Frank J. Menetrez: So there we have it:
Finkelstein claims to have proven, in Beyond Chutzpah {U.S., U.K.}, that The Case for Israel {U.S., U.K.} is riddled with misrepresentations of fact.
Dershowitz, in turn, claims that everything Finkelstein has ever written is “false,” “preposterous,” and “discredited.”
And Dershowitz has prepared a list of the “clearest and most egregious instances” of Finkelstein’s dishonesty (hereafter the “List”), which builds on the evidence previously compiled in his Case Study.
If we examine Dershowitz’s List and Case Study {112kb.pdf, source}, then, we might be able to figure out who, if anyone, is right.
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Prior to publication, I emailed drafts of this article to both Finkelstein and Dershowitz for comment.
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Beyond Chutzpah purports to refute virtually every aspect of The Case for Israel’s account of Israel’s human rights record and the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Consequently, the most striking feature of Dershowitz’s List is that not one of the numbered items on the List is taken from Beyond Chutzpah.
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From these facts it appears reasonable to conclude that, with the possible exception of the plagiarism issue, Dershowitz has been unable to find a single false statement in Beyond Chutzpah.
And it follows that, as far as Dershowitz himself can now determine, his own book The Case for Israel is full of falsehoods concerning Israel’s human rights record and the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, while Finkelstein’s book contains none.
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Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial (1984) ... argues that at the time of Israel’s founding in 1948, many of the Arab inhabitants of the areas that became the state of Israel were actually recent immigrants—they and their ancestors had not lived there “from time immemorial.”
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Consequently, Peters’ book has been rejected as worthless by the scholarly community around the world, including in Israel.
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Given the well-known scholarly repudiation of Peters’ book, no scholar would rely on it, any more than a scholar would rely on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
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[Dershowitz] relied upon a bestselling book that has been condemned by the international scholarly community.
Even if his citations to Peters were impeccable — even if he is right that they are in fact impeccable — it is still true that he repackaged material from Peters’ discredited bestseller, From Time Immemorial, and added to it his own imprimatur, as a Harvard law professor, in his bestseller The Case for Israel.
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Either he knew that Peters’ book was discredited or he didn’t.
If he did know it, then he intentionally used a thoroughly disreputable source.
If he didn’t know it, then he was too ignorant of mainstream scholarly work on Israel/Palestine to deserve to be taken seriously.
Either way, by relying on Peters in The Case for Israel and expressly defending her in The Case for Peace, he took himself outside the realm of serious, informed discussion of the topic on which he was writing.
When I started to research and write this article, I intended to evaluate every charge that Dershowitz’s List levels against Finkelstein. ...
But I have abandoned that project.
Here’s why:
The first item on the List is entitled “Burt Neuborne.”
The first sentence after the title reads:
“Finkelstein actually tried to get Burt Neuborne, a professor of law at NYU and one of the country’s top civil liberties and Supreme Court advocates, disbarred.”
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But the only reasonable inference from the available evidence is that the charge, interpreted in the way that any ordinary reader of the List would interpret it, is fraudulent, because Dershowitz has no evidence to support it.
On that basis, I concluded that the first sentence of the first item on Dershowitz’s List of the “clearest and most egregious instances” of Finkelstein’s lies is itself a fraud.
And on that basis I concluded that my original project — to sift through and evaluate every single claim on Dershowitz’s List — should be abandoned.
My work on the project, however incomplete, does nonetheless raise the following interesting question:
If this is the best that an adversary as clever and dedicated as Dershowitz can come up with, how could Finkelstein possibly not deserve tenure?
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Note: Frank Menetrez was interviewed, about his investigation, on May 18 2007 (KPFA.ctl). –CJHjr
