Exile and the prophetic: My encounter with Alan Dershowitz — sort of

This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

You have to love Alan Dershowitz even if you can’t stand him.

How Dershowitz survives at Harvard is an amazing feat. Then again, judging from aspects of Harvard’s history, perhaps it isn’t so amazing after all.

Especially daunting are proposals Dershowitz has made over the years. One that stands out in my memory was his call for collective punishment against Palestinians for suicide bombings.  There are also his post-September 11th tirades on torture.  Though Dershowitz is somewhat out of the legal concept loop, he remains a stalwart at the Harvard Law School.

Haaretz reports that Dershowitz forwarded another proposal, this time for Middle East peace, in a meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, who is in town for a United Nations meeting.  Abbas has reportedly signed on to it. 

I hesitate to dignify his plan by repeating it here.  Between us, I think it should be named:  “The Most Retro and Ridiculous Peace Plan That Has Ever Been Proposed Over and Over Again for Decades.”

Dershowitz is the enabler of enablers.  He has the manner and ego that befit his enabler personae.  So instead of repeating his proposal that leads to more of Israel stalling and land grabbing, I relate a story that might shed some light on our famous Harvard academic.

I have never met Dershowitz. I do have the distinction of being published by him – sort of.

Some years ago I received a fax from Dershowitz asking me if I would contribute an essay to a collection of reflections on Israel.  The title: “What Israel Means to Me.”  I was astounded he asked me. Initially, I thought it was a mistake.  I figured Dershowitz wouldn’t know me from Adam and if he did know of me and what I stood for, by inviting me he would have been casting the widest net ever invented. 

Then, again, I had to give him credit.  He did ask me – sort of.

I decided to test the waters.  That evening, I wrote a short essay and sent it off in the mail the next day.  I didn’t expect to hear from him again.

A year or so later, there it was, the book, sent to my address, with my essay included.   Dershowitz came through. 

I thought more highly of Dershowitz for including me – sort of.

“Sort of” is more important to this story than you might think at the outset.

You see, after I got over my amazement, I was quite interested to see how I was presented.  Under the title of each essay, there was a short description of the author.  Mine started on the upswing, citing a few books I wrote and my academic title.  It also mentioned I was a supporter of Palestinian rights. There were eighty authors.  As I remember it, I was the only author directly identified with Palestinians.  So far, so good.

It was correct to associate me with Palestinian rights.  However, the biographical description then identified me as Board member of a Palestinian Right of Return organization. I wasn’t a member of the Board Dershowitz identified me with.  I hadn’t heard of the organization.

On the inside of the book, there was an email address you could communicate through regarding the book.  Since there was an error in my biographical information, I emailed my complaint.  I didn’t expect a response from Dershowitz.  That was for one of his student assistants.  I didn’t get one from either. 

The reason is telling.  This is where a fascinating story unfolds.

The person who responded to me worked at the publisher’s – so I thought.  Being quite concerned about the error, she suggested we speak by phone.  Meanwhile, she set out to find how such an error was made.  She asked “her” research associate who reported to her the next day. As it turns out, my biographical information was gathered from my Wikipedia page. 

It was 2007 and I’m a late computer bloomer.  I had never looked at my Wikipedia page and hardly knew what one was.  I knew that there were controversies about Wikipedia’s accuracy, especially related to controversial authors and political figures. 

I was disconcerted that my biographical information would be gleaned from such a site. I was alarmed when I finally read my Wikipedia page. 

I discovered that there was very little biographical information on my biographical page.  Rather, I encountered a war over my being – that had little or nothing to do with my being. 

On my Wikipedia page I am a savior of this and that. I am also the vilest creature that ever walked the planet.  These aren’t stated as contrasting views; they are interspersed sentence by sentence.  Since that first encounter with Wikipedia, I’ve learned that people hack and counter-hack into my page, each one countering the last who hacked into it. 

At that point I knew only that my Wikipedia page didn’t make sense.  I asked myself how Dershowitz’s Harvard student assistant could rely on such convoluted “information.”

Then I began to piece together the game I had become part of.  You see, like his latest peace proposal, Dershowitz’s book wasn’t original in the strictest meaning of the term.  As far as I could tell, he had minimal involvement with the volume that carried his name.

Dershowitz had published me – sort of.

During further investigation, I learned this was a “packaged” book, contracted out for editing.  How this works I still don’t know exactly.  Let’s just say that in a packaged book the author’s name is used for marketing purposes with minimal or no involvement from the author himself.  In sum, it’s a publicity and income generating scheme for the “author” and the “packager.”

As far as I can tell the substantive editor was a freelancer or worked in publishing rather than academia.  She hired her own researcher.  Where her researcher came from and what his credentials are I have no idea.  She was sorry for the error that was now appearing in Barnes and Nobles around the country.

True, I’m no Norman Finkelstein.  I’m not interested in pursuing Dershowitz to the ends of the earth.  The ends of the earth are a dead-end, as we now know. 

But since Dershowitz is in the news, I thought I’d share my “encounter” with the man of many proposals.  That also go nowhere.