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clarel's review
4.0
I should re-read this with my new perspective on Zionism (as a Christian, I was blindly supportive of Israel). What I do recall, however, is that Dershowitz illuminates just how difficult it is to make firm condemnatory statements about Israeli behaviour in Palestine. There are so many interested parties, so much propaganda from both sides, that one almost never gets at the truth the first time around.
toggle_fow's review
2.0
I started reading this book because I was told it was a great defense of Israel. My education on the Israel-Palestine conflict has come from a very liberal university, and also from the Jordanian Institute of Democracy -- so I was interested in what a very decided pro-Israel argument would offer. Despite my pro-Palestinian educational background, I mostly don't have much of an issue with Israel. I was primarily seeking information on just a few specific accusations, including:
Sadly, as I discovered too late, this book was written in 2003.
Since it is FOURTEEN YEARS OLD (which predates full Israeli disengagement from Gaza much less the siege itself) this book predictably addressed barely any of these issues. The only one of my questions that was directly mentioned was the West Bank settlements, and then only in a vague allusion as part of a separate argument.
The West Bank settlements won't be any barrier to peace, Dershowitz states confidently, because the minute the Palestinians are willing to accept a real peace agreement, Israel will immediately dismantle everything it has built in the West Bank, withdrawing back into Israeli territory, like when Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt. Which... really? Like, uh... has anyone told Netanyahu?
Ah well. That's my bad for not checking the date before starting the book. I'll have to look somewhere else for more modern analysis.
The Case for Israel was more of a historical account of the conflict rather than a defense of Israel's current (or 2003) policy anyway. Dershowitz takes a different anti-Israel accusation every chapter, and attempts to directly rebut. (Often these accusations are levied by Edward Said. I can't escape this guy, apparently.) I respect this format, since it's easily readable and very coherent. He puts a lot of emphasis on backing up his claims with evidence, too, which is admirable.
Unfortunately, it was still a frustrating and underwhelming read.
Dershowitz starts by laying out a couple principles. 1) He believes in a two-state solution, and 2) there has to be a statute of limitations on ancient grievances in order to make peace. Sounds good, right? I found it kind of ironic that he started by saying "the grievances must go" and then spent like 20 chapters arguing that Israel/the Jews had the right of every single grievance from 1880 to 2003. Meanwhile, I'm crying tears of pure frustration because none of this... is relevant... to defending the current state of Israel from allegations of abuse...
I have quite a few thoughts, but I'm mostly going to keep this short and only talk about two things.
First of all, I am apparently WAY too neorealist for this book.
SO much time is spent arguing in support of Israel's right to exist as a nation on principles of morality and self-determination. I don't care about this. "Right to exist"? Israel's right to exist is the exact same as America's right to exist: the fact that we exist.
Did America take the land from the Indians? Yes. Does this mean that the modern nation of the United States has no right to exist? Maybe, but that question is a useless one for philosophers and moralists. Israel exists, and has the means of defending its existence. There is no point in examining this question further.
Some of the "accusations" he rebuts are also just weird. The academic winds might have changed somewhat between now and 2003, or I might simply be ignorant. But I scratch my head at Dershowitz arguing with assertions that "Israel unjustly occupied Palestinian land after the '48 and '67 wars" apparently referring to the Sinai, West Bank, and Golan Heights. Does anyone really think that being attacked by 3+ neighboring countries, overwhelmingly winning, and then offering them back the territory that THEY LOST TO YOU through stupidity and aggression in exchange for peace... is somehow wrong? Israel is clearly 100% in the right as far as both of these wars go.
Who exactly is throwing the stones here, because I'm pretty sure they live in a glass house. We still have this place we call "the entire Southwestern United States" that we took from Mexico under MUCH shadier circumstances.
Similarly, the accusation that Israel is somehow horrifically morally reprehensible for using assassination against terrorist leaders currently attacking them. What is that? This isn't even referring to the Mossad's history of shady kidnappings and assassinations around the world. (I don't really have a problem with that, either, but I recognize some people do for good reason.) This is literally talking about assassinations of terrorist leaders who are in the MENA region actively making war on Israel. Again, they are at war. What?
