In this interview with Jerusalem Post, Dershowitz says that the left wants to revolutionize 1948– end Israel/create one democracy in Israel/Palestine– and that makes his 80 percent case for Israel (80 percent good, that means!) easier. Notice below that he uses strawmen Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky. But both men are for the two-state solution! Chomsky has vestiges of Zionist idealism… And I believe many on the left would accept the existence of Israel if it ceases to be an occupier practicing Jim Crow against an ethnic-religious minority. But Israel doesn’t seem to want to give up those practices; and, putting on my realist hat, the terrible reality is that it’s one state right now, how do you go about creating a viable Palestinian state? Dershowitz of course notions such a thing. The notions never end, and meanwhile the world gets Kosovo, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan– many other states. Excerpt begins with Dershowitz’s description of a hasbara corps on college campuses, something like Haim Saban’s scheme. Second question gets to his misrepresentations of Finkelstein and Chomsky.
I make what I call the 80 percent case on colleges. I don’t support the settlements, or all Israel’s policies, so I think I do have credibility…. Look , I need help. I want more young people, I want people of color, I want people who are Asian, people who are Latino. I want to broaden the support for Israel. I think it’s very important that the elder generation, what we colloquially call the elders of Zion – me and Irwin Cotler and Elie Wiesel and others of my generation – can’t be the only spokespeople for Israel on university campuses. We need a lot more help from young people and a more diverse group of people. We need more women making the case of Israel.That’s why I’ve had a proposal for years – although no one has listened to me in Israel – to create a structure for making the 80% case for Israel that is outside the government, that is much like the Bank of Israel, that has independence, that is staffed only by professionals, no political people, that could use people like [author] Amos Oz to make the case for Israel, people who are critical of particular Israeli polices. Their job is not to defend the government of Israel but the State of Israel, to brand it, to make it more widely accepted and better understood. And that would be staffed with young people, people with very diverse backgrounds and targeted to very particular audiences.
Can you win over people from the radical left or is it more about stopping the fringes winning over the mainstream?
No. I’ll tell you a story that will help illustrate it. I spoke at [the University of California at] Irvine about a year ago… before [Israeli Ambassador] Michael Oren was shut down… they tried to shut him down. They shut me down too; they were screaming, but I just spoke over them. You could see that there were three groups in the audience. A group on my left that were wearing blue and white, some of them were wearing kippot, some of them were waving an Israeli flag. There was a group on my right that were wearing Palestinian garb, anti-Israel shirts, and a very large group in the middle.
So I started off by saying, “How many of you identify yourselves as pro-Israel,” hands went up. “How many would identify yourselves as pro-Palestine,” hands went up. “I want to ask the pro-Israel people, how many of you accept a Palestinian state, a non-terrorist state, a demilitarized state living side by side in peace with Israel.” Every hand went up. I said, “I want to now turn to the pro-Palestinians. How many of you would accept a non-settlement, non-expansionist, peaceful state living side by side.” There was some mumbling, some discussion, but not a single hand went up.
I won the debate right at that point with the 800 or 900 in the middle. They understood this was not pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. It was pro-Israel on one side, and anti, anti, anti on the other side. And so you don’t try ever to convert Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein or the extremists on the Left. They won’t listen to reason. You only try to use them in a very non-Kantian way. To use these extremists to help you win over the middle, to win over the hearts and minds of the people who have an open mind.
