"Tony Judt is in favor of the complete dissolution of the state of Israel... the total dissolution of the state of Israel," said Dershowitz.

Second, Dershowitz's characterization doesn't seem fair to me; he is using eliminationist rhetoric to suggest that Judt is a kind of Nazi or antisemite, who would sweep Jews into the sea. In fact, if you read Judt's groundbreaking essay, you understand that his position is being caricatured. Yes, Dershowitz is right; Judt's vision would result in the end of the Jewish state. But his tone is pained, realistic, and even idealistic: it is a recovery of the old Judah Magnes/Elmer Berger/Anglo-American Inquiry Commission position that partition is racialist, that Arab and Jew should learn to live together in historic Palestine—because god knows, they haven't done a very good job of living with partition.  read more »

On first reading, my chief response is (surprise) positive: the paper humanizes Walt and Mearsheimer, the voice is warmer and more intimate than their stunning original of last March. You have the feeling here of two minds struggling through a difficult subject. For instance, the authors say that it was former Harvard Dean Walt's decision—not Harvard's—to remove the Harvard logo from the on-line Kennedy School version of the original after newspapers began referring to the paper as "the Harvard study," but that given the great symbolism attached to this gesture, it was a mistake, and illustrates the saying, no good deed goes unpunished.

Something else that humanizes the document is the section at the end titled, "Our Mistakes." O.K., a number of these are penny-ante, still the tone is humbling. "...there are places where our choice of words could have been clearer or more nuanced... although we went to some lengths to demonstrate that we harbor no animus towards Israel or its more ardent defenders in America, it is possible that some of our discussion did not make this point as forcefully as would have liked. First and foremost, we regret having capitalized the word 'Lobby' in our original article..." Etc.

But now the anger over their publication seems to be dissipating, and what they had hoped for is coming to pass: a discussion of the ideas on their merits. Myself, the March day that a friend first emailed me W&M's paper and I read it through at my desk with my eyelids glued open was a great day. I had long felt constrained by the lobby, it had limited my work and freedom. W&M had a liberating effect.

It is with real pain that I note that Brandeis is yielding to what amounts to an academic boycott of a former President for criticizing Israel.... We look like mini-Joe McCarthys and we are all being hurt by this...

Israelis themselves just laugh. How is it, they ask, that they can debate Israel-Palestine with absolute freedom but we Americans are afraid to...

Invite Carter to speak. Alone. Like any other speaker. Your students can handle it. Trust me. Trust them.

But watch out. The success of Carter's book, the contract to Walt/Mearsheimer, the Corrie run at the Minetta Lane, the Iraq Study Group's hail Mary to Syria—the world is changing.

My generaton of Jews was too young to fight against Nazism or for Israeli independence, too American to make aliyah (emigrate to Israel), too comfortable to put our bodies on the line for anything Jewish. Instead, we observed, contributed... We became part of what is perhaps the most effective lobbying and fund-raising effort in the history of democracy. [my emphasis]

I say shocking because when Walt and Mearsheimer published their bombshell paper on the power of the Israel lobby in March, the Harvard Law Professor was their leading attacker. He said the scholars had "destroyed their professional reputations" (a disgraceful statement that Zbig Brzezinski would appear to include when he talks in Foreign Policy of "self-demeaning" attacks by critics of Walt and Mearsheimer) and three weeks after their paper was published, rushed a response onto Harvard's Kennedy School website, saying that speed was "essential" "because of the attention the original paper has received."

But in criticism of Dershowitz, a lot of his rebuttal rejects the idea of a vaunted Israel lobby. "The so-called lobby," he calls it, and asks, contemptuously, "Who belongs to 'the Lobby?'" He says that "there are many lobbies that support diverse approaches to the Arab-Israeli conflict," and generally, "thousands of other groups that maintain powerful lobbies in Washington." Yes, AIPAC "to its credit, has been an influential lobby." But he presents AIPAC as the Israel lobby. Everyone else who supports Israel in government and the press and thinktanks does so because they all independently believe that Israel and the U.S. share interests.

I've two responses to Dershowitz's hypocrisy. The first is that he's an advocate, and a great one, a verbal swordsman. He intimidates people (I remember talking to a pro-Palestinian professor of the Classics not long ago who begged me not to use his name, lest Dersh go after him), but he's not reflective. The guy was a high school and college debating star in Brooklyn; he's still that, rushing a thrown-together argument to the public within days of Walt and Mearsheimer's 18-months-long-prepared article, so he can do his flamenco in their spotlight. I have that disconnect with Dersh one has with many lawyers: The contradiction in his statements makes me wonder what he really thinks when he's not making a heated righteous argument. (Apropos of that lack of subtlety, I'd note that elsewhere in his book, he states that two uncles of his did emigrate to Israel. Yet he says his generation was too American to do so. It's not thought-through.)

That's my second point about Dershowitz; I think anger fed his attack on Walt and Mearsheimer. Read Chutzpah (I'm on page 100 or so now) and you see how much his views were shaped by the antisemitic discrimination he experienced on leaving the Brooklyn nest in the late 50s. Notwithstanding his great grades at Yale Law School, Dershowitz was rejected by white-shoe law firms in New York again and again, including Cravath and Paul, Weiss (the latter wouldn't accommodate his Sabbath-observance). Despite his subsequent achievements, in 1991, when he wrote the book, he was still extremely angry at all the Harvard deans and presidents who thru the 20th century rationalized discrimination against Jews. Again and again he calls these liberal leaders "bigoted." "A pack of dishonest bigots unworthy of respect or emulation... awful men whose names are memorialized [on buildings]..." Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell "should be honored by no one other than the Ku Klux Klan." He insists that President Derek Bok (soon-to-be-interim President again) sees Dershowitz as a "shtetl Yid" whose "breath smells of herring."

This is high-school rhetoric. It's the same moral vehemence that would erase all Jefferson's or Washington's achievements because they owned slaves. Grownups who study history should be a little more sophisticated. Think about it, how should people who dismissed Palestinian human rights be regarded a generation on?

The support underscores something Alan Dershowitz says—that universities are hotbeds of leftwing thought. I agree. The question is why? Why are leftwing ideas that are marginalized elsewhere in the culture doing fine at universities?

It is a conservative-dominated country. Big business plays a huge role in our public life. It funds the thinktanks and the media. It funds campaigns. There are tons of privileged Americans with leftwing views, but not many places for them to actually apply their thinking. The universities are deemed harmless enough. There these thinkers will only educate young people, in places far from Washington.  read more »

According to the event's erroneous program, Speaker Miller was listed as a speaker set to address the conference after a video-taped lecture from Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz. As the tape ended, Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff — highly critical of President Bollinger's response — walked up to the lectern in front of about 250 attendees.

"We at the City Council are very concerned about reports that that is not what is happening here at Columbia...

"We will no accept that as the final answer."

"Nestled in the middle of the country's largest and most diverse city—the city of New York—Columbia University has for a long time lived in fluctuating, ambivalent relation to the world outside....."