I just think about our own colorful history of trying to assassinate Castro and Qaddafi, not to mention Bin Laden. The controversy about al-Awlaki was over the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen -- not over whether it's justifiable to seek to kill those who make war on us! I assume these kinds of arguments are Dershowitz arguing with fellow liberalists, but wow, I don't care. I don't believe there's such a thing as the moral right to exist as a state.
Second of all, Dershowitz is constantly playing a comparison game. At every turn, he is pointing out that international criticism of Israel follows a hypocritical double standard, castigating Israel and coddling the Palestinians. I agree that there is a double standard, but not that it is between Israel and the Arabs. The real double standard is the overly harsh critique of Israel compared to criticism of its other peers in the developed world.
Dershowitz complains that no one criticizes Arab states, but everyone is constantly examining Israeli policy with a microscope looking for flaws. This double standard, he implies, is both Antisemitic (painting exceptional Jewish behavior as reprehensible) and racist against Arabs (the assumption that we can't expect anything from them because they're "crazy").
I do see his point that this double standard exists. The standards the international community seems to feel comfortable holding Arab states to are:
Anything else is a little ambitious. Maybe this is racist. Maybe it's realistic.
Israel, by contrast, is a successful, economically and militarily powerful developed nation. It's a star by literally any international standard. Israel is way beyond getting stickers for not killing people or for not collapsing into anarchy. At that level you start getting scrutiny for civilian casualties, transparency of the democratic process, rigorous observance of human rights, etc.
Yeah, it's a bummer to be the high-achieving child.
Dershowitz's real criticism should not compare Israel to the Arab states. It should compare Israel to the United States. Seriously -- some of their policies as explained in The Case for Israel are deeply impressive and set a high standard for morality during war. For instance: doing more dangerous house-by-house terrorist searches instead of bombing, discontinuing the neighbor policy, and prioritizing civilian life over military life.
Civilian judiciary oversight of the military? That is hardcore. We, by contrast, will always choose bombs over boots on the ground, and continue to see the lives of our soldiers as the most valuable ones.
Of course, we also get a ton of flak. But we have never been called "the world's principal human rights violator" or anything similar by the UN. This is the double standard that truly matters, and I'm kind of confused why Dershowitz never explicitly pointed it out. It's obviously an effect of the balance of power. Who is the UN going to feel more free to constantly hammer? The USA, the sole global superpower and a co-founder of the UN itself -- or Israel, a tiny Middle Eastern country?
I believe this, too, applies to the inconsistency he highlights between the "Palestinian rights" outcry and the relative silence on similar stateless peoples in Tibet and Chechnya. Compare Russia and China -- both UN co-founders, permanent security council members, and world heavyweight military powers -- to Israel. I mean, Russia is currently in the process of swallowing half of the Ukraine, and nobody is saying anything. China straight up views the concept of human rights as Western cultural imperialism, and everyone tiptoes around them. Talk about double standards.
The UN is pretty useless as an overseeing body against the world's principal nations. It only shows its teeth to less powerful states. In my opinion, these considerations have more explanatory power regarding the international community's double standard towards Israel than simply prejudice and Antisemitism.
There are other things I could mention, like how Dershowitz totally glosses over the existence of Jewish paramilitary units like Irgun and Lehi (which did some terrorism of their own) until BARELY mentioning them when saying that Ben-Gurion forcibly disarmed them. Or his weirdly Eurocentric repeated point that the Ashkenazi Jews of the First Aliyah improved life in Palestine by bringing civilization and modern agriculture. (Which gives them right to the land, I guess?) Or how inconsistently applied and disputed the concept of self-determination is internationally! Or how Dershowitz seems to only have 10 points, and by the end of the book he's re-using these same 10 points to rebut every argument, sometimes even in the same exact words.
But I've already mentioned my two things, and I'm done.
I did learn a bit, and The Case for Israel gave me a good refresher of the history. However, fundamentally I found the experience of reading it frustrating. Dershowitz's analysis seemed to be overly moralistic and pathos-focused, rather than practical, and I was left after every chapter with the sensation that he had, either narrowly or sometimes broadly, missed the point.
