Of all the emotions I thought Alan Dershowitz’s The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies would generate, the last I expected was sympathy for Donald Trump. Not once have I pitied the two-time president. But after reading Dershowitz’s convoluted and self-contradictory defense of Zionist Israel, I understood what it felt like to stand on the debate stage across from the senile Joe Biden. Here I was, eager to dispute Dershowitz’s apologia, only to find my opponent was a dotard, unable to muster a coherent argument, whose best days are behind him.
It feels unfair to ridicule an eighty-six-year-old. But the Zionist project has no reservations about propping up the ghost of Dershowitz, so why should I have qualms about tearing him down?
Every chapter of The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies centers on an “accusation” against Israel, which Dershowitz refutes with a “reality” that has more qualifiers than the Olympics. (“Israel has done more to protect the civilians than any nation that has fought terrorists who use their civilians as human shields to protect their combatants.”) Dershowitz put his effort into a few select arguments and phoned in the rest, with the most attention given to arguing that Israel is “the opposite of a colonist imperialist state.”
A standard Zionist defense, Dershowitz claims Israel is not settler colonialism because Jewish Israelis are indigenous to the area. He writes, “Those who claim Jewish refugees who immigrated to Palestine in the 19th century were ‘tools’ of European imperialism must answer, ‘For [which country] were they working?’”
This was answered by Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. In his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat, Herzl wrote:
We [Zionists] should form a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should, as a neutral State, remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence. The sanctuaries of Christendom would be…
Auteur: Joe Mayall
