The Preventive War Scholar
A Little Theory on Why Alan Dershowitz Hit the Panic Button and Attacked Norman Finkelstein for Years
Early on in my studies, I didn’t understand why Norman Finkelstein wasn’t a more accepted scholar in the mainstream. His scholarship was reliably thorough, serious, and easy to learn from. Even now, there are some aspects of his obscurity (up until recently) that remain a mystery to me. Many seem to think he has a big mouth, gets himself in trouble, uses ad hominem language, but in most instances for which he was ostracized, his statements and his work strike me as fairly moderate.
One almost wonders if it’s the opposite: Maybe Finkelstein’s scholarship is sound. One can’t refute him, at least not on every point, so one must paint him as an unhinged monster worthy of attack, lest the people get the impression that you can go around exposing American scholars who propagandize for Israel as frauds, or pointing out that Palestinians have a right to defend themselves.
Until after October 7th of 2023, it wasn’t even easy to find his Democracy Now! debate with Alan Dershowitz in full.[1] On YouTube, finding part two always required some digging, and it was never under the Democracy Now! channel that I found it, always some random YouTube handle. This was partly why I urged Ben Burgis to review it on Give Them an Argument in his debate breakdown portion of the show, which he invited me on to do with him. Most of the background information in this piece is derived from my interviews with Finkelstein in 2018 on an hour plus long car ride, portions of which were published in Counterpunch at the time, and the August 2023 interview of Finkelstein with myself, Burgis, and Jordan Dubin before we reviewed his 2003 debate with Dershowitz.[2]
Whole books could be written on this topic. As one of (probably) few people who followed Finkelstein’s work from about 2012 to now, I’ve had many thoughts on how he became as marginalized as he did, and why. This piece will focus specifically on one part of that story, the one involving Alan Dershowitz, and my little theory about that episode.
Others I’ve known who have been familiar with Finkelstein’s work over the years often assume it was the falling out with Dershowitz that caused Finkelstein’s professional demise, but it’s not that straightforward to me. Shockingly, for example, I’ve also come across people who were familiar with Finkelstein’s work, had come across one or another of his books or interviews over the years, and did not know that he ever debated Dershowitz. I’ve been surprised by how many people, even those older than me and familiar with his work, totally missed this event. I think Finkelstein’s marginalization is related to a number of things. Most are as unfair as what happened as a result of his interaction with Dershowitz, but it’s difficult to determine which was most decisive.
Here, though, I’ll focus on what happened in that debate, and present a theory, in light of more recent events that prompted me to reflect on it, as to why Dershowitz reacted the way he did in the aftermath. As Noam Chomsky said at the time, Dershowitz went “on a Jihad” against Norman Finkelstein.[3]
First, though, this must be addressed: Every one to three years, give or take, I come across some liberal, progressive, or centrist suddenly asking questions like, “What happened to Alan Dershowitz?”[4] As a person who has spent my life reading, considers myself, for lack of a better term, a person of the left, and is also still fairly young, this is always puzzling to me. Every couple years, I’m reminded that not everyone has learned or remembered not to take Alan Dershowitz seriously. But — call me crazy — Dershowitz has always been a slimy meathead of a public intellectual, groveling for the prestige that comes with hanging around celebrities and masters of war.
He started out defending a client who attempted to kill Sol Hurok in 1972 and killed a secretary instead.[5] Then he defended a series of men accused of sexual assaults and murders of women, including O.J. Simpson. Then he became a spokesperson for Israel. That’s when his feud with Finkelstein happened. Then he advocated a “continuum of civilianality” in international law, meaning international law should allow for more civilians to be targeted and killed in military operations because some civilians are more culpable for terrorist attacks than other civilians.[6] Then he went around the country advocating torture (based on his “ticking time bomb” thought experiment, of which scholars have pointed out there are no documented instances in the real world being thwarted by torture).[7] Then, after the Snowden leaks, Dershowitz went around the country defending the surveillance apparatus instead of Snowden,[8] leaning heavily on his title as a “civil liberties” lawyer to do so, just as he leaned on his tepid opposition to the Vietnam War to give himself license to excuse and advocate Israeli war crimes.[9] Then he went around the country seemingly rehearsing to be Trump’s lawyer as Trump was facing various scandals, throughout Trump’s impeachments.[10] Then he found himself tangled up in the Epstein scandal and his defense was to admit he got a massage from one of Epstein’s victims while insisting that he kept his underwear on.[11] He’s continued his full throated advocacy for Israel through its ongoing genocide of the people of Gaza.[12] Now he’s going around the country arguing that the United States should bomb Iran in a first strike.[13]
Forgive me while I catch my breath.