I still need a good modern book to walk me through Israel's current security policy and whether it is actually suppressing Palestinian rights or not.
• The Wall
• Limiting West Bank Palestinian travel/access to water/etc
• The ongoing siege of Gaza & the way it is conducted
• Accusations of biased/excessively brutal/double standard policing and justice in general
• Likud & Netanyahu's shady/illegal settlement agenda
Sadly, as I discovered too late, this book was written in 2003.
Since it is FOURTEEN YEARS OLD (which predates full Israeli disengagement from Gaza much less the siege itself) this book predictably addressed barely any of these issues. The only one of my questions that was directly mentioned was the West Bank settlements, and then only in a vague allusion as part of a separate argument.
The West Bank settlements won't be any barrier to peace, Dershowitz states confidently, because the minute the Palestinians are willing to accept a real peace agreement, Israel will immediately dismantle everything it has built in the West Bank, withdrawing back into Israeli territory, like when Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt. Which... really? Like, uh... has anyone told Netanyahu?
Ah well. That's my bad for not checking the date before starting the book. I'll have to look somewhere else for more modern analysis.
The Case for Israel was more of a historical account of the conflict rather than a defense of Israel's current (or 2003) policy anyway. Dershowitz takes a different anti-Israel accusation every chapter, and attempts to directly rebut. (Often these accusations are levied by Edward Said. I can't escape this guy, apparently.) I respect this format, since it's easily readable and very coherent. He puts a lot of emphasis on backing up his claims with evidence, too, which is admirable.
Unfortunately, it was still a frustrating and underwhelming read.
Dershowitz starts by laying out a couple principles. 1) He believes in a two-state solution, and 2) there has to be a statute of limitations on ancient grievances in order to make peace. Sounds good, right? I found it kind of ironic that he started by saying "the grievances must go" and then spent like 20 chapters arguing that Israel/the Jews had the right of every single grievance from 1880 to 2003. Meanwhile, I'm crying tears of pure frustration because none of this... is relevant... to defending the current state of Israel from allegations of abuse...
I have quite a few thoughts, but I'm mostly going to keep this short and only talk about two things.
First of all, I am apparently WAY too neorealist for this book.
SO much time is spent arguing in support of Israel's right to exist as a nation on principles of morality and self-determination. I don't care about this. "Right to exist"? Israel's right to exist is the exact same as America's right to exist: the fact that we exist.
Did America take the land from the Indians? Yes. Does this mean that the modern nation of the United States has no right to exist? Maybe, but that question is a useless one for philosophers and moralists. Israel exists, and has the means of defending its existence. There is no point in examining this question further.
Some of the "accusations" he rebuts are also just weird. The academic winds might have changed somewhat between now and 2003, or I might simply be ignorant. But I scratch my head at Dershowitz arguing with assertions that "Israel unjustly occupied Palestinian land after the '48 and '67 wars" apparently referring to the Sinai, West Bank, and Golan Heights. Does anyone really think that being attacked by 3+ neighboring countries, overwhelmingly winning, and then offering them back the territory that THEY LOST TO YOU through stupidity and aggression in exchange for peace... is somehow wrong? Israel is clearly 100% in the right as far as both of these wars go.
Who exactly is throwing the stones here, because I'm pretty sure they live in a glass house. We still have this place we call "the entire Southwestern United States" that we took from Mexico under MUCH shadier circumstances.
Similarly, the accusation that Israel is somehow horrifically morally reprehensible for using assassination against terrorist leaders currently attacking them. What is that? This isn't even referring to the Mossad's history of shady kidnappings and assassinations around the world. (I don't really have a problem with that, either, but I recognize some people do for good reason.) This is literally talking about assassinations of terrorist leaders who are in the MENA region actively making war on Israel. Again, they are at war. What?
I just think about our own colorful history of trying to assassinate Castro and Qaddafi, not to mention Bin Laden. The controversy about al-Awlaki was over the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen -- not over whether it's justifiable to seek to kill those who make war on us! I assume these kinds of arguments are Dershowitz arguing with fellow liberalists, but wow, I don't care. I don't believe there's such a thing as the moral right to exist as a state.
