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Alan Dershowitz is a famous Harvard professor
and lawyer with a strong interest in the State of Israel and the ‘peace
process.’ He can be found everywhere giving speeches. He defends Israel. And
he urges Israel to negotiate a ‘Two State Solution’ with PLO/Fatah (better known to many as the
‘Palestinian Authority’). According to Dershowitz, this double stance incurs
no contradiction.
Recently, I attended a conference organized
by Stand With Us,
a grassroots organization that, among other things, fights the BDS (Boycotts,
Divestments, and Sanctions) movement against Israel. Dershowitz, introduced
as perhaps the world’s most important public defender of Israel, was the
invited keynote speaker. In the climax of his speech, Dershowitz
shocked me. Until the day comes, he
intoned, when PLO/Fatah desires its
own state more than it desires the destruction of the Jewish state, there can
be no viable ‘Two State Solution.’[1] His forceful delivery suggested a tough
position, and the audience—professional defenders of Israel’s
prestige—applauded warmly. But slow it down. Dershowitz was not even
calling for PLO/Fatah to accept
Israel’s existence; just that it re-tune, a tad below the desire for its own
state, its hunger for Israel’s destruction. This is not tough; this is weak. In fact, it’s the weakest
‘demand’ logically available. But ardent defenders of the ‘peace process,’
such as Alan Dershowitz, never ask much of PLO/Fatah (when they ask anything). No shocker there. No, what jumped at me was the premise: Dershowitz conceded—in a
public conference chock-full of witnesses, with press in attendance, and
recorded on video—that PLO/Fatah
has always meant, and still does mean, to destroy Israel. He almost yelled
it. My inner lawyer was stirred. Your Honor, permission to treat as a
hostile witness. I asked for the microphone and repeated back
to Dershowitz his own statement. He nodded agreement. Then I asked: But given
that PLO/Fatah has always meant to
destroy Israel, wasn’t it perfectly absurd for Israeli leaders ever to begin negotiations to bring this
terrorist organization inside Israel? “No,” was the automatic rejoinder. And he
gave two reasons: 1)
“It is good to negotiate”; 2)
“You negotiate with your enemies.” Both replies, in my view, are in error. I’ll
make my case; the jury will judge. Take the first claim. Notice that no conditions
attach. The implication is that it is always
good to negotiate. Dershowitz is a lawyer, and lawyers are routinely
called upon to conduct negotiations on behalf of their clients. Ask yourself:
What would happen if Dershowitz, on the strength of “it is good to
negotiate,” advised every single client to negotiate every... single...
time...? Answer: he would be useless as a negotiator. Nobody would hire him. But Dershowitz does have clients. And he is
no laughing stock but a world-famous lawyer. So I suspect Dershowitz in fact
agrees with me that, under certain
conditions, it is good to negotiate, but, under certain other conditions, it isn’t. This suspicion has a
strong foundation, because Alan Dershowitz is a professor at Harvard Law
School, where the world-famous integrative bargaining method was invented. As I learned when my university, ITAM (Mexico
City), sent me to Harvard to learn it, this method, though premised on being nice and finding ‘win-win’
solutions, teaches you to first define your own BATNA (your Best Alternative
to a Negotiated Agreement), because that’s your lower limit. Then you bargain. This way you are
ready: if you find that bargaining is getting you less than your BATNA, you cease
to negotiate. You walk away.
It follows that Israel should negotiate with
PLO/Fatah if—and only if—PLO/Fatah makes an offer that is better
than Israel’s BATNA. (It ain’t rocket science, this BATNA idea, but don’t
ever knock good common sense.) What was Israel’s BATNA before negotiations with
PLO/Fatah began? To see that, take
yourself back to the 1980s, before US pressure began in earnest on Israeli
leaders to negotiate with PLO/Fatah—so
that PLO/Fatah could come into
Israel and become the government over the Palestinian Arabs in the
territories of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. It is quite important that, at this time,
PLO/Fatah had been defeated already.
