the hard intellectual labor of sorting out Marty Peretz, Alan Dershowitz and Norman Podhoretz

by on July 2, 2009 11
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Jack Ross writes:
Dershowitz is still, at least half-heartedly defending Obama--Commentary's take with a link to the column. I'm not sure quite what to make of it.  On the one hand, Dershowitz takes pretty much the same position as Norman Podhoretz, that Obama isn't any real danger to Israel proper, before he descends into the paranoid line about Iran and that any effort to accommodate Iran is an "existential threat".  On the other hand Dershowitz is clearly reluctant to go as far as Marty Peretz has in the last month, but at the same time clearly suspecting it will only be a matter of time.  I am genuinely puzzled as to what accounts for this difference.

Posted in Iran, Israel Lobby, Israel/Palestine, Neocons

{ 11 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. Ed says:
    July 3, 2009 at 1:43 am

    What do Peretz, Dershowitz and Podhoretz all have in common? They are all participants in political Judaism. Also, none of them have yet figured out that the post-Holocaust “pass” granted to political Judaism is in the process of being revoked due to abuse, so they’re all also a bit thick, or, more likely, chutzpah-ridden.

  2. Nth Republic says:
    July 3, 2009 at 5:56 am

    You're really not sure what to make of it, Phil? Dershowitz is nothing but a street peddler of low-brow Hasbara talking points, who's firmly entrenched in that nucleus of liberal academia, Harvard, though he uses his position at HLS as not much other than a marketing tool for his regurgitative books and a big stick to swing at other institutions of learning when they have the audacity to allow professors or speakers of opposing views to articulate themselves. It is for the preservation of his status, the maintaining of his posture so he can continue to sell books and whore himself around the country giving fallacy-ridden, hateful speaking tours (I was lucky enough to attend one, though I got to tell him "fuck you" to his face for my trouble), and attempt to collect the scalps of anyone he deems not "pro-Israel" enough (such as Norman Finkelstein and the students of Hampshire College — really noble work there, Dersh…), that he "half-heartedly defends" Obama.

  3. Sean2009 says:
    July 3, 2009 at 8:29 am

    It's easy enough to figure out. Dershowitz may be a lying scumbag of particularly low degree, but he's right that Obama's talk about the settlements is consistent with what other presidents, including Bush, have said. It's nothing but noise to appease American liberals and in the end, nothing will change. The problem is that some of the zanier Zionists like Podhoretz are such paranoid entitlement whores when it comes to American groveling to their every whim that even the usual scripted deviation from 100 percent obeisance to Israel and its demands amounts to a "betrayal" to them.

  4. Richard Witty says:
    July 3, 2009 at 9:50 am

    They each are saying something, and something distinct. Thanks for presenting that distinctness, Phil and others. While it is "easy" to dismiss every person that bears any sympathy for Israel as a "hasbara"-ite, that indicates the utter ignorance of nuance, the absence of honest intellectual discussion. Its parallel to regarding every dissenter as a communist. Each bear the balancing of Jewish/Democratic state to varying degrees. Commentary will only air those that are within a slightly left of center – center right range. They do not air fascist Jewish-only perspectives, and they do not air any perspective that they regard as actually threatening to Israel. It is GOOD news that the range of discourse now extends to willingness to distinguish between the opposition to policies and practises (settlements) and blanket endorsement. That is the significance of the Dershowitz piece. He is Begin in Cairo, Sadat in Jerusalem, credible enough to be published there. You are confusing his near-violent confrontation with Finkelstein as absence of intellectual depth. Loyalty to Finkelstein is a blinder in this case. It hinders inquiry.

  5. Shingo says:
    July 3, 2009 at 12:16 pm

    There is no difference between the likes of Marty Peretz, Alan Dershowitz and Norman Podhoretz. They represent a distinction without a difference. As the saying goes., right wing Zionists will advicate enthic cleasing, while the left wing will insist that the Palestinians be put on air conditioned busses.

  6. Shingo says:
    July 3, 2009 at 12:18 pm

    "Loyalty to Finkelstein is a blinder in this case." Translation: Finkelstein knows his facts too well and is not afraid to crush Zionist propaghanda. I watched his smack that Ziinist shill, Martin Indyk around on a detate on Democracy Now. Indyk squealed like a baby.