Maybe I could understand hearing any one of these things by themselves and thinking, “Whatever happened to Alan Dershowitz,” “Where is this coming from,” “He used to be such a respectable scholar,” etc. But, when you look at the whole picture, the assumption that there was this earlier, better Dershowitz becomes impossible to sustain. When was this period in our world where Alan Dershowitz was a consistently principled liberal?
The 2003 debate with Finkelstein focuses on Dershowitz’s book The Case for Israel, and took place about three months after the book was published.
In the opening exchanges of the debate, Finkelstein documents several instances of plagiarism by Dershowitz of Joan Peters’ book From Time Immemorial. Plagiarism by itself would be bad enough but in this case Dershowitz was plagiarizing a fraud. In fact, Finkelstein is the one who had exposed From Time Immemorial to be a fraud in his early work.[14]
Two of the instances debated at length on the show are long block quotes of Mark Twain and William Young lifted from Joan Peters by Dershowitz. A couple of things are exposed about Dershowitz early here. First, I’m pretty sure Dershowitz committed plagiarism. Second, the Mark Twain quote is particularly funny for Dershowitz to plagiarize from Peters’ book, because Peters’ book was in no small part exposed as a hoax because of demographic numbers and claims that Peters had faked, and the Mark Twain quote is meant to bolster those false claims about demography.
Furthermore, Dershowitz’s defense of this on the air was that other sources had used the Mark Twain quote as well besides Peters, the only one of which he cites on the show being the AIPAC newsletter Myths and Facts, AIPAC being the Israel lobby, which really only tells us that he may have plagiarized AIPAC and not Joan Peters, and that he may not have the level of understanding I’d hope that a college undergraduate would of what plagiarism is. He cited the identical, long block quotes with the ellipses in the same places, but he did not cite Joan Peters or AIPAC. He cited Mark Twain, for example. And Dershowitz saying AIPAC used the same quote as his defense actually strengthens the case that he did not get the quote from the person he cited.
The embarrassment grows by the minute for Dershowitz. Finkelstein later points out that Dershowitz twice used the phrase “George Orwell’s turnspeak” in The Case for Israel, but George Orwell never used that term. Orwell coined the term “newspeak” in his novel 1984, first read by those who have read it in — you know — high school. Joan Peters coined the term “turnspeak,” and said it was a play on George Orwell. Even many who didn’t read it in high school might have picked up on a key-word like that in class discussion, just enough to pass a test.
The embarrassment for Dershowitz continues to snowball.
Just when you think it can’t get much worse, moderator Amy Goodman plays a clip of Dershowitz debating Sam Husseini on Scarborough Country, an MSNBC program at that time.[15] Goodman plays the clip twice in the course of the debate:
Dershowitz: I will give 10,000 dollars to the PLO in your name if you can find a historical fact in my book that you can prove to be false. I issue that challenge. I issue it to you. I issue it to the Palestinian Authority. I issue it to Noam Chomsky. I issue it to Edward Said. Every word in my book is accurate.
And he agrees more than once to stand by that offer again in the Democracy Now! debate.
Finkelstein focuses on two key examples after the clip is played. After a lot of nonsense and crosstalk from Dershowitz, he’s forced to quote his own book aloud: “[Benny] Morris estimates that between two and three thousand Arabs fled their homes during this phase [April-June 1967] of the Arab initiated fighting.”
There’s more panic and deflection before Amy Goodman reads the sentence from Morris’ book Righteous Victims, the sentence that Dershowitz was citing in The Case for Israel, because Dershowitz refuses to read it aloud on camera himself: “Altogether, about two to three hundred thousand Arabs fled their homes during the second stage of the exodus.”
