academics behaving badly

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<http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,6000,1545972,00.html>

J'accuse

It's a dispute that involves just about every emotive issue you can
think of - Israel, Palestine, human rights, freedom of speech. Gary
Younge dissects the academic battle that has gripped America

Gary Younge
Wednesday August 10, 2005
Guardian

In his landmark book, Democracy in America, the 19th-century French
intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the fever pitch to
which American polemics can often ascend. In a chapter entitled Why
American Writers and Speakers Are Often Bombastic, he wrote: "I have
often noticed that the Americans whose language when talking business
is clear and dry ... easily turn bombastic when they attempt a poetic
style ... Writers for their part almost always pander to this
propensity ... they inflate their imaginations and swell them out
beyond bounds, so that they achieve gigantism, missing real grandeur."

When it comes to a duel between DePaul university political science
professor Norman Finkelstein and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz
over Finkelstein's upcoming book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of
Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, gigantic bombast feels like an
understatement. It is a row that has spilled on to the pages of most
of the nation's prominent newspapers and gone all the way to the desk
of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Like the two professors in Irvine Welsh's The Acid House who abandon
their high-minded theoretical clashes for a drunken brawl in a car
park, Finkelstein and Dershowitz hover between principle and raw
verbal pugilism in which the personal and the political are almost
indistinguishable.

Finkelstein says Dershowitz is a "total liar", adding that "If a true
word were to leap out of his mouth he would explode." Dershowitz
eschews direct personal attacks only to ascribe his jibes to others.
"Many people have thought he was unstable ... he is like a child ...
he makes up facts."

But beneath the vitriol lie many vital issues: namely Israel,
Palestine, human rights in the Middle East, anti-semitism, academic
freedom and intellectual honesty. Not to mention the scope for
discussing these subjects in the United States, Israel's greatest
ally, where the parameters for debate are relatively narrow compared
with the rest of the western world. "The atmosphere for publishing
critical stuff on Israel here is very intimidating," says Colin
Robinson, who as publisher of the New Press initially intended to
publish Finkelstein's book.

Finkelstein billed his book as "an exposé of the corruption of
scholarship on the Israel-Palestine conflict," but essentially it is
an attack on Dershowitz in general and his bestselling book, The Case
for Israel, in particular, which Finkelstein describes as "among the
most spectacular academic frauds ever published on the
Israel-Palestine conflict."

This is fighting talk. But then both of these writers come to this
subject and each other with some form.

Finkelstein is best known for his book The Holocaust Industry:
Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. The book,
serialised in the Guardian, argued that the Holocaust should not be
treated as a sacred event to be exploited by a huge "memory industry"
but understood as one of many genocides. Translated into 17 languages,
it drew widespread criticism from many Jews for playing to an
anti-semitic gallery in both its tone and tenor. It is "filled with
precisely the kind of shrill hyperbole that Finkelstein rightly
deplores in much of the current media hype over the Holocaust", wrote
historian Omer Bartov, who holds a chair at Brown university. "It is
brimming with the same indifference to historical facts, inner
contradictions, strident politics and dubious contextualisations."
Other experts believe he has a point.

Dershowitz is not just a prominent figure in American academe but the
nation's cultural life. He was part of both OJ Simpson and Mike
Tyson's defence teams. In 1991, he wrote Chutzpah, in which he argued
that American Jews should shed their self-image as second-class
citizens and engage more bravely with gentile America. In 2003 he
wrote The Case for Israel.

A passionate advocate of Zionism and Israel, who after September 11
made the case for torture of suspects whom authorities believed to be
hiding information about "an imminent large-scale threat", Dershowitz
is also loathed by the left. Noam Chomsky has described him as a
"Stalinist-style thug".

Both insist they would rather not stoop to the other's level but have
been provoked. "I feel that I have an obligation to defend the ideas,"
says Dershowitz. "He is not going to destroy my career. But if they
can attack me in this way then it can have a powerful message for
others who share my ideas that their careers can be destroyed."

Finkelstein insists that Dershowitz is either baiting him or is
insane. "On a public relations front his attacks have become so
hysterical that [Dershowitz] is either trying to provoke me or he's
imploding. My friends keep telling me, 'Norman, don't respond'."

Finkelstein's criticisms of the book can be reduced to two central
themes. The first amounts to an accusation of academic fraud. He
originally asserted that Dershowitz "almost certainly didn't write
[it] and perhaps didn't even read it prior to publication". He also
charged that Dershowitz "plagiarises large swaths" of From Time
Immemorial by Joan Peters, a now-discredited - by Finkelstein - 1984
book, which attempted to buttress the Zionist argument that the land
that is now Israel was underpopulated, and its few inhabitants a
collection of different peoples, not Palestinians with a strong claim.
(In the version that has just gone to press, the word "plagiarise" has
been softened to "lifts from" or "appropriates without attribution".)
Finkelstein alleges that of the 52 quotations and endnotes in the
first two chapters of Dershowitz's book, 22 are almost exact replicas
of Peters' book. However, instead of quoting Peters as the source,
Dershowitz cites the original sources from Peters' footnotes.

