- What do you do when somebody wants to publish a book
that says you're completely wrong? If you're Alan Dershowitz, the prominent
Harvard law professor, and the book is Norman Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah:
On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, you write the
governor of California and suggest that he intervene with the publisher--because
the publisher is the University of California Press, which conceivably
might be subject to the power of the governor.
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- Schwarzenegger, showing unusual wisdom, declined to act.
The governor's legal affairs secretary wrote Dershowitz, "You have
asked for the Governor's assistance in preventing the publication of this
book," but "he is not inclined to otherwise exert influence in
this case because of the clear, academic freedom issue it presents."
In a phone interview Dershowitz denied writing to the Governor, declaring,
"My letter to the Governor doesn't exist." But when pressed on
the issue, he said, "It was not a letter. It was a polite note."
-
- Old-timers in publishing said they'd never heard of another
case where somebody tried to get a governor to intervene in the publication
of a book. "I think it's a first," said Andre Schiffrin, managing
director at Pantheon Books for twenty-eight years and then founder and
director of the New Press. Lynne Withey, director of the University of
California Press, where she has been for nineteen years, said, "I've
never heard of such a case in California."
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- But if you're Alan Dershowitz, you don't stop when the
governor declines. You try to get the president of the University of California
to intervene with the press. You get a prominent law firm to send threatening
letters to the counsel to the university regents, to the university provost,
to seventeen directors of the press and to nineteen members of the press's
faculty editorial committee. A typical letter, from Dershowitz's attorney
Rory Millson of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, describes "the press's
decision to publish this book" as "wholly illegitimate"
and "part of a conspiracy to defame" Dershowitz. It concludes,
"The only way to extricate yourself is immediately to terminate all
professional contact with this full-time malicious defamer." Dershowitz's
own letter to members of the faculty editorial committee calls on them
to "reconsider your decision" to recommend publication of the
book.
-
- Why would a prominent First Amendment advocate take such
an action? Dershowitz told Publishers Weekly that "my goal has never
been to stop publication of this book." He told me in an e-mail, "I
want Finkelstein's book to be published, so that it can be demolished in
the court of public opinion." He told Publishers Weekly his only purpose
in writing the people at the University of California Press was "to
eliminate as many of the demonstrable falsehoods as possible" from
the book before it was published.
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- Everyone knows who Alan Dershowitz is--the famed Harvard
professor, part of the O.J. Simpson defense team, author of the number-one
bestseller Chutzpah, portrayed by Ron Silver in the film Reversal of Fortune,
about his successful defense of accused wife-murderer Klaus von Bülow.
He's also one of the most outspoken defenders of Israel, especially in
his 2003 book The Case for Israel; it reached number twelve on the New
York Times bestseller list. That's the book Finkelstein challenges in Beyond
Chutzpah.
-
- Norman Finkelstein is not so famous. The son of Holocaust
survivors, he is an assistant professor of political science at DePaul
University in Chicago. He's the often embattled author of several books,
of which the best known is The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation
of Jewish Suffering--an exposé of what he calls "the blackmail
of Swiss banks." It was originally published by Verso in 2000, with
an expanded second edition in 2003, and has been translated into seventeen
languages. The book was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by the
distinguished Holocaust historian Omer Bartov, who holds a chair at Brown
University; he wrote that the book "is filled with precisely the kind
of shrill hyperbole that Finkelstein rightly deplores in much of the current
media hype over the Holocaust; it is brimming with the same indifference
to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics and dubious
contextualizations; and it oozes with the same smug sense of moral and
intellectual superiority." (A positive review, written by Neve Gordon,
appeared in these pages on November 13, 2000.)
-
- Finkelstein's Holocaust Industry, however, has some prominent
supporters, and not only leftists like Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn.
Most significant is Raul Hilberg, the semi-official dean of Holocaust studies
and author of the classic The Destruction of the European Jews, who wrote
of The Holocaust Industry, "I would now say in retrospect that he
was actually conservative, moderate and that his conclusions are trustworthy....
I am by no means the only one who, in the coming months or years, will
totally agree with Finkelstein's breakthrough."
