by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Let’s start with a passage from Alan Dershowitz’s latest book, The Case for Israel, now slithering into the upper tier of Amazon’s sales charts. On page 213 we meet Dershowitz, occupant of the Felix Frankfurter chair at Harvard Law School, happily walloping a French prof called Faurisson, charged by the FF prof from Harvard U as being a fraud and a holocaust denier: “There was no extensive historical research. Instead there was the fraudulent manufacturing of false antihistory. It was the kind of deception for which professors are rightly fired–not because their views are controversial, but because they are violating the most basic canons of historical scholarship..”
You want an example of Dershowitz’s canons of scholarship, base rather than basic?
On pages 233-4, he writes, “In September 1970, King Hussein of Jordan killed and injured more Palestinians in one month than Israel has during three years of responding to the suicide bombing intifada.” The corresponding endnote reads: “Estimates vary as to the number of Palestinians killed during “Black September,” with some estimates as high as 4,000.” His two cited sources for this claim? a Sony movie, One Day in September, and a chronology for a high school course outline on the Middle East conflict.
If Justice Frankfurter had fuelled decisions with this kind of scholarship he’d have been citing Marvel Comics as useful repositories of case law and precedent. If, in writings off the bench, he’d used the sort of research procedures displayed elsewhere in Dershowitz’s Case for Israel he’d probably have been forced off the Supreme Court for ethical considerations of a sort that I imagine Harvard’s president, Lawrence Summers, will soon be pondering in the case of Prof. Dershowitz.
Let me now usher into the narrative an important member of our cast in this drama: “From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the ArabJewish Conflict Over Palestine”, a 60l- page book by Joan Peters, published in l984. Peter’s polemical work strove to buttress the old Zionist thesis that the land of Israel had been “a land without people, awaiting a people without land”. There was no substantial Palestinian presence, Peters claimed, before the Jewish return. Initially given an ecstatic reception by publications such the New York Times the book was soon discredited as a charnel house of disingenuous polemic. The coup de grace was administered by Professor Yehoshua Porath in the New York Review of Books for January 16 and March 27, 1986.
Though neither Peter’s nor her book appear in the index to The Case for Israel, they do get a mention in note 3l of chapter 2, where Dershowitz cites the work of a 19th century French geographer called Cuinct, and adds, “See Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial (Chicago, JKAP Publications, 1984). Peters’s conclusions and data have been challenged. See Said and Hitchens, p. 33. I do not in any way rely on them in this book. “Them” clearly refers to Peters’ conclusions and data.
This brazen declaration is preceded in chapters one and two by wholesale, unacknowledged looting of Peters’ research. I have before me a devastating comparative archive of these plagiarisms, compiled by Norman Finkelstein, author of “The Holocaust Industry: The Exploitation of Jewish Suffering” and “Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict”. Here are but four instances, out of no less than 20 thus far discovered in the first two chapters alone.
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