For in 1982, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin had invaded Lebanon—where
PLO/Fatah was then based (and where
it had caused a civil war)—and Begin had forced the small remnant of this
terrorist organization to seek exile in Tunis, far away from Israel. PLO/Fatah
had no leverage. So, when US president George Bush Sr.
pressured the Israeli government of Yitzhak Shamir to negotiate with PLO/Fatah at the Madrid Peace Conference in
1991, the Israeli government could have done one of two things: A. negotiate; or B. not negotiate. Plan B is what you do if it
seems like negotiation will get you less
than what you currently have and can do without negotiating. Because that
is your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement—your BATNA. And what did Israel have already? Two things:
1) A defeated enemy languishing in Tunisian exile; and 2) the opportunity to
explain to the world what that enemy was, and why it should remain in Tunis. That was Israel’s BATNA. Did Israeli leaders have good reasons to
think that negotiation would get them less
than their BATNA? Yes, they had plenty. Let us quickly review them. PLO/Fatah
was created by Hajj Amin al Husseini, father of the Palestinian movement.
This character not only planned
with Hitler the extermination of the soon-to-be Israeli Jews, but
he also became, during the war, a top leader of the German Nazi Final
Solution.[2] After the war, Husseini and his follower
Azzam Pasha, secretary general of the Arab League, tried to complete the
frustrated dream of a Jewish genocide in the Middle East, which Hitler had
been unable to carry out (he was stopped at El Alamein). This new attempt was
called the War of 1948, which Azzam
Pasha promised would be “a war of extermination and momentous
massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the
Crusades.” But the Arabs lost that war and the State of
Israel was established. So for his next attempt, Husseini created in Cairo, in
the 1950s, with German Nazi training provided by escaped Nazis who were
flocking to Egypt, the group Al Fatah. This
is a terrorist group that, by 1970, had swallowed the PLO (Palestine
Liberation Organization), another terrorist group, keeping its name.[2] Most people still don’t know about Husseini,
but Israeli leaders always have. And so does Dershowitz.[3]
Dershowitz is so well informed, in fact, that
perhaps he knows this too: PLO/Fatah
played a leading role in the creation of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian
theocracy, the judeophobic jihadist regime that every month or so renews its
promise to destroy the Jewish state in a joyous, apocalyptic genocide.[4] PLO/Fatah
armed and trained Khomeini’s guerillas, and then, after the Iranian Islamic
Revolution of 1979, a victorious Khomeini invited Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud
Abbas, the top PLO/Fatah leaders, to
Teheran—to celebrate, and to begin building the repressive and terrorist apparatus
of the new jihadist state. Once there Arafat and Abbas announced that they
would destroy Israel, and they explained to Arab reporters gathered there the
strategy: they would promise peace to negotiate for a piece of Israeli
territory, and then, with Iran’s help, they would use that as a base to
annihilate the Israeli Jews. This is the so-called Plan of Phases, authored
by the PLO in 1974. This is still the plan. And the relationship
between PLO/Fatah and Iran remains
strong. Just last August, right as the US-Iran nuclear deal was being
negotiated, PLO/Fatah signed an
“all-out cooperation” agreement with Iranian leaders.[5]
Given all that, Israeli leaders could easily
have refused the negotiations the US first tried to bully them into in 1991. In a dramatic press conference, those leaders
could have explained everything I just summarized to the world, and declared that
it is absurd to negotiate with a group pledged to negotiate in bad faith. And
that it is simply inconceivable to bring into the Jewish state—the state
created to protect the Jewish people from genocide!—a terrorist group spawned
by a leader of the Nazi genocide; created explicitly to continue that
genocide in Israel; and allied with a regional power (which it spawned) that
continually promises to carry out said genocide.[6] Most Westerners, once informed, would have
sided with Israel, and would have made her continued media demonization, not
too advanced yet in 1991, very difficult. That was a good BATNA. It would have made Israel
safe for a long time. Perhaps forever. But guess what? Israel didn’t need a good
BATNA. It just needed a BATNA. Any BATNA. Why? Because PLO/Fatah leaders have always meant to destroy Israel, as Dershowitz
indignantly (and correctly) roared, so they always offered less than zero. Since my BATNA is, by
definition, what I have when I choose not to negotiate, my counterpart’s
offer of ‘less than zero’—you may know it as ‘theft’—is, by definition, less
than any imaginable BATNA. Under such conditions, it is always bad to negotiate. Dershowitz is wrong. QED. But I’m in the mood for some overkill. Just how wrong is he? Well, since Husseini’s heirs have always
