Dershowitz makes case for Israel

NEW YORK, Nov. 13 (JTA) — It was the week between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when a Harvard student knocked on Alan Dershowitz’s door and asked the esteemed law professor for forgiveness. Why? For not speaking up for Israel, the Jewish student explained. He knows he should be more supportive of Israel, but doing so might prevent him from getting dates, Dershowitz said the student told him. The idea that support for Israel could place a student outside the pale infuriated Dershowitz and encouraged him to build support for Israel among college students. In his newest book, “The Case For Israel,” Dershowitz outlines the most frequent accusations against the Jewish state — such as that it’s a colonialist country that displaced and practiced genocide against indigenous Palestinians — and then dissects them with the crisp intelligence that has made him such a successful defense lawyer. In fact, Dershowitz believes, when all countries’ ethical behavior are judged by a single standard, Israel merits praise. With college campuses now fertile ground for pro-Palestinian agitation, Dershowitz has embarked on a tour of campuses throughout North America and England. A civil libertarian famed for defending such high-profile clients as Patty Hearst, O.J. Simpson and Michael Milkin, Dershowitz feels he’s well-qualified to promote Israel’s rights on the college scene — where self-styled “progressives” criticize democratic Israel but remain silent about or even justify authoritarian and repressive Arab regimes. “I do it because I’m a liberal,” Dershowitz told JTA. “By liberal standards, you have to support Israel.” Dershowitz’s efforts comes as pro-Israel activists on campus have harsh words for faculty members. They despair that many faculty have lent their backing to the Palestinian cause, while those that sympathize with Israel largely have remained silent. “The faculty issue continues to be a dogging issue,” says Wayne Firestone, director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, an umbrella group for 26 Jewish organizations. “What you’re trying to reverse is something that started in the 1970s with Arab petro dollars being recycled and turned into academic chairs in universities around the country,” fostering a pro-Arab ideology among faculty. In addition, in the post-Vietnam era it has become fashionable on college campuses to support the perceived underdog in international conflicts — especially when the stronger party is allied with the United States. The solution is not simple. Even if Jewish groups invested in creating academic chairs on Israel, there’s not “an abundant pool of trained academics who could even fill” them, Firestone said, and it’s “going to take time to hopefully train people from different disciplines.” Many pro-Israel faculty consider it a breach of professionalism to speak out on political issues. Most “try not to bring our political views blatantly into either the classroom or to the campus, because in a sense that would vitiate our bona fides as academics who study the area,” said Norman Stillman, the Schusterman/Josey chair of Judaic history at the University of Oklahoma. “Why don’t we all do the Dershowitz thing and jump onto the Israel bandwagon?” asked Tamar Rudavsky, professor of philosophy and director of the Melton Center for Jewish Studies at Ohio State University. “I think there are lots of ways to accomplish that goal,” she said, “and some of our faculty choose less obvious, but maybe ultimately more successful, ways to accomplish what we think is the ultimate goal of a university education — to look at issues from both sides critically.” But Edward Beck, a faculty member at Penn State University, said pro-Israel faculty are “really afraid to come out of the foxholes.” Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, a group Beck created to “educate, network and empower faculty people to advocate for Israel,” has recruited only 550 activists from among the 33,000 faculty members he has solicited. In part, he blames the “established Jewish community.” “Pro-Israel faculty are very ambivalent right now, but they haven’t felt nurtured and supported and surrounded to step forward. They’re in a hostile environment,” Beck said. Firestone acknowledges that many pro-Israel faculty members prefer to stay above the political fray. Dershowitz said that, precisely by taking political positions, pro-Israel professors could serve as role models for students to become involved in public affairs — but a campaign of academic McCarthyism stymies open dialogue, he said. While there’s a “silent plurality of pro-Israel faculty in universities around the country,” there’s a “systematic attack to intimidate” them, Dershowitz said. His own efforts have brought more personal attacks and threats of discipline or termination than any case he has taken on, he says. As a tenured professor who has taught at Harvard for 40 years, he’s not worried. But “what young faculty member wants to endure what I’ve had to endure?” he aks. Each time he speaks up for Israel, Dershowitz said, he gets a batch of “whisper” phone calls from pro-Israel faculty thanking him for his public stance, he told JTA in a recent interview at Ohio State University. Dershowitz visited Ohio State in late October to launch a Chabad-supported program to train Jewish students as “ambassadors” for Israel. Students seemed to welcome Dershowitz’s effort. For Melissa Rosenfield, 20, an Ohio State senior and newly minted “Ambassador for Israel,” the training program was vindication. Rosenfiled recalled how, when she was a freshman taking a 600-person sociology seminar, her professor told the class that Jews provoke the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rosenfield privately asked the professor to change his comments, but he refused. When she earned a D+ in his course — a full grade lower than she expected — she said the professor told her she was a troublemaker. If such a situation occurred today, Rosenfield says, she would tell the professor, “Let me educate the class, let me tell the class what’s up, because I know what’s up.” After attending a private “Ambassadors for Israel” class with Dershowitz, Rosenfield said she feels newly connected to the Jewish state and armed with intelligent arguments. In the training session at the Ohio State Chabad house, Dershowitz quizzed the students on Israel’s democratic merits: On which Israeli Supreme Court case do feminists and fervently Orthodox rabbis come down on the same side? On a case that would block broadcasts of Israel’s Playboy channel, Dershowitz told the crowd. Israel makes mistakes, he told the students, “but in general has been on the right side of history.” He warned, too, that “Israel-baiting doesn’t come free” — it paves the way for harming Israelis. Later that night, at the entrance to the student union where Dershowitz addressed hundreds of students and community members, protestors passed out leaflets calling him a bigot. Inside, Dershowitz sought to take the case for Israel one step further — to make support for the Jewish state not just acceptable on campus, but downright cool. “Date a Zionist!” he urged students.