The Case Against Israel's Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace [Hardcover]

Before commenting on the book, let me mention that I studied Law and Medicine under Professor Dershowitz many years ago at Harvard Law School. The course was conducted as a running debate between the M.D. professor and Professor Dershowitz. Much could be learned by listening to both sides.

When it comes to Israel and Palestine (and its supporters in and out of the Arab world), there aren't very many debates. Instead, supporters of one side or the other make claims about the other side being at fault. The history is so involved and complicated that few people know enough about it to assess the assertions without doing a lot of research (something that is beyond the interest of most uninvolved observers).

Professor Dershowitz offers to debate critics of Israel, but they don't take up the challenge. As a result, books like this one are important for helping to get a balanced view of the historical perspective and the current issues (as we all watch with horror as rockets are launched at Israel and Israel attacks those who launch them . . . often in civilian dominated areas).

Let me summarize the book's key points:

1. Former President Jimmy Carter got it wrong in his book, Peace, Not Apartheid. Professor Dershowitz clearly distinguishes what South Africa did to its African and "colored" populations from what Israel does to Palestinians. Carter's book seems filled with obvious errors which are detailed pretty thoroughly in an appendix. Yet Carter stands by the book being without error.

2. Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt mischaracterized the history of Palestinian-Israeli relations in a way that is either incompetent or corrupt. The fact-checking makes the two professors look pretty bad.

3. Those who want to boycott Israeli academics and divest from Israeli businesses are acting as though stifling free debate will help create peace, on the one hand, and that Israel is a rogue nation, on the other hand. Professor Dershowitz shows that the academic community doesn't support the boycotts and that the divestiture movement isn't based on a sound factual evaluation.

4. Those who oppose Israel's activities with regard to the Palestinians from either the hard left or hard right seem to be taking positions that are racist because they don't criticize regimes that are actually engaged in genocide or severe forms of racial discrimination. Many are also quoted as having made anti-Semitic statements.

5. Those who favor suicide bombers aren't interested in peace but are rather acting on religious beliefs that require that Israel be destroyed and eliminated, and he provides many quotes to support that view.

6. The Iranian atomic program is a danger to Israel and the United States because the current leadership is committed to destroying Israel and any nation that opposes what Muslims want to do. He provides many quotes to support these views from the mouths of the appropriate leaders.

In conclusion, he argues that

1. Israel has always been willing to trade land for peace, but Palestinians haven't.

2. Israel has the right under international law to take a proportionate response to attacks on its territory and citizenry.

3. Muslims, Arabs, and Christians have more rights in Israel than they do in Muslim countries.

4. Palestinian opposition to the Jewish presence in what is now Israel dates back to the Nazi era and includes collaboration in the Holocaust.

5. Most of the current social problems that Palestinians experience are a result of Arab nations not wanting to accept them in their countries rather than mistreatment by Israelis.

After having read the book, I wanted to understand why so many people are making such preposterous statements.

In thinking about how all these falsehoods could have occurred, I realized that it was a lot like watching two football fans argue about which fan's team was the better. Each fan is convinced of its team's superiority and isn't very aware of or sympathetic to the other side. And they really don't care if they get it wrong in making their arguments. Why? Their loyalty to the team is more important than the truth. It's about emotions . . . not about facts.

If someone is outraged to see Palestinians suffer from Israeli bombs, they will see the Israelis as guilty. If someone is outraged to see Israeli civilians blown up by Palestinian suicide bombers or Hamas rockets, they will see at least some Palestinians as guilty.

When football is involved, the leagues supply independent officials to sort it all out. In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, no one is playing that role of independent officials any more. And I have to assume that few would want to be inserted into what could be hundreds of years of warfare.

It seems like a situation that will only escalate, until one side or the other has to give up because the cost of "victory" is too high. That's hardly a civilized or desirable resolution.

What's the answer? Well, if every nation is going to be at risk of these angry parties lobbing atomic weapons at one another, perhaps the time has come for the international community to realize that it had better supply those objective officials or bear a horrible price.

Who will step forward? I don't know, but I pray someone will.