meant to kill every last living Israeli Jew, PLO/Fatah wasn’t offering ‘a bit less than zero’ but ‘infinitely less than zero.’ And that’s
the precise magnitude of Dershowitz’s error: infinity. Which yields the
following curiosity: an expression always used as rhetorical hyperbole—“He couldn’t be more wrong”—is here a literal and
numerical inference from simple mathematical definitions. Or we can talk semantic definitions. In Dershowitz’s second reply—“you negotiate with your enemies”—once again no
conditions attach. This implies that you must negotiate even when you’ve laid
down your arms and your enemy keeps firing. But to say that someone
‘negotiates’ when they have no leverage is a semantic absurdity. It violates
the definition of ‘to negotiate.’ For without leverage, you simply can’t negotiate (though you may,
between head dunks, certainly beg the enemy to stop firing, or shout your
acceptance of his terms of surrender). You can see the problem now: Israel opened
the door for PLO/Fatah, and, as
Dershowitz has now publicly conceded, PLO/Fatah
came in firing. Re-QED. I felt bad, watching Dershowitz twist. He was
not really defending an argument—he was grasping for slogans. The first one—“It is good to negotiate”—he just made up on the fly. I
never heard it before, and doubt I will again (lacks music). The second, “you
negotiate with your enemies,” was a quick patch from “you make peace with
your enemies, not your friends,” an empty mantra drilled ad nauseam into the heads of Israeli Jews so they will not dare reason about the policies of their
‘leaders.’
But even as he spoke and dug (and dug…),
Dershowitz seemed to sense the change in his altitude, and so lurched for
something more: Israel should negotiate, he said, because that process can
one day moderate PLO/Fatah’s
leaders and convince them not to destroy Israel. To which I could give several answers... But experts in attendance at the Stand With Us event had explained to me that personalized arguments—when you ask
someone to walk in the shoes of another—are often the most persuasive. And
that’s perfect here. Because Dershowitz has already walked in
Israeli shoes: he has complained of needing
armed guards to protect himself from radical anti-Israeli
leftists when he speaks at US campuses. And he once reported receiving death
threats from Norman Finkelstein’s supporters. So I ask: Did Dershowitz, hoping to moderate
them, invite his would-be assaulters and murderers to live in his own home,
where his family sleeps, for a period of indefinite negotiations? No? I
didn’t think so. Why should Israelis do it? A picture is worth a thousand words; an
anecdote, a thousand explanations. Here we see how a smart person—indeed, a world-class professional in the
field of presenting logical arguments—cannot begin to reason if his mind is
shackled to a taboo. And it is a
taboo. Dershowitz, and a great many other defenders of Israel, cannot bring
themselves to oppose the so-called ‘peace process.’ For ‘peace’ is most holy.
So they contort logic in twenty different directions so long as they can
still support ‘peace.’ This would be Dershowitz’s ‘insanity
defense.’ Presumably, the rank-and-file Zionists who
approached me after the talk, impressed with my question and crestfallen at
Dershowitz’s answer, would—out of charity for him—make this defense. But they
may consider an alternative
hypothesis: that Dershowitz—and presumably also many other influential Jews,
including the leaders of Israel—are dishonest, deliberately confusing, with
premeditation, rank-and-file Zionists. This hypothesis, I allow, has an
obvious defect: it is disturbing. But it’s politically necessary. And assuming that Alan Dershowitz, at least, is intellectually honest, he must now consider this disturbing
hypothesis. For Israeli leaders do not negotiate as
private individuals but on behalf of an entire nation, and not just any
nation but an historically vulnerable people that, over the centuries, has
been an incalculable treasure and blessing to our planet. Israeli leaders,
therefore, are ‘agents’ representing a precious ‘principal’—a sacred trust. Is their behavior serious or frivolous? Are
they honest or corrupt? Are they patriots or traitors? These unthinkable
questions are now, at long last, finally being asked in Israel (see, for
example, Caroline Glick’s withering criticism of the Israeli
General Staff). Any answer to such questions must consider
that, in order to sell the ‘peace process,’ these leaders promised their long-suffering nation that PLO/Fatah
really meant to make peace. Indeed, only with such assurances—which
Israelis took on good faith—could the ‘peace process’ even get started. (And
Israeli ‘leaders’ are still talking
like this.) In light of such promises, and after
conceding that PLO/Fatah always
meant to destroy Israel, only two hypotheses now remain open to Alan
Dershowitz. Either 1)
Israeli
leaders lied,
and committed high treason against Israelis;
or 2)
their
frivolous incompetence rises to a criminally
negligent form of governmental malpractice. A dismal choice. But not for a lawyer! (Will Dershowitz bring
suit?)
