dershowitz and follow-up to his 2003 book The Case for Israel.
Antisemitic tropes or antisemitic canards are "sensational reports, misrepresentations, or fabrications" that are defamatory towards Judaism as a religion or defamatory towards Jews as an ethnic or religious group. Since the Middle Ages, such reports have been a recurring motif of broader antisemitic conspiracy theories.
The Politics of Anti-Semitism is a book edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair and published by AK Press in 2003.
Antisemitism in contemporary Norway deals with antisemitic incidents and attitudes encountered by Jews, either individually or collectively, in Norway since World War II. The mainstream Norwegian political environment has strongly adopted a platform that rejects antisemitism. However, individuals may privately hold antisemitic views. Currently, there are about 1,400 Jews in Norway, in a population of 5.3 million.
This is an incomplete bibliography of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Chutzpah is a Hebrew term for audacity or nerve.
Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist and activist. His primary fields of research are the politics of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
The United Nations has been criticized for a variety of reasons, including its policies, ideology, equality of representation, administration, ability to enforce rulings, and ideological bias.
In 1978 Sami Esmail, a 24-year-old American citizen of Palestinian descent, was prosecuted in Israel for membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The case generated a great deal of interest in the US, especially in the Arab American community and at Michigan State University, where Esmail was an Electrical Engineering graduate student.
Criticism of Israel is a subject of journalistic and scholarly commentary and research within the scope of international relations theory, expressed in terms of political science. Israel has faced international criticism since its declaration of independence in 1948 relating to a variety of issues, many of which are centered around human rights violations in its occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Operation Atlas was the code name for an operation carried out by a special commando unit of the Waffen SS which took place in October 1944. It involved five soldiers: three who were previously members of the Templer religious sect in Mandatory Palestine, and two Palestinian Arabs who were close collaborators of the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini.
The weaponization of antisemitism, also described as the instrumentalization of antisemitism, is the use of the charge of antisemitism or the deployment of antisemitism and antisemitic sentiments.