The latest run of the Dershowitz mill is a volume misleadingly titled The Case for Peace. What this volume amounts to is a counterattack -- packaged in a soft foam padding of balanced and judicious-sounding flummery -- on the growing support for a "one-state" solution in Israel/Palestine.
I first noticed this welcome trend in a fine article by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books (October 23, 2003). NYRB is usually pretty dependably pro-Israel, so this piece was a straw in the wind of log-like dimensions. Since then, the old-and-new-again idea of a binational secular state incorporating all of historic Palestine has been getting a lot of attention.
It's an awfully encouraging sign, really, that the Israel lobby's clean-up hitter is a comical hack like Dershowitz. And I'm glad to note that there's a very tired and pro-forma feel about the book. The first chapter recites the history of Zionist settlement and of Israel's wars in the numbingly familiar and highly elided terms you might have heard at any suburban Hadassah meeting any time in the last fifty years. Much weight, as usual, is placed on the absence of a definite article in UN resolution 242. Palestinian claims are dealt with largely by putting them in quotes:
"Palestinian extremists must give up ... the alleged 'right' of millions of descendants of those who left or were forced out of what is now Israel during the war of 1947-1949 to 'return' to their 'ancestral homes' in Israel."
The unintended humor of this last passage is quite keen, if you pay attention. Why so many quotes? You can see why a committed down-the-line Israelophile like Dershowitz would want to call the Palestinians' "right" into question. But in what way might it not be a "return"? Perhaps because the "homes" in question weren't really "ancestral?" Perhaps the "people" aren't really "Palestinians" at all, but in "fact" "came" from "somewhere else"?
Don't laugh; the claim has been made and, in the demented context of American discussion on this subject, treated seriously. Dershowitz -- credit where it's due -- is too canny to come right out and say something so manifestly absurd as this, but the spatter of inverted commas over this passage suggests that he's trying to slip the notion in under our radar. Or perhaps he's guarding his own flank against his Ultra friends, who would damn him as a turncoat for even hinting that there might be such a thing as a "Palestinian".
