Alan Dershowitz: the Israel you don't hear about
October 25, 2003

The following article by Alan Dershowitz -- author of the important new book, The Case for Israel -- is the type of critique that needs to be passed around. Yes, Israel is stuck in a conflict with the Palestinians, but why forget how much it has accomplished? In absolute terms, Israel is prospering, and it has bright future. Critics can tar it with any -ism under the sun, but that does not make it true, or change the fact that Israel has struggled to become a powerful, wealthy, advanced industrial state. It is also a liberal democratic one that recognizes the Palestinian right to a national homeland, is pained by Palestinian suffering, and seeks peace with them and all other neighbors.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is -- in terms of total casualties -- not in the top ten worst conflicts in the world today, not even close. Yet, it garners more attention than the rest combined. It is, as we've repeatedly considered on this listserv, a strange phenomenon. There are four primary causes:

1) Israel's democratic openness: it allows journalists, film-makers, activists, non-governmental organizations and observers freedom to roam, interview, document, even when they abuse such rights, like with the egregious Jenin debacle. Half of the facts employed in criticisms come from B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization -- if Israel didn't allow the group access to information and monitoring rights -- the norm in the repressive region -- they won't have these facts (and it's great that they do). At any rate, the most devastating conflicts in the world today, like Chechnya, Sudan, Algeria, and Congo don't have free access to reporters, so you don't hear about it. Since 1998, 3.3 million have died in the Congo because of war -- a thousand times that total casualties of Israeli-Palestinian fighting -- but where again is Congo on a map? Who's fighting again?

2) Modern anti-Israelism has clear roots in the efforts of the Soviet Union, beginning in the late 1960s, and continues today as the Marxist-inspired left continues to make the bulk of criticisms against Israel in America and Europe. The U.S. backed Israel, the Soviet Union backed the Arab states -- now, the later superpower is gone, but not its legacy of animosity towards Israel. The Soviet Union's influence explains the UN's cuckoo proceedings, beginning with its crude Marxism that taught that the Third World states -- the Asian-Arab-African bloc -- were poor because the West was rich; the nonaligned states went after the U.S., and by extension, Israel; they gave the Soviets a free ride (for instance, they criticized "foreign forces," not Soviets, in Afghanistan in the 1980s).

In the 1970s, the nonaligned states trashed the spirit of the UN: they barred Israel from the previously nonpolitical UNESCO, gave the PLO observer status at the height of its terrorist campaign, and declared Zionism to be a form of racism, the only instance when the UN actually put itself on record as favoring the destruction of a member-state (and which according to Anton LaGuardia, the British journalist, first appeared in Pravda, the leading Soviet newspaper, in 1968). During the 1970s, more countries had diplomatic recognition of the PLO than Israel. Through far too many denunciations, these countries forever forfeited the UN's capacity to act as peacemaker. The latest UN vote condemned the security barrier: 144-4, opposed only by the U.S., Israel, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands. That all these countries, without any real stake in the outcome, vote this way, pro forma, consistently -- and remember, this is an assembly that never brought up issues like, say, Pol Pot's 1.7-million-victim Cambodian genocide -- belies its tiresome, hollow, Third World-centric, anti-Western orientation. But that's really not news.

3) Third are the efforts of Arab nations in provoking hostility towards Israel in political, economic, diplomatic, athletic, cultural spheres. Israel is one of the issues that everyone there can gleefully agree upon, whether one is a Marxist, mullah or nationalist. It exists at the highest levels in foreign ministries, and in the streets, like in the big Egyptian pop hit "I Hate Israel" -- it almost seems like part of the cultural fabric. Of course, not everyone in the region has a problem with Israel, but tens of millions do. Here's a revealing question: while there are dozens of groups among the world's thirteen million Jews that declare their solidarity with Palestinians, why is there not one visible Arab group that expresses solidarity with the Israelis? Where is the Palestinian peace movement to urge compromise and reconciliation?

Arab elites use Israel to deflect attention from their own illegitimate governance, but more accurately, they simply cannot criticize others without criticizing themselves. Condemnations of dictatorship, repression, economic mismanagement, corruption, cronyism are equally applicable to all. Twenty-two Arab nations, twenty-two autocracies.

According to resolution in a recent Arab summit not long ago, the Arab League is reactivating the boycott against Israel. The League actually has something called the Central Office for the Boycott of Israel, headquartered in Damascus. The boycott, it should be noted, began in 1951. Arab officials say its costs Israel billions; Israeli economists say something like 400 million since the 1950s. Remember that the combined GDP of the twenty-two Arab countries is less than Spain's, and many of Israel's leading exports -- computer, communications, biotech, medical -- are hardly directed towards Arab markets. Nor does Israel need Arab-produced imports, of which economists say there is not one that is competitive on world markets; the boycott probably hurts the boycotters them more than the other way around.

4) Finally, realpolitik: a country faces widely different risks and opportunities when dealing with a tiny country of six million and an Arab world of 270 million, backed by fifty-seven Muslim-majority states. The Arab and Muslim Middle East happens to be in possession of two-thirds of the world's known conventional oil reserves, produce the majority of extremists that threaten the West, serve as the birthplace of large expatriate populations, most of whom live in Europe, and constitute large, import-loving markets just across the Mediterranean. The consequences of offending Arab and Muslim political sensibilities versus those of a few million Israelis make it far more pragmatic for many governments to side against Israel, or at least mute their reservations, European-style.

Anti-Semitism plays a role, too, but that's for another email. It's important enough here to note how alive and well it is in the Muslim world especially: Prime Minister Muhammad Mahathir of Malaysia's comments last week the Tenth Islamic Summit spoke of Jewish control of the world, the stock-and-trade of Nazi propaganda, and half his speech was directly towards Israel. The Prime Minister, curiously not unlike bin Laden, envisaged Islam locked in combat with the Jews -- "We are up against a people who think," and spoke of the need to "fight" them to achieve a "final victory." Everyone applauded.

Read "Democracy, freedom and rights - the Israel you don't hear about," by Alan Dershowitz, The Sunday Times, September 28, 2003.