Second of all, Dershowitz is constantly playing a comparison game. At every turn, he is pointing out that international criticism of Israel follows a hypocritical double standard, castigating Israel and coddling the Palestinians. I agree that there is a double standard, but not that it is between Israel and the Arabs. The real double standard is the overly harsh critique of Israel compared to criticism of its other peers in the developed world.
Dershowitz complains that no one criticizes Arab states, but everyone is constantly examining Israeli policy with a microscope looking for flaws. This double standard, he implies, is both Antisemitic (painting exceptional Jewish behavior as reprehensible) and racist against Arabs (the assumption that we can't expect anything from them because they're "crazy").
I do see his point that this double standard exists. The standards the international community seems to feel comfortable holding Arab states to are:
1. Don't become a failed state
2. Don't kill your own people
3. Stop actively sponsoring terrorism
Anything else is a little ambitious. Maybe this is racist. Maybe it's realistic.
Israel, by contrast, is a successful, economically and militarily powerful developed nation. It's a star by literally any international standard. Israel is way beyond getting stickers for not killing people or for not collapsing into anarchy. At that level you start getting scrutiny for civilian casualties, transparency of the democratic process, rigorous observance of human rights, etc.
Yeah, it's a bummer to be the high-achieving child.
Dershowitz's real criticism should not compare Israel to the Arab states. It should compare Israel to the United States. Seriously -- some of their policies as explained in The Case for Israel are deeply impressive and set a high standard for morality during war. For instance: doing more dangerous house-by-house terrorist searches instead of bombing, discontinuing the neighbor policy, and prioritizing civilian life over military life.
Civilian judiciary oversight of the military? That is hardcore. We, by contrast, will always choose bombs over boots on the ground, and continue to see the lives of our soldiers as the most valuable ones.
Of course, we also get a ton of flak. But we have never been called "the world's principal human rights violator" or anything similar by the UN. This is the double standard that truly matters, and I'm kind of confused why Dershowitz never explicitly pointed it out. It's obviously an effect of the balance of power. Who is the UN going to feel more free to constantly hammer? The USA, the sole global superpower and a co-founder of the UN itself -- or Israel, a tiny Middle Eastern country?
I believe this, too, applies to the inconsistency he highlights between the "Palestinian rights" outcry and the relative silence on similar stateless peoples in Tibet and Chechnya. Compare Russia and China -- both UN co-founders, permanent security council members, and world heavyweight military powers -- to Israel. I mean, Russia is currently in the process of swallowing half of the Ukraine, and nobody is saying anything. China straight up views the concept of human rights as Western cultural imperialism, and everyone tiptoes around them. Talk about double standards.
The UN is pretty useless as an overseeing body against the world's principal nations. It only shows its teeth to less powerful states. In my opinion, these considerations have more explanatory power regarding the international community's double standard towards Israel than simply prejudice and Antisemitism.
There are other things I could mention, like how Dershowitz totally glosses over the existence of Jewish paramilitary units like Irgun and Lehi (which did some terrorism of their own) until BARELY mentioning them when saying that Ben-Gurion forcibly disarmed them. Or his weirdly Eurocentric repeated point that the Ashkenazi Jews of the First Aliyah improved life in Palestine by bringing civilization and modern agriculture. (Which gives them right to the land, I guess?) Or how inconsistently applied and disputed the concept of self-determination is internationally! Or how Dershowitz seems to only have 10 points, and by the end of the book he's re-using these same 10 points to rebut every argument, sometimes even in the same exact words.
But I've already mentioned my two things, and I'm done.
I did learn a bit, and The Case for Israel gave me a good refresher of the history. However, fundamentally I found the experience of reading it frustrating. Dershowitz's analysis seemed to be overly moralistic and pathos-focused, rather than practical, and I was left after every chapter with the sensation that he had, either narrowly or sometimes broadly, missed the point.
I still need a good modern book to walk me through Israel's current security policy and whether it is actually suppressing Palestinian rights or not.
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