Recommended readings JUST WHERE DID ISIS COME FROM? HERE COMES THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD Footnotes and Further reading
[2] “The Nazis and the Palestinian
Movement: Documentary and Discussion”; Historical
and Investigative Research; 26 July 2013; by Francisco Gil-White [3]
“Ahmadinejad Holocaust’s Myths”; HuffPost Politics; 25 May 2011; by Alan Dershowitz [4] Read here about the entire history of
the PLO/Fatah-Iran relationship: “PLO/Fatah and Iran: The Special
Relationship”; Historical and
Investigative Research; 8 September 2010; by Francisco Gil-White [5] “PLO figure: Iran, Palestine in deal
for all-out cooperation”; IRNA; 11 August 2015. [6]
Iranian leaders, with great consistency, have been calling for Israel’s
destruction over the years, ever since Ayatollah Khomeini insisted that
“[Israel] should vanish from the page of time.” Their intent is clearly
genocidal. Here follow three more recent examples, and then a link to a
source that lists many more incitements by Iranian leaders. EXAMPLE 1 “the Iranian President [called] for
Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’...” This
is a reference to a statement made by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at the time
President of Iran. SOURCE:
BLAIR CONSIDERS UN SANCTIONS AS HE SPEAKS OF 'REVULSION' AT IRANIAN
PRESIDENT'S SPEECH, The Independent (London), October 28, 2005, Friday, Final
Edition; NEWS; Pg. 5, 745 words, BY ANNE PENKETH AND COLIN BROWN EXAMPLE 2: “One of Iran’s most influential ruling
cleric [sic] called Friday on the Muslim states to use nuclear weapon against
Israel, assuring them that while such an attack would annihilate Israel,
it would cost them ‘damages only’. ‘If a
day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has
in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not
leave any thing in Israel but the same thing would
just produce damages in the Muslim world,’ Ayatollah Ali Akbar
Hashemi-Rafsanjani told the crowd at the traditional Friday prayers in
Tehran. Analysts
said not only Mr. Hashemi-Rafsanjani’s speech was the strongest against
Israel, but also this is the first time that a prominent leader of the
Islamic Republic openly suggests the use of nuclear weapon against the Jewish
State.” We
point out that Hashemi Rafsanjani is not merely “one of Iran’s most
influential ruling cleric[s],” but the very father of the Iranian nuclear
program. SOURCE:
“RAFSANJANI SAYS MUSLIMS SHOULD USE NUCLEAR WEAPON AGAINST ISRAEL”; Iran
Press Service; 14 December 2001 EXAMPLE 3 “Israel… has no cure but to be
annihilated.” This is
a message that Iranian ‘supreme leader’ (it’s an official title) Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei sent on his Twitter account in November 2014. SOURCE:
“IRAN’S KHAMENEI: NO CURE FOR BARBARIC ISRAEL BUT ANNIHILATION; Slate; 9 November 2014; by Daniel Politi THE LONG LIST If
you have the stomach for it, and would like to consult a longer list of
documented incitements to genocide against the Israeli Jews, you may do so in
the following sources: http://jcpa.org/article/20-threats-iranian-leaders-made-in-2013/ http://jcpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IransIntent2012b.pdf |
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