We are living in times of a bottomless hatred of Israel and it's people and friends that is frightening in it's irrational venom.
It certainly resembles the hatred of Nazis for Jews in the 1930s and 40's in it's sheer viciousness, what a Jewish women who witnessed Kristallnacht as a child on that excellent documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West as 'the type of hatred that makes your hear beat faster'.
Liberal Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, describes being attacked by a mob of Israel-haters outside Faneuil Hall in Boston points out that this hatred is unexplainable on any rational basis. Phyllis Chesler describes this hatred as 'eroticized'.
Desrhowitz agrees and says that the hatred he saw there was 'passionate hatred, ecstatic hatred, orgasmic hatred, it was beyond mere differences of opinion'.
Again the type of hatred on would have seen at Hitler's Nuremberg rallies or during Kristallnacht.
Dershowitz points out that for a tiny country the size of New Jersey, with a population of 6 million , no other country has as many destructive enemies as Israel.
No other country has been targeted with divestment and boycotts, been the object of so many hostile UN resolutions, been singled out for editorial abuse in the international media , been the victims of as many aggressive protests on colleges and universities and been threatened with annihilation and physical destruction and genocide against it's people.
As an example of the genocidal rhetoric aimed at Israel's population, Hamas MP Ahmed Abu Halabiya speaking from a large mosque in Gaza in June 2003 thundered "Have no mercy on the Jews no matter where they are in any country...Wherever you are kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them...We will not give up a single inch of Palestine from Haifa to Jaffa'.
British MP Clare Short actually said that Israel will cause the end of the human race diverting attention away from global warming! Not China or the USA, but tiny Israel, one of the most environmentally conscious countries on this planet.

Dershowitz devotes one of the chapters in his book to condemning Jimmy Carter for his canards against Israel in his shameful and slanderous book 'Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid'
Carter has demanded that the European Union and the United States recognize the mass murderous and racist terror organisation Hamas, and has had cordial meetings with Hamas and Hezbollah leaders and has described Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as very nice.
Dershowitz (who supports peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians a two state solution and territorial compromise) actually has discovered that Carter had pressuring Palestinian leaders to take the maximalist position of rejecting compromises and effectively settlement that Israel could reasonably accept without risking it's existence.

Carter played a role in persuading Arafat in 2000 to reject the then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's generous offer of a contiguous Palestinian state including all of Gaza, 95 % of the West Bank and parts of Jerusalem. Arafat rejected the offer and launched the intifada that has led to loss of thousands of Israeli and Arab lives.
Therefore far from preaching and pointing fingers Carter should hang his head in shame for the blood on his hands.
Most importantly Dershowitz demolishes the charge by Carter of Israel practising Apartheid (the system of rigid racial segregation that was exercised by the government in South Africa between 1948 and 1994). He quotes two prominent Black South African woman ,who have courageously stood up against the violent tsunami of anti-Israel hatred and the campaign slander and libel against Israel, Rhoda Kadalie and Julia Bertelsmann : "Israel is not an apartheid state...Arab citizens of Israel can vote and serve in the Knesset. Black South Africans could not vote until 1994. There are no laws in Israel that discriminate against Arab citizens of separate them from Jews. South Africa has a job reservation policy for White people; Israel has adopted pro-Arab affirmative action programmes in some sectors. Israeli schools , universities and hospitals make no distinction between Jews and Arabs. An Arab citizen who brings a case before an Israeli court will have that case decided on the basis of merit, not ethnicity. This was never the case for Blacks under Apartheid"
Carter has accused Israel of genocide while referring to the genocide in Rwanda as 'ancient history' and condemned those who use the word 'genocide' in reference to the mass murder by Sudan's government in Darfur in which hundreds of thousands of Black Africans have been butchered, millions displaced and hundreds of thousands of women raped.
Derhshowitz also has a chapter condemning both extreme Left anti-Israel bigots (such as John Dugard, Richard Falk, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Michael Lerner) and extreme right anti-Israel bigots (such as Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak, Neo-Nazi David Duke, Joseph Sobran and Taki Theodoracopulos).
He confronts such leftwing extremists as South African UN commissioner John Dugard who has justified suicide bombings against Israeli women and children and compared Arab terrorists who target Israel women and children to the resistance movements that fought against Nazism during World War II.UN commissioner Richard Falk (a supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah and well as a variety of despotic regimes including Iran and Zimbabwe) who has compared Israel's defensive actions in Gaza to the Nazi Holocaust.
Norman Finkelstein has stated that Israel's human rights record is worse than that of Nazi Germany and called on the world to support openly genocidal terrorist and anti-Semitic organisation Hezbollah whose leader leader Hassan Nasrallah said of the Jews after the 2006 Lebanon War "If they gather in Israel it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide"
Hezbollah carried out the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center killing 87 men, women and children.
One of the most important chapters is the Case Against Boycotting Israeli Academics, taking on a vile and racist campaign by far-left academics to ban any co-operation between their universities and Israeli universities and to ban all Israeli academics (regardless of their political views) as well as the campaigns for divesting from Israeli businesses.
The author points out the hypocrisy of these boycotts in attacking the campaign by Britain's largest labour union, UNISON, for an economic, cultural sporting and economic boycott on Israel.
As Dershowitz points out: "These unions (and other institutions) did not call for boycotts of any other countries such as China (which has occupied Tibet for over half a century and denies academic freedom to Tibetan critics, among other abuses), Russia (which has brutally suppressed the Chechens) North Korea (which is probably the most oppressive, closed and tyrannical state on earth) , Iran (an oppressive theocracy and supporter of terrorism whose president often threatens genocide against Israel, or tyrannical regimes in Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Syria, Belarus, Libya, Zimbabwe and so on".