  7. Nth Republic says:
    July 3, 2009 at 1:26 pm

    Richard, please. I didn't dismiss every person that bears any sympathy for Israel as a "Hasbara-ite", I rightly declared Mr. Dershowitz a peddler of Hasbara talking points. Skim The Case for Israel, and read some of the articles he's written for the Jerusalem Post. I'll offer an anecdote of my own. You don't have to take it at face value if you don't want to, as I'm sure you can tell by now I strongly dislike the man, but I am most certainly not embellishing this story. The "academic presentation" I alluded to attending in my earlier post was in April of this year, given by Mr. Dershowitz, and titled "Two States for Two Peoples", part of the "Voices of Vision" series. It was, ostensibly, a platform through which he was going to offer his endorsement of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, with his own specificities, I imagine. I took fairly copious notes, and there was only one reference to anything that could be construed as having any relation to a settlement to the conflict, and that was an ambiguous one-liner endorsement of a divided Jerusalem housing a capital for each independent state. The rest of the hour-long monologue was made up of justifications for the Gaza offensive (Hamas using civilians as "human shields", hiding in schools and hospitals, et cetera), a one-sided and wildly incorrect history lesson ranging from Grand Mufti Al-Husayni's war crimes against Jews and his connections with Adolf Hitler to PLO terrorism from the 1970s to 2000s, a run-down of Israel's superb human rights record and admirable rule of law, a snapshot of Arabs' draconian treatment of homosexuals, and constant reminders of the endemicity of Arabs' irrational, venomous hatred of Jews. There was much, much more, but these are some of the highlights. In short, it was the case for Israel's superiority and the case for the Arabs' (note: not the "Palestinians'" — can't call them that) barbarism, explained again and again in so many ways, some truths conflated with a veritable mountain range of falsehood so as to confuse the novices in the audience and wear down the more experienced with the least resolve — Hasbara to a "T". It's telling that you immediately classified my feelings towards Dershowitz as stemming from some Finkelstein fanboy-ism. I won't lie, I greatly respect Dr. Finkelstein and admire his work and academic prowess; but let me put this into some context for you. I live in the Boston area, and I do a lot of Palestine/Israel-related activist work here. In addition to being a manifestation of ideologies we work to fight against, Dershowitz uses his academic and political clout in this area to lobby hard to get pro-Palestine speakers' appointments canceled when they appear on college campuses, despite the fact that he works the university circuit on the "other" side. Also, I'm friends with many of the students at Hampshire College in SJP who successfully won their school's divestment from companies on the BDS list, and Dershowitz tried to have them all expelled. There's nothing "honest" or "intellectual" about that — his tactics are not those of a "serious scholar", as Finkelstein would say, they're those of a lawyer. I don't feel the need to continue here about more of his personal crusades against figures like Bishop Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter, Rabbi Michael Lerner, et al. Suffice to say his paranoia and crusading took the form of a book published in the fall of last year, titled The Case Against Israel's Enemies. Just one last thing to point out. From Dershowitz's WSJ op-ed: "A majority of American-Jewish supporters of Israel, as well as Israelis, do not favor settlement expansion." Ha'aretz disagrees: "Forty-six percent of respondents said Israel should continue construction in the West Bank even if this causes a confrontation with the U.S., and 44 percent said the opposite."

  8. lovelyisraelis says:
    July 3, 2009 at 2:05 pm

    nth repub shingo nice. Witty, dershowitz, etc want to keep a debate they've utterly lost, open. They are veritable ants on a mobius strip of lies. As soon as they complete one dismal circuit, they simply begin all over again.

  9. lovelyisraelis says:
    July 3, 2009 at 2:11 pm

    oh..and not to leave out sean…your post was depressing…and most likely, spot on.

  10. Citizen says:
    July 3, 2009 at 7:33 pm

    I agree with all the comments above except Witty's–Dershie is a trial lawyer and he always represents the same side. He has an intellect but its devoted to one-sided advocacy. He's no scholar, just a propagandist in his books. His legal trial lawyer tricks are easy to recognize. That's one thing when there's a judge in an advocacy system court room, or a jury of peers that has been subjected to jury selection process by opposing advocates. It's quite another in a room of gullible or thinly informed students. His basic character is The Bully.

  11. ThorsProvoni says:
    July 4, 2009 at 11:50 am

    To explain the differences between Dershowitz and Peretz with regard to Obama, one must understand the basic split in the "enlightened" nationalist imperialist Zionist faction between the European "progressive" voelkisch racists and the American refugeeists: Peretz belongs to the intellectual tradition of the former while Dershowitz is pretty much a refugeeist. I discuss the distinction briefly in Makdisi Overlooks US Journalistic Nazification and with more detail in Jewish Financial Aggression, Worldwide Economic Nakba. Ultimately as Korzybski said, " A difference which makes no difference is not a difference." The Schroedinger and Heisenberg formulations are quantum mechanics are equivalent. Both Dersh and Peretz are sick twisted murderous genocidal Zionist racists, who belong in jail for at least the next 65 years for aiding and abetting Zionist terrorism.

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