Dershowitz’s tunnel vision

Let’s imagine for a moment that recently retired Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz defended animals rather than criminals and savage states.

In a case involving the mauling of a goat by a hyena, for example, a typical Dershowitzian approach might argue that the hyena was engaged in self-defence and that the civilised world must thus stand behind it.

In a situation in which a group of hyenas devours an entire goat farm, including an array of baby goats, he might instead lecture us that the goats in question had built underground tunnels to facilitate the mass murder and kidnapping of young hyenas.

It may appear that Dershowitz has been over-represented in my writings of late, but the fact is that the man is never absent from the sidelines during periods of systematic slaughter of Palestinians and other Arabs by the state of Israel.

In his latest dispatch for Haaretz, which bears the Onion-esque title “Netanyahu, the reluctant warrior”, Dershowitz once again wields his so-called legal expertise to excuse the bloodshed. And once again, the defence unfolds in two simple steps:

1.      Invent reality.

2.      Invent laws to go along with it.

The process has been amply test-driven. During Operation Pillar of Defence, Israel’s November 2012 killing spree in Gaza, Dershowitz’s line of attack went something like this:

1.      Israel only attacks “terrorist leaders and other legitimate military targets”. Hamas only attacks “Israeli civilians in their homes”.

2.      Therefore, not only is Hamas “entirely to blame for the current situation”, certain media are also guilty of not “distinguishing between the war crimes committed by Hamas and the lawful actions undertaken by Israel”.

Never mind that, as usual, Palestinian civilians and their homes bore the brunt of the damage, underscoring Israel’s apparent inability to distinguish between Hamas rocket launchers and Palestinian children. (Anyway, what’s the difference? They both pose a threat to the complete usurpation of Palestinian land.) The affair also highlighted the former Harvard law professor’s refusal to distinguish between legality and its antithesis.

Dershowitz underground

In his latest benevolent intervention at Haaretz, Dershowitz summarises Netanyahu’s current war aims as the destruction of “terror tunnels” that “snake under the Gaza-Israel border”, and announces that he himself was in one such passageway a few weeks ago. The underground stint permitted the following revelations:

“The tunnel I was in ended very close to an Israeli kindergarten in a kibbutz. The purpose of that tunnel was to allow Hamas terrorists to emerge from underground and kill and kidnap the 57 babies and children who attend the kindergarten every day”.

It’s not clear how Dershowitz has managed to divine with such precision the intended function of the alleged tunnel. But other contemporary news items suggest tunneling may serve a less bloodthirsty purpose; in October of last year, an Al Jazeera article recalled that Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was kidnapped in 2006 with the aid of a tunnel and was eventually exchanged for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. Given the disproportionate value that is consistently accorded to Israeli life, it’s not difficult to see the logic behind such operations.

In the present disproportionate display, almost 600 Palestinians have already been eliminated in Gaza in less than two weeks (last week, it was estimated that one-fifth of fatalities thus far were children). Linking to a Haaretz video from 17 July, Dershowitz hyperventilates about the “discovery by Israel of yet another tunnel”, which is what “immediately provoked [the] ground incursion” into Gaza by the Israeli military:

“This discovery almost came too late to prevent a mass casualty disaster. The terrorists had already emerged from the tunnel, with grenade launchers, bazookas, machine guns and other weapons capable of mass murder.”

For those of us preoccupied with cause-and-effect relationships, it bears reiterating that this was approximately 10 days into the mass casualty disaster being inflicted upon Gaza by the Israelis, who don’t require tunnels to harass the coastal enclave in every way they please.

Dershowitz laments that Israel can’t attack the tunnel entrances from the air because “Hamas has deliberately placed [them] in hospitals, schools, mosques and other civilian buildings.” But as anyone whose head isn’t lodged somewhere below his navel can confirm, Israel has zero qualms about attacking such institutions.

In the meantime, the hype over tunnel-borne terror could potentially spawn a new subterranean defence industry subsidised by US taxpayers. How about an Iron Mantle Defense System, or Iron Core?

The day after the tunnel

The reason Dershowitz knows how “reluctant” Netanyahu is to wage war, we are told, is that he “had a private dinner” with the prime minister the day after the tunnel excursion.

Dershowitz’s itinerary clearly identifies him as a valuable asset to the Israeli military machine, and he loyally pledges at Haaretz: “I know of no country in the world that would tolerate such danger to its civilians without doing everything in their power to prevent it.” To be sure, this is a version of a commonly heard refrain - with the implication that Palestinians are inferior and should tolerate whatever is dealt them - but it doesn’t always come accompanied by a bio from one of the world’s most prestigious educational institutions: “Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard.” (So much for Haaretz’s own report last year on Dershowitz’s retirement.)

At the end of his piece, Dershowitz redundantly invokes the words of then-Senator Barack Obama during his 2008 visit to Sderot:

“If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same.”

According to Dershowitz, the moral of the story is that, in the current lethal adventure in which exactly zero Israeli children have perished, “[t]he moral Israel is doing the same and the United States is supporting Israel in its self-defence actions”.

I’d prefer to draw a different conclusion, which is that tunnel destruction should be timed to coincide with Dershowitz’s visits. 

- Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine.

This views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. 

Photo credit:  A Palestinian youth crawls through a tunnel during a summer physical training camp run by Hamas in Gaza City in 2013 (AFP PHOTO/MOHAMMED ABED)