A friend has directed me to the following report in the Yale Daily News on Alan Dershowitz’s visit to the school in October. I wish I had the transcript of his talk; but it is significant that Dershowitz makes the same analogy I have insisted on making since my visit to Gaza, to the Warsaw Ghetto.
Dershowitz then denied that there is a humanitarian situation in Gaza. One student challenged him, citing examples of limitations on fruits and vegetables as one of many examples of such a crisis. Dershowitz dismissed this as superfluous, brazenly stating that the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto would have been glad to have such a range of choice, and adding that this range was probably greater than in Martha’s Vineyard. The coarseness of his joke combined with the chuckles and applause in response led one student to leave the room in tears. There is no greater way to profane the memory of those at Warsaw than to use their suffering as a way — as a rhetorical weapon — to justify living conditions in Gaza as somehow better than the former.
The fact that Dershowitz is using the analogy to a different end than I do is not as significant as the fact that his mind leaps to Warsaw. His comment reveals the huge psychic wound that the Holocaust has generated in Jews and, more important, reveals the belief that the Palestinians deserve to suffer for the sins of the Nazis–that Gaza is just retribution. (On a related note: Dershowitz at Brandeis spoke of the ’67 borders as "Auschwitz borders"; because they made the Jews vulnerable to Nazis.)
The Yale Daily News report was written by Yasmin Zaher, Jordan Laris Cohen, Aminah Zaghab and Alexandra Dennet.