The author points out that the terrorist organizations that Israel is defending her population against (such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad) not only deliberately and predominantly target Israel's civilian population but also deliberately put their own civilians in the line of fire, knowing that casualties among Arab populations will result in more strident hype against Israel in the world.
Therefore for the terrorist groups, both Arab and Israeli casualties are a win-win situation. Israel has done more than any other nation in modern warfare
to avoid civilian casualties . Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza in 2008/2009 was a reaction to thousands of missiles fired at Israel population centers, often targeting school and Israeli children on their way to school. The reason Israeli deaths have been lower than the Palestinian terror networks have intended was because of Israel's measures taken to protect her own civilians and in many cases what could only be put down to miracles (as if Israel must apologize that more of her people have not died), and the fact that Palestinian spokesmen have counted among their casualties the suicide bombers themselves armed terrorists, terrorist leaders, Arabs killed by Palestinian terror bands themselves, bomb makers whose bombs have exploded prematurely and those killed in the vicinity , Arabs hit by rockets aimed at Israel and even people killed in the gunshots fired at Palestinian rallies.

This book is vital to read for those who want to investigate the vile charges levelled against Israel and the motivations and moral turpitude of her enemies.
Highly recommended.

In "The Case Against Israel's Enemies," Alan Dershowitz writes with passion about a subject close to his heart. He lays out the facts in this well researched book (which includes 35 pages of small print references) in a direct and no-frills style.

Chapter 1 lays out the errors made by one man, Jimmy Carter, whose actions while president have had consequences we are still contending with. Carter's foreign policies were even worse and more long lasting than his national decisions, and I concur with Dershowitz on all his assessments on the past and present behavior of Jimmy Carter, who as an ex-president has done tremendous damage to Israel, and "may be remembered not as a Nobel peace laureate but as a vain and destructive meddler."

Chapter 2 lays out the case against the authors of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. A book that starts with an agenda, and shifts "facts" to prove its case, they admit to not having interviewed a single person, and not making any original research for the paper that was the basis of this book, and yet students and professors give credence to their warped views. Among the other chapters, Dershowitz describes the anti-Semitism of many in the hard Left and hard Right, like Noam Chomsky on the Left, whose relentless hatred of Israel and embrace of Holocaust deniers is staggering, and Pat Buchanan on the Right (though I consider Buchanan more of a 5 star crack-pot than a Right-winger, rather like a book-end to the Left's Ramsey Clark).

Another chapter describes Israel's suicidal enemies, and how parents are known to urge their children to blow themselves up, with as many Israelis as they can take with them, and then celebrate their "martyrdom." Dershowitz concludes with "The Case Agaist Simple-Minded, One-Sided Solutions to Complex, Multifaceted Problems," which is well reasoned, concise and illuminating, and a fitting ending to a book that is a good response to the many anti-Israeli statements that seem to be coming from many directions, and in abundance, in recent times. "The Case Against Israel's Enemies" is good reading, and excellent up to date history.