Alan Dershowitz Israeli Politics Melanie Phillips US politics

Melanie Phillips: Alan Dershowitz Just Doesn’t Get It…….

Blind faith in a political party
is no excuse to turn a blind eye
Melanie Phillips:
Liberal credentials should never
be more important than the security of Israel

The Tundra Tabloids has the utmost respect for Harvard Law Professor, Alan Dershowitz, there is no better advocate for Israel than he, I do however, draw the line at placing political allegiances over common sense. I deem Israel’s security needs to be of far more pressing concerns (read=outweigh) for the average American, than any political ideological stance at the domestic level.

Alan Dershowitz is dead wrong on this one, and he should be called out on it, thanks to Melanie Phillips for doing just that. It’s not that Israel’s self interests outweigh US self interests, but that the continued existence of the Jewish state is in the best interests for both peoples, and B.Hussein Obama appears incapable of any such vision. He’s too fixated on appeasing Arab states to detriment of the US’s only true ally in the region.

But make no mistake about it, Israel is a free agent in every sense of the word, and if the US looks increasingly hostile to its own self interests (read=survival), the Jewish state will be looking elsewhere for an alliance. Russia, China and Brazil and India are quietly waiting in the wings if the Jewish state seeks to shift its foreign political weight in another direction. Alan Dershowitz’s blind allegiance to the Democratic party is foolish, especially since he’s spent so much of his time defending Israel from his fellow Democrats’ charges. KGS

Alan Dershowitz still doesn’t get it

My argument was rather that Dershowitz and those like him amongst American Jews appeared incapable of acknowledging the terrible truth about Obama simply because they appear incapable of acknowledging that a Democratic President could ever be bad for Israel and the world. Their obsessive and irrational – indeed, Manichean – dread of the Republican party means they approach politics with heavy blinkers on and become incapable of seeing what is under their noses, a fact which Dershowitz’s own article merely underscores.

His main point, however, is that Obama must be supported because Israel must not become a politically divisive ‘wedge issue’ in the US as it is in Britain. He writes that instead of criticising American Jews, I should be

“trying to change the terrible situation in Great Britain, where support for Israel has never been lower–in part because support for Israel has become a liberal versus conservative wedge issue.”

This is wrong in almost every respect. First, I am trying to change the terrible hatred in Britain towards Israel. Second, it is not a political wedge issue in Britain. For sure, hatred of Israel is virulent on the Left. But it also courses through the Right. Although the two sides come at this issue from totally different positions, there is barely a cigarette paper to slide between them when it comes to attitudes towards Israel. The Left is fuelled by its anti-imperialist, anti-west, pro-Third World attitude, which means it hates Israel as America’s supposed proxy.’

Conservative ‘Middle Britain’ thinks that ‘abroad’ is a dangerous place full of lunatics who will leave us alone as long as we are nice to them, and that the only reason we and the world are at risk is because we support America and America supports Israel; and Israel is at the root of the world’s problems because it is preventing the Palestinians from having a state of their own, a fact of which the ‘settlements’ are the unpalatable evidence.

Moreover, support for Israel is not quite as bipartisan in the US as Dershowitz makes out. ‘New realist’ Republicans unite in their detestation of and disgust for Israel with Democrat professors and the Democrat-leaning media. It was after all in America that Mearsheimer and Walt produced their disgusting and much lionised ‘Jewish conspiracy theory’ that the ‘Israel Lobby’ runs America’s foreign policy, in a book which became a New York Times bestseller. Dershowitz writes:

Recall as well that among Israel’s most virulent opponents are right-wingers such as Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak.”

For sure – but that roll-call of infamy also includes Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Norman Finkelstein, Tony Judt, Jimmy Carter, Tony Kushner. (The fact that so many virulent Israel-bashers on the left are Jews merits a separate discussion). The suggestion that it is only in Britain and Europe where hatred of Israel resides on the Left is absurd.

READ IT ALL HERE

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