Fast forward through Dershowitz being exposed for lying about whether Israel was committing torture, and we get to Finkelstein telling Dershowitz he will simply read quotes from The Case for Israel aloud. He asks Dershowitz to stop him at any time and say, “I can prove that,” or, “I have the evidence,” then quotes this sentence from Dershowitz’s book: “There is no evidence that Israeli soldiers deliberately killed even a single civilian in Jenin.” Then Finkelstein quotes Human Rights Watch saying the exact opposite, and quotes one of Human Rights Watch’s examples in their report on Jenin:
“Among the civilian deaths were those of Kamal Zgheir […], a 57 year old, wheelchair bound man, who was shot and run over by a tank on a major road outside the camp on April 10, even though he had a white flag attached to his wheelchair.”[16]
Additional humiliating moments ensue for Dershowitz in the second half of the debate. Finkelstein reads through some of Dershowitz’s citations in the endnotes of The Case for Israel, which, on top of a number of IDF sources in various forms, included Sony Pictures, a chronology to a high school syllabus, and a slap dash op-ed in The Orlando Sentinel on UN Resolution 242 as sources for key historical facts.
He was also called out by Finkelstein for claiming to have had “input” on the framing of UN Resolution 242 in 1967, despite not knowing the name of the key British framer Lord Caradon. (In his book, Dershowitz calls him “Lord Carrington,” and live on the show when asked to name him, Dershowitz calls him “Lord Shorecroft.”) The rest of the debate… isn’t better.
In the aftermath of the debate, Finkelstein was preparing his book Beyond Chutzpah, in which he documented various fraudulent aspects of The Case for Israel, and documented in an appendix all the instances of plagiarism he discovered in Dershowitz’s book. And Dershowitz was setting out on a warpath against Finkelstein.
Aside from the typical smear piece someone like Alan Dershowitz would publish in a situation like this, to be expected from any power-elite centric public intellectual, here are some other things he did to attempt to silence and destroy Finkelstein:
He made desperate attempts to suppress the publication of Beyond Chutzpah. He tried to get then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to prevent University of California Press from publishing the book.[17] When Schwarzenegger refused on the grounds that it was a free speech issue, Dershowitz/his legal team sent a letter to the University of California Press that read, “If you don’t remove the appendix now, it will be a very painful operation later.”[18]
When University of California Press published the book anyway, Dershowitz amped up his smear campaign, diving deep into the mud to come up with his new material. He repeatedly called Finkelstein a self-hating Jew and an anti-Semite.[19] On the Harvard Law School website, he claimed that Finkelstein’s mother was a Nazi collaborator and he accused Finkelstein himself of being a “Holocaust justice denier.”[20]
(It’s hard to overstate how vile that is. for readers unfamiliar with his work, both of Finkelstein’s parents were in Warsaw. Both parents were victims of the Nazi Holocaust, each in multiple concentration camps, and the rest of his family was exterminated by the Nazis. His parents and their children were alone together on the planet.)
Not content with these smears, Dershowitz lobbied heavily for Finkelstein to be denied tenure at DePaul, where Finkelstein was teaching at the time. Dershowitz wrote letters and put other pressure on the college to deny Finkelstein tenure while Dershowitz’s allies ramped up the smear campaign. In January 2007, though the faculty voted overwhelmingly (17-7) to give Finkelstein tenure, and though the outside professor tapped by DePaul to review and write a letter on the Finkelstein tenure case said it was clear that Finkelstein should have gotten tenure,[21] the administration stepped in and overruled the 17-7 faculty vote and unilaterally denied Finkelstein tenure, with the dean citing “‘personal and reputation demeaning attacks against Alan Dershowitz’ and others” as the reason in the dean’s official statement.[22]
Keep in mind that their debate on Democracy Now! took place in 2003, and Finkelstein was denied tenure in 2007. Dershowitz made this smear campaign a personal project for years.
So, as I said at the top, perhaps I am missing something, but I still can’t help but wonder: Why?
Also, why was this smear campaign by Dershowitz eventually effective? Why is Dershowitz, neither an impressive scholar nor a particularly interesting guy, so influential and powerful? Why did Dershowitz allow this humiliating debate to go on for so long before removing himself from the studio? Did he have zero ride-or-die homies who could call and fake an emergency to get him out of there after, say, hour number one on the air? And what else, if anything, led to Finkelstein’s academic demise?