-
- Dershowitz did not see the manuscript for Beyond Chutzpah
before writing his letters, which were based instead on statements Finkelstein
had made in interviews and lectures. Dershowitz's attorney objected first
of all to Finkelstein's statements that Dershowitz "almost certainly
didn't write [The Case for Israel], and perhaps didn't even read it prior
to publication." He also objected to the charge that Dershowitz is
guilty of plagiarism--more on that later--and that "every substantive
sentence" in the Dershowitz book "is fraudulent." Finkelstein
has been telling this to anyone who will listen, and wrote as much in an
e-mail to me: "I devote some 200 pages to documenting that every substantive
fact in the book is a flat-out lie." (Emphasis in original.)
-
- Now that the "uncorrected pages" of Beyond
Chutzpah are being sent out to reviewers, it's possible to see what Finkelstein's
book actually says. (Disclosure: A senior editor of The Nation served as
a freelance editor of Beyond Chutzpah.) The claim that Dershowitz didn't
write The Case for Israel has been removed--the UC Press explained in a
statement accompanying review copies that "Professor Finkelstein's
only claim on the issue was speculative. He wondered why Alan Dershowitz,
in recorded appearances after his book was published, seemed to know so
little about the contents of his own book. We felt this weakened the argument
and distracted from the central issues of the book. Finkelstein agreed."
-
- But the rest of the claims Dershowitz and his attorney
railed against are still there: Beyond Chutzpah describes Dershowitz's
Case for Israel as "among the most spectacular academic frauds ever
published on the Israel-Palestine conflict." In Dershowitz's book,
"It's difficult to find a single claim...that's not either based on
mangling a reputable source or referencing a preposterous one, or simply
pulled out of the air." He charges that Dershowitz "plagiarizes
large swaths" of his book from Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial,
whose scholarship Finkelstein had debunked in an earlier book. The introduction
concludes by calling The Case for Israel "rubbish."
-
- The body of Beyond Chutzpah shows Finkelstein to be an
indefatigable researcher with a forensic ability to take apart other people's
arguments. The core of the book challenges Dershowitz's defense of Israel's
human rights record by citing the findings of mainstream groups, including
Amnesty International, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem and
Human Rights Watch.
-
- The most important part of the book examines Israel's
treatment of Palestinian civilians during the second intifada, which began
in September 2000. Since then Israel has killed three Palestinians for
every Israeli killed. Dershowitz tries to defend this ratio, writing that
"when only innocent civilians are counted, significantly more Israelis
than Palestinians have been killed." But Finkelstein cites Amnesty
International's conclusion that "the vast majority of those killed
and injured on both sides have been unarmed civilians and bystanders."
That means Israel has killed something like three times as many unarmed
civilians and bystanders as Palestinians have.
-
- Dershowitz has a second argument: While Palestinian terrorists
have targeted Israeli civilians intentionally, the killing of Palestinian
civilians by the Israel Defense Forces is "unintended," "inadvertent"
and "caused accidentally," because the IDFfollows international
law, which requires the protection of civilian noncombatants. For example,
Dershowitz writes, the IDF tries to use rubber bullets "and aims at
the legs whenever possible" in a policy designed to "reduce fatalities."
But Finkelstein's evidence to the contrary is convincing: Amnesty International
reported in 2001 that "the overwhelming majority of cases of unlawful
killings and injuries in Israel and the Occupied Territories have been
committed by the IDF using excessive force." Amnesty cited the use
of "helicopters in punitive rocket attacks where there was no imminent
danger to life." As for the rubber bullets, Amnesty reported in 2002
that the IDF "regularly" used them against demonstrators who
were children "at distances considerably closer than the minimum permitted
range...and the pattern of injury indicates that IDF practice has not been
to aim at the legs of demonstrators, as the majority of injuries suffered
by children from rubber-coated bullets are to the upper body and the head."
-
- Another of Dershowitz's examples of Israeli protection
of Palestinian civilians concerns Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh. Dershowitz
writes that on several occasions, the army passed up opportunities to attack
him "because he was with his wife or children." But in July 2002
an Israeli F-16 dropped a one-ton bomb on Shehadeh's apartment building
in Gaza City, killing Shehadeh and fourteen Palestinian civilians, nine
of whom were children.
-
- Most of Beyond Chutzpah consists of these kinds of juxtapositions--arguments
by Dershowitz on Israeli practices of torture, assassinations, treatment
of Palestinian children, and water and land rights, refuted by documentation
from human rights organizations. The cumulative effect is a devastating
portrait of widespread Israeli violations of human rights principles and
international law.
