January 28, 2009

Harvard Law professor Alan M. Dershowitz is that rare individual who is both a highly respected academic and well known to the general population.

But in another regard he is even rarer. He regards himself as a man of the left, yet on one of the defining moral issues of our time, attitudes toward Israel, he has nothing in common with the left. He is not only one of Israel’s staunchest supporters, he spends much of his time defending Israel. He has written innumerable articles and four books defending Israel: “The Case Against Israel’s Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace,” “The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved,” “The Case for Israel,” and “What Israel Means to Me: By 80 Prominent Writers, Performers, Scholars, Politicians, and Journalists.”

This past week, Dershowitz wrote two eloquent columns defending Israel’s attack on Hamas in Gaza. One was titled, “Israel, Hamas, and Moral Idiocy,” published in the Christian Science Monitor and the other, “Israel’s Policy Is Perfectly ‘Proportionate,’” was published in The Wall Street Journal.

In his Monitor column, Dershowitz describes “three types of international response to the Israeli military actions against the Hamas rockets” — “Iran, Hamas, and other knee-jerk Israeli-bashers”; “the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, and others who, at least when it comes to Israel, see a moral and legal equivalence between terrorists who target civilians and a democracy that responds by targeting the terrorists,” and “the United States and a few other nations that place the blame squarely on Hamas.”

It is relevant to the question I will pose that he omits any mention of the world’s left, even when mentioning the European Union. Who exactly in the European Union is condemning Israel? Its conservatives? Who in America is condemning Israel? Conservatives? Who in Australia or Canada? Conservatives? Of course not. As regards Israel (and America and much else), the Western world’s moral idiots, to use the term in the title of the Dershowitz column, are virtually all on the left, including and especially many of his colleagues in academia.

So, I have a question for my friend Dershowitz. (I say “friend” because we’ve known each other for years and debated and dialogued together.)

Given that Israel’s security is so important to you, given that you believe that the ability to morally distinguish between Israel and its enemies is tantamount to the ability to distinguish between good and evil, and given that those who condemn Israel for its “disproportionate” response to Hamas terror-rockets are almost all on the left in America and Europe, why do you continue to identify yourself as a man of the left?

Everyone who thinks sometimes differs with one’s ideological compatriots. But when one’s ideological compatriots are morally wrong on the greatest moral issue of the moment and perhaps the very clearest, as well, don’t you at least suffer from cognitive dissonance?

It seems that to avoid this cognitive dissonance, Dershowitz engages in some intellectual denial. Just as he avoids any mention of the left in his column on the world’s moral idiots at the present moment, he does criticize the right for having its anti-Israel moral fools. In his book, “The Case Against Israel’s Enemies,” he has a chapter on the far left and a chapter on the far right, as if there is any equivalence of impact. And as if the existence of anti-Israel voices on that insignificant “far right” somehow balances the staggering number of anti-Israel voices on the huge left, whether far or not so far.

Dershowitz himself repeatedly acknowledges how inverted moral thinking reigns on American campuses.

To cite just two examples: In 2005 Dershowitz wrote, “It’s no coincidence that so many of the professors leading the campaign against Harvard President Lawrence Summers for his recent comments about women in science also were in the vanguard of the campaign to divest from Israel and boycott Israeli academics.” And in 2007: “The only people who tremble on campuses are students at Columbia and Berkeley who are worried that they’ll be graded down for being pro-Israel.”

Now which part of the American political spectrum dominates the universities, the left or the right? The former, of course. But Dershowitz won’t put two and two together, at least publicly, and conclude that there is something fundamentally and morally flawed about the left and its values.

Dershowitz undoubtedly reads The New York Times and Boston Globe editorials as well as those of The Wall Street Journal. So he knows that only the conservative editorials of The Wall Street Journal routinely defend Israel.

He knows that with few exceptions, there are no pro-Israel left-wing journals as there are right-wing pro-Israel journals, such as the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and National Review.

He knows that Israel is routinely bashed on left-wing talk radio (including, though more subtly, on NPR) and that Israel is constantly defended on right-wing talk radio.

He knows that on the Internet, the most virulent attacks on Israel are on the left, while the most pro-Israel Web sites are nearly all conservative and right wing, from Townhall.com to LittleGreenFootballs to NationalReviewOnline.

But none of this matters. Dershowitz still morally equates left and right and considers himself a man of the left.

Why?

I welcome Dershowitz’s response. Here is mine.