But there’s a little part of me that can’t get past this smaller, fundamental though less interesting question right at the beginning of it all. Why did Dershowitz go to such great lengths, for so long, to destroy Finkelstein, to stop publication of his work, to deny him the right to teach, to smear his credibility let alone threaten his livelihood?
Many of the few I’ve known who were familiar with this public feud have an attitude of, “What did Finkelstein think was going to happen? He spoke truth to power, and if you do that, you pay a price.” But I think that might be a little naïve in its own way. Consider what Finkelstein, responding to those with the “what did you expect” reaction to what happened to him, said in the GTAA interview while reflecting on the Dershowitz debate:
“I felt confident that I would be able to prevail in a court of public opinion in an exchange with him …. A lot of people basically said I got what was to be expected would be coming to me. And I would want to respond to that by saying – and I think I could say this with complete certitude; I’m not engaging now in some sort of exculpation or coverup – I honestly believed that it was going to be a tit for tat at the scholarly level. I would level my claim. He would level his claim. It would go back and forth. I did not anticipate that it would degenerate into a jihad to destroy me professionally. So, I don’t think it’s fair to hold it against me that somehow I am feigning innocence and I didn’t know what I was getting into when I publicly claimed that large parts of the book were, in various forms, fraudulent…. Actually, maybe I was naïve, but I expected that we were going to have a real tit for tat, point-counterpoint. It would be a vigorous exchange, but I was confident, in the end, I would prevail.”
And consider what scholar and journalist Ben Burgis said in reflecting on the debate, keeping in mind that Burgis goes around the country debating public intellectuals frequently and has been doing so for years now:
“It seems pretty strange to think that doing a debate where you question the originality of the book — I mean, that seems like the sort of thing that, what I would expect to be coming as a result of that is maybe later he writes an article where he tries to clear his name and he’s really vicious or something like that. That would be the sort of thing I would expect. I wouldn’t expect – I mean, I think nobody, really, in the normal course of things, certainly on most issues, would expect that [debating an author’s book] would lead to an attempt to destroy somebody’s academic career.”
Of course, we’ll most likely never know what motivated Alan Dershowitz to act as he did for so long. And I’m not a lawyer. But I’d like to return to that moment in the middle of the debate where Amy Goodman plays a clip of Dershowitz on MSNBC saying, “I will give 10,000 dollars to the PLO in your name if you can find a historical fact in my book that is false,” etc, and in the Demoracy Now! debate, doubles down by saying he is “prepared to do that” if someone meets his challenge.
Fast forward about 19 years. One day I’m stoned, hanging around my apartment, pondering the Finkelstein-Dershowitz debacle of 2003 – it seems like just another day in America – when Mike Lindell comes on the news.
Evidently Lindell had been saying he had a collection of data proving that the 2020 election was stolen and China was to blame, just as Dershowitz had gone around 19 years earlier saying everything in The Case for Israel was accurate, and challenging people to disprove his 2020 election data for five million dollars, just as Dershowitz challenged people to disprove his book for 10,000 dollars. Now Lindell was legally on the hook for five million dollars, because a random tech savvy Trump supporter went through the data and quickly proved it to be false. Lindell publicly issued a challenge multiple times saying he’d give five million dollars to anyone who could prove his data was false.[23]
Here are some examples of what Lindell said below, so the reader may compare it to what Dershowitz said above:
“A five million dollar prize for anybody that can prove the election data that I have from the 2020 election is false.” “I’m putting my money where my mouth is, five million dollars.” “Why don’t you prove it there, so you can win five million dollars?”
A federal judge in Minneapolis “affirmed an arbitration panel’s ruling last year that Lindell has to pay up for losing his own 2021 contest challenging experts to prove that the data he had in his possession was not from the 2020 election,” and gave Lindell 30 days to pay the five million dollars.
As a lawyer and professor, Dershowitz may not have fully known what plagiarism is, but something tells me he knew deep down that he might be on the hook for that 10,000 dollars. Whether it was calculated strategy or he just went into panic mode, he wasted no time putting Finkelstein and his publisher on the defensive, smearing Finkelstein and his family, threatening to sue, staying on the offensive for years, and lobbying against Finkelstein’s career. I wonder if going so much on the offensive was, aptly, a kind of preventive war strategy by Dershowitz to distract from the fact that he himself could be discredited or in trouble in some way, that he could be potentially legally on the hook in some way, perhaps for, say, 10,000 dollars or so.