The second accusation is that Dershowitz's defence of Israel's human
rights record during the second intifada is based on flawed or
fraudulent data, which Finkelstein challenges with reports from
organisations such as Amnesty International, the US-based Human Rights
Watch and the Israeli human rights organisation, B'Tselem. "I
juxtapose what he says is going on there and what is actually going on
there," says Finkelstein.

A recent piece in the American leftwing magazine The Nation details
some of the points of contention. Finkelstein takes issue, for
example, with Dershowitz's assertion that "when only innocent
civilians are counted, significantly more Israelis than Palestinians
have been killed." Yet, he says that, according to Amnesty
International, even when only unarmed civilians are counted, the ratio
is still three to one, Palestinian to Israeli. Dershowitz argues that
the IDF tries to use rubber bullets "and aims at the legs whenever
possible"; he points to a 2002 Amnesty report that rubber bullets are
regularly used against children, at close range, often injuring their
heads or upper bodies.

Dershowitz says his principal grievance was with the accusation that
he hadn't written the book - "It's like disputing the paternity of my
children," he says. "I know I wrote the book. I wrote every single
word of it" - and dismisses the plagiarism allegations as malevolent
pedantry. He says they were investigated by the Harvard library and
dismissed as a "frivolous charge" and that he can prove he used some
of the citations in public debates as far back as the 70s and that he
first saw the other quotes in Peters' book, then went and checked the
originals in Harvard library.

On the issue of what is going on in Israel, Dershowitz claims that
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch did not get all of their
facts right and that Finkelstein is a "transient academic" with little
practical knowledge of the Middle East. "This is a man who until
recently had never been to Israel."

When Dershowitz found out that the book was going to be published by
the New Press, says Robinson, who published The Holocaust Industry
when he was an editor at Verso, he got the home addresses of the New
Press board and urged them not to publish it. "I got four letters from
Dershowitz in three months."

Realising that the book was bound to provoke great controversy,
Robinson says he sought to postpone publication from early spring to
early autumn so that he could be sure they got it right. "We wanted
our ducks in a row. We wanted to read the manuscript to know what we
would be defending before we put it in the catalogue."

Piqued, Finkelstein took the book to the University of California
Press, saying that he wanted to get it out as early as possible. "The
book was very timely and I thought a delay would be damaging," he
says.

After the UC Press decided to take it on, Dershowitz wrote to
Schwarzenegger, but even he would not get involved. "You have asked
for the Governor's assistance in preventing the publication of this
book," wrote his legal affairs secretary. "He is not inclined to
otherwise exert influence in this case because of the clear academic
freedom issue it presents." According to The Nation's reporter Jon
Weiner, who is also a professor of history at the University of
California, Dershowitz got a prominent law firm to write stern letters
to the university regents, to the university provost, to 17 directors
of the press and to 19 members of the press's faculty editorial
committee.

UC Press defends Finkelstein. "His books are very, very thoroughly
researched," Lynne Withey, the publishing house's director, told
Associated Press. "He clearly has a point of view that is antithetical
to Dershowitz's, but scholars line up on both sides of the issue."
Dershowitz denounces the UC Press as "very hard-left" and "very
anti-Zionist": "No other university press would publish garbage like
this."

Dershowitz, who received the William O Douglas First Amendment award
from the Jewish advocacy group the Anti-Defamation League, says he
never wanted to curb Finkelstein's freedom of speech. "I want to see
his book published," he says. "I want to see it demolished in the
marketplace of ideas. I just want the false personal charges taken
out."

UC Press persuaded Finkelstein to withdraw the claim that Dershowitz
had not written the book, thereby relegating this rather serious
charge to the status of an overexuberant rhetorical flourish. In a
statement accompanying review copies, the press explained that
"Professor Finkelstein's only claim on the issue was speculative ...
We felt this weakened the argument and distracted from the central
issues of the book. Finkelstein agreed."

For a while last month, it seemed as though Finkelstein's book might
never come out. Involved in delicate negotiations with UC Press at one
point he posted a message on his website saying that it had been
dropped.

But with the book coming out later this month (and possibly in October
in the UK; the contract has been written but not signed) he is bullish
once again. "I have not retracted one jot of one word of what I've
said the past year."

Dershowitz, meanwhile, says he has no plans to sue "that nut job"
despite the disputed allegations that remain. He too has a book coming
out this month. Its title: The Case for Peace.
-- 
"I'll judge you all and make damn sure that no-one judges me" [Jethro Tull]