http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/5/14/dershowitzCallsForAShiftInDialogue
Noted Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz decried the state of dialogue surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college campuses during a speech last night in a less-than-half-full Memorial Auditorium.
“In the place of debate, we have name-calling, dehumanization, polemics and simply the naming of things in extreme ways,” he said. “That’s not at all conducive to peace. All I’m doing today is calling for nuance. I’m calling for an improvement in the debate.”
Through a 50-minute speech and 40-minute question-and-answer session, Dershowitz offered a measured criticism of Israeli policy while strongly arguing that the Jewish state was being unfairly singled out for criticism among its neighbors in the region.
A graduate of Yale Law School, Dershowitz was the youngest professor in Harvard Law School’s history, when he joined the school’s faculty at the age of 25. Today, he is considered one of the nation’s top civil liberties and criminal defense lawyers.
In his lecture, Dershowitz was especially pointed in his disdain for campus divestment campaigns, including the recent failed proposal at Stanford. The professor argued that these campaigns were “filled with ignorance” and were merely venues for students to propagate misinformation about the situation in the Middle East.
“They serve no purpose at all but simplify the problem,” he said. “Stanford will not divest from Israel. It’s too smart. It knows it’s not in its economic self-interest. It’s also immoral, and Stanford is a moral institution.”
The event, which was free to students and community members, was jointly sponsored by the ASSU Speakers Bureau, Hillel at Stanford, the Jewish Student Association and the Stanford Israeli Alliance.
“We are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the world’s population, and we get a disproportionate amount of attention,” Dershowitz said.
Dershowitz compared the treatment of Arabs in Israel to African Americans in the United States, saying it was “very unsatisfactory, improving considerably, but not nearly improving enough.”
His visit prompted a protest by eight students affiliated with Amnesty International, who claimed that Dershowitz supports legal exceptions for torture. The students were dressed in orange jump suits and had trash bags pulled over their heads. For about 30 minutes, they sat in a line on the stairs of Memorial Auditorium with their heads pointed toward the ground while three Amnesty volunteers handed out flyers.
“I found out that Dershowitz was coming and knew about his stance on torture so I got some guys together and signed up with Amnesty,” said Imran Akbar ‘07, the lead organizer of the protest. “It worked out pretty well I think.”
Akbar said that he worried protesters might be mistaken as Guantanamo Bay detainees, but he acknowledged that Dershowitz does not support the holding of enemy combatants at the U.S. Naval base in Cuba.
In his speech Dershowitz said that he does not support torture, but he does believe that if torture is going to happen it must happen in a transparent and verifiable matter.
“In principle, killing one terrorist to save lots of lives is a tradeoff worth making,” he said. “Don’t confuse my descriptive statement that torture is occurring with a normative statement that torture should occur.”
Dershowitz also had advice for students.
“Learn more about the Middle East,” he told The Daily in an interview after his speech. “Listen to both sides. Don’t listen to the extremists. Look at the issue broadly, contextually and conceptually. Have meetings. Get together with Palestinian and Israeli students.”
Dershowitz has been in an ongoing feud with Norman Finkelstein, a controversial professor at DePaul University in Chicago whose bid for tenure has brought national attention. Finkelstein spoke on campus in January in an event sponsored by the Students Confronting Apartheid by Israel (SCAI). Dershowitz followed up on his stinging opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal on May 4 by attacking Finkelstein’s scholarship and views.
“The difference between Finkelstein and I is when you hear Finkelstein speak, it is the end of a dialogue,” he said. “When you hear me speak, I want it to be the beginning of a dialogue.”
Dershowitz said that labeling the situation in Israel as apartheid is “absurd.”
Omar Shakir ‘07, the president of SCAI, effectively called Dershowitz a wolf in sheep’s clothing. SCAI, under Shakir, has led the charge for divestment from Israel in the ASSU Senate.
“His inability to be more up front was couched as nuance but he’s deceptively trying to justify his extreme thoughts,” Shakir said. “He’s very manipulative in the way he words things. He’s an excellent lawyer, but if you look at the views he expresses, they’re very much out of the mainstream.”
Carrie Mlynarczyk ‘09, co-president of the Stanford Israel Alliance, said she appreciated Dershowitz’s call for an end to name-calling and oversimplification.
“I hope this is the turning point,” she said, “where we can stop talking about the divisive measures and start working toward peace.”
Law School Dean Larry Kramer, who moderated the question-and-answer session, said he was impressed by the respect the audience showed the speaker.
“The questions were hard,” Kramer said, “but the questions were civil.”