Of course, it’s probably not the money Dershowitz would have cared so much about. Indeed, it’s an insultingly low amount of money to be hanging over the heads of people suffering through a humanitarian crisis, akin to challenging a homeless person in your neighborhood to go on an Easter egg hunt to earn all the change you found in your dryer one day, but conceding that he has to pay any amount of money because of errors or manipulations in his book is probably what worried him more. It’s likely not so much that he was afraid of the damage to his wallet as the damage to his reputation. If Dershowitz was constantly threatening to sue Finkelstein or his publisher, maybe nobody would pause to think, so busy on the defensive, about whether Dershowitz could be sued. Perhaps it was all a diversion, a sideshow, to prevent any attention on Dershowitz’s own deficiencies and liabilities.
And whether or not that was the intention, the planned strategy, it worked as if it was. Finkelstein’s publisher was indeed immediately on the defensive.[24] The Case for Israel continued to sell many copies, and Dershowitz continued to be a mainstream commentator on various issues in many mainstream TV and print outlets. Finkelstein was marginalized over the decades, in no small part because of propaganda spread by Dershowitz and his allies. Even the debate was relatively forgotten by many. As I mentioned at the top, I’ve met several people over the years familiar with Finkelstein’s work who didn’t know it happened. I’ve met many more people familiar with Dershowitz’s work, and many more of those didn’t know it happened either. And people continue to ask, “Whoa, what happened to Alan Dershowitz?” as if he hasn’t been an unhinged warmongering weirdo all along, shouting from the hilltops. Finkelstein was denied tenure after Dershowitz lobbied heavily against him receiving it, and Finkelstein was never able to get another tenure track job. Alan Dershowitz retired from Harvard Law School recently as a result of natural causes, not because he was marginalized.
And perhaps most importantly, as far as I know, Dershowitz has never had to acknowledge that The Case for Israel is a bullshit salad and he might owe 10,000 dollars to the PLO (unless he wants to allow Norm to earmark it for Jenin).
[3] https://www.democracynow.org/2007/4/17/noam_chomsky_accuses_alan_dershowitz_of
[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1982/06/06/dershowitz-for-the-defense/8f99b8cc-d644-4fae-9741-3ce62862b736/
[6] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-jul-22-oe-dershowitz22-story.html
[7] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/prohibition-of-torture-in-exceptional-circumstances/ticking-bomb-scenario-origins-usages-and-the-contemporary-discourse/0B186F68C4D5E081DA2D48BAC1CA40DF
[10] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/03/dershowitzs-audition-to-be-trumps-lawyer-not-going-well.html
[11] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/alan-dershowitz-jeffrey-epstein-case.html
[14] See Finkelstein’s 1995 book Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, which expands his work on Joan Peters from his In These Times article in 1984.
[15] I’ve found it interestingly difficult to find the full version of this debate in my internet searches.
[16] This is the report Finkelstein is citing, which I recommend reading more from if you ever have the time: https://www.hrw.org/report/2002/05/02/jenin/idf-military-operations
[17] See interview with Finkelstein in footnote two.
[18] In the interview cited in footnote two, Finkelstein described the impact it had on the publisher when Dershowitz sent these legal threats, shedding light on how difficult the decision to publish the appendix or not became after Dershowitz made these threats:
“They said to me, ‘Look, Norman, we are a small university press,’ which is true. Presses are small operations, relatively speaking. They said to me, ‘If Professor Dershowitz sues us,’ meaning University of California Press, ‘in New York…., we don’t even have the money to fly out our staff for a trial.’ And so they really feared that he would bankrupt them. That was a very serious issue for them.”
[19] See this documentary starting 34 minutes in:
[20] https://aish.com/48892847/#
[21] See 1:05:45 of the documentary cited in footnote 19.
[22] See 1:05:35 of the documentary cited in footnote 19.
[23] See article and video here: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/judge-says-mike-lindell-must-pay-5-million-man-won-prove-mike-wrong-ch-rcna139986
[24] See footnote 18.