One reason, I believe, is that to acknowledge the moral failure of the left, especially the secular left, on most of the great moral issues of the post-World War II era — the Cold War, the Middle East, confronting (or even acknowledging the existence of) the Islamist threat — is very difficult for a person on the left, even one as analytical as Dershowitz. Secular leftism is analogous to Arthur Koestler’s “god that failed.” And few people want to confront the fact that the ideal, the god they bet their lives on, is a false god.

Second, to acknowledge the broken moral compass that guides the left is to implicitly endorse the right, especially the religious right. But that is very difficult for anyone on the left to do because the essence of the secular left is a rejection of the Christian right. That it is conservatives, especially religious conservatives, who are the most stalwart supporters of Israel, must greatly disturb Dershowitz.

And, it is precisely among those who most reject Judeo-Christian values that anti-Israel moral idiocy prevails. How does Dershowitz explain that? That’s my question.

Dennis Prager is a syndicated radio talk show host, columnist, author and public speaker. His Web site is www.dennisprager.com.

My old friend Dennis Prager can’t understand why I don’t leave the left to join him on the right. Let me explain.

I am a civil libertarian, centrist liberal who supports most of the policies of mainstream Democrats and opposes many of the policies of the Republican Party and of conservatives. I support progressive taxation. I oppose tax breaks to the rich, even though I am relatively affluent. I support the right of working people and unions, though I oppose efforts by some unions to deny their members anonymous voting rights. I strongly support the separation of church and state. Indeed, I would build a wall of separation even higher than it is now, consistent with the principles of Jefferson and Madison. I strongly oppose efforts by many Republicans and conservatives to lower the wall, to Christianize America and to argue that atheists and agnostics are less moral than believers in traditional religion. I strongly favor stem cell research and complete equality for homosexuals. I support a woman’s right to choose, under most circumstances. I favor a broad reading of the constitutional rights of those accused of crime, even terrorism, and oppose efforts, whether by Republicans or Democrats, to circumvent the Constitution or to operate beneath the radar screen of accountability. I strongly favor our system of checks and balances and oppose the Republican concept of the “unitary executive.” I favor a maximalist view of freedom of speech and oppose efforts to censor pornography, blasphemy or other “objectionable” forms of speech. I favor strict regulation of gun ownership, consistent with the Second Amendment. I favor universal health care consistent with maintaining the high quality of medicine. I support the kind of free college education afforded me at the New York City college system.

I spend much of my life fighting against the bigotry of the hard left when it comes to Israel and American foreign policy. My staunchest enemies in the world include Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Tony Judd, Elon Pappe, Alexander Cockburn, Jimmy Carter and others on the hard left who are obsessed with Israel’s imperfections, while ignoring genocides and real abuses of human rights in other parts of the world. As a centrist liberal and Democrat, I believe I have a special obligation to attack the hard left, because my attacks receive somewhat more credibility than the attacks coming from the right. (I also believe that conservative supporters of Israel have a special obligation to attack those on the hard right, such as Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak, who are virulently anti-Israel.)

Moreover, I base my defense of Israel on liberal values. I support Israel precisely because it is a secular democracy (I wish it had more of the separation between synagogue and state), because of its commitment to human rights and civil liberties, because of its adherence to the concept of holiness of arms (in the secular sense), because it fights defensive rather than aggressive wars. I support Israel because of its generally progressive views on women, gays, the environment and civil liberties. I am an admirer of Israel’s Supreme Court.

Nor am I alone in being a centrist liberal Democrat who supports Israel. I work closely with Irwin Cotler, a member of the Canadian Liberal Party and former Minister of Justice; with Elie Wiesel; with Anthony Julius of London; with Sam Pisar in Paris; with Amos Oz and Aaron Bharak in Israel; and with many others in academia and politics. My views are close to those of Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Al Gore, Barney Frank — and I hope Barack Obama.

It is extraordinarily important for Israel to be supported by the left and the right. Support for Israel should never become a conservative cause alone, a mission of only the religious right and a plank of only the Republican Party. It must remain a bipartisan issue. On college campuses, as well, there must be liberal supporters of Israel to counteract the many hard-left Israel bashers.

It is the hard left that has left the left over Israel. My goal is to increase support for Israel within the mainstream of Democrats and liberals. I will not be kicked out of the left by its anti-Israel extremist fringe. I will instead continue to support Israel to attack those on the hard left who demonize Israel, and to support centrist liberal principles that are good for America, for Jews and for the entire world.

Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is the author of 27 fiction and non-fiction works and has also published more than 100 articles in magazines and journals.