In a particularly odious recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Alan Dershowitz, advocate of torture and Israel, wrote that “…44 years … [ago] … the Arab states attacked Israel in 1967 and Israel occupied some lands of the invading nations.” (Click here for full article.) I am sure that I do not have to inform MW readers that this is complete BS. Maybe someone should refer Alan and the WSJ to the book Michael Oren, current Israeli Ambassador to the US, wrote about the 1967 war, or to the speech that Menachem Begin (see middle of page) made in 1982 in which he called ’67 a “war of choice.”
I suppose Dershowitz really knows all this, but if the judge (or the WSJ) lets him get away with it, why not lie? In the end he believes it will get his client off the hook, and that’s his job, right? Wrong. He should play by the rules and he is not going to get Israel off the hook, even if he doesn’t.
How about that second clause in the quotation above? Oh, there was this little matter of occupying some lands, no big deal.
And then there is the old recycling of the “Barak’s generous offer” argument. How many more times do we need to hear this canard? But by far the worst is Dershowitz’s mockery of Palestinian suffering and tragedy, when he says, “Yet the current Palestinian leadership still insists on calling the self-inflicted wounds caused by its rejection of a two-state solution the “nakba,” meaning the catastrophe.” This is hate speech — vicious, hurtful, mean-spirited and false. How could any political decision possibly justify the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland?
Alan Dershowitz has successfully defended Claus Von Bulow, Mike Tyson and OJ Simpson in the United States Criminal Court. Israel is an even more difficult client, more guilty and with a less appealing courtroom demeanor. And the court of world public opinion is less prone to ignore Dershowitz’s antics and dishonesty.
It is clear that Dershowitz is a demagogue who reflects the basest instincts of the defenders of Israeli criminal policy. The WSJ shows a lack of journalistic integrity when it allows Dershowitz to claim that “the Arabs attacked Israel in 1967” when the historical record unequivocally shows that to be untrue. But to allow Dershowitz to belittle the Palestinian tragedy of 1948 is allowing the newspaper to be used for the vilest of purposes.