-
- Finkelstein has won support for his book from leading
scholars, whose statements appear in the book's publicity materials: Baruch
Kimmerling, who holds a chair in sociology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
and whose book on Palestinian history was published by Harvard University
Press, calls Beyond Chutzpah "the most comprehensive, systematic and
well documented work of its kind." Sara Roy of the Center for Middle
Eastern Studies at Harvard, whose book on political Islam in Palestine
has just been published by Princeton University Press, calls Beyond Chutzpah
"a vigorous, intelligent, succinct and powerfully argued analysis."
Avi Shlaim, professor of international relations at Oxford, calls it a
work of "erudition, originality, spark, [and] meticulous attention
to detail." Daniel Boyarin, professor of Near Eastern studies at UC
Berkeley, calls the book "accurate, well-written, and devastatingly
important."
-
- The argument about plagiarism, which has figured prominently
in the pre-publication controversy over the book, has been relegated to
an appendix. Finkelstein's evidence has already been presented in these
pages by Alexander Cockburn and debated by Dershowitz in letters exchanges
with Cockburn [October 13, October 27 and December 15, 2003]; thus it can
be summarized here briefly. In the Dershowitz book, twenty-two out of fifty-two
quotations and endnotes in the first two chapters "match almost exactly"
material quoted in Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial--including the placement
of ellipses in quotations. Beyond Chutzpah has an eleven-page chart comparing
these quotations. They are virtually identical. But Dershowitz never acknowledges
Peters as the source for these quotations; instead, he cites the original
sources that appear in Peters's footnotes.
-
- The official policy on plagiarism at Harvard, where Dershowitz
teaches, is clear on this issue: "Plagiarism is passing off a source's
information, ideas, or words as your own by omitting to cite them."
Dershowitz in an e-mail made three arguments in his defense: first, for
three of the quotations in question, "I have incontrovertible evidence
that I was using those quotations in the 1970s in debates," and thus
"I did not originally find them in the Peters book." Second,
although hedid not cite Peters for the quotations listed by Finkelstein,
he did cite her as the source of "at least eight" others. As
to why he failed to cite Peters for the quotations in question, Dershowitz
acknowledges that he found them originally in Peters, but "I then
went to the Harvard library, read them, and cited them in the original,"
without indicating that he found them first in the Peters book--a citation
practice that he (and some of his defenders) regards as proper.
-
- But Finkelstein somehow obtained a copy of the uncorrected
page proofs of The Case for Israel containing some devastating footnotes,
which he reproduces in Beyond Chutzpah--including one that says "Holly
Beth: cite sources on pp. 160, 485, 486 fns 141-145." Holly Beth Billington
is credited on Dershowitz's acknowledgments page as one of his research
assistants; the pages to which he refers her are from Peters's book. The
note doesn't tell Holly Beth that Dershowitz is going to the Harvard library
to check the original sources, nor does it tell Holly Beth that she should
go to the library to check; it says she should "cite" them--copy
the citations from Peters into his footnote, presumably to give readers
the impression that he consulted the original source. That's not plagiarism
in the sense of failing to put in quotation marks the words of somebody
else, and the Harvard administration has taken no action in response to
Finkelstein's charge. But it's clearly dishonest for Dershowitz to have
passed off another scholar's research as his own.
-
- The Finkelstein book was originally under contract to
the New Press, and Dershowitz claims he succeeded in persuading the New
Press to drop it. He told me in an e-mail that after he wrote the New Press
pointing out "numerous factual inaccuracies in Finkelstein's manuscript,
New Press cancelled it's [sic] contract with him." New Press publisher
Colin Robinson says that's not true: "We did not cancel the agreement
to publish Norman's book and never wanted to do so." Finkelstein said
the same thing in an e-mail: "I was the one who pulled out of the
contract when publication was delayed due to Dershowitz's letters. In fact,
Colin urged me to reconsider the decision and stay with New Press."
-
- Now, despite Dershowitz's best efforts, UC Press is publishing
the book--to the great credit of director Withey and history editor Niels
Hooper. The book is appearing in August rather than June--because, according
to the press statement, "editing and production took longer than we
hoped." Hooper explained that California published the book not as
part of a personal feud between Finkelstein and Dershowitz but because
the chapters on human rights "show what is going on in the Occupied
Territories and Israel." Dershowitz is relevant as a prominent defender
of Israeli policies and practices.
-
- Will Dershowitz now sue for libel in federal court in
Boston, or in London, where the law makes it easier for libel plaintiffs
to win--as his attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore has threatened?
That would be another shameful act by a man who claims to be a defender
of free speech.
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- http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050711&s=wiener
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