In Defense of Israel

Alan Dershowitz recently gave a speech at the UC Berkeley, one of the most virulently anti-Israel universities in the United States. He asserts that much of the anti-Israel sentiment on campuses has to do with the fact that college students simply don't know the history and are easily swayed by the Arab propaganda.

Many of the students who attended were not Jews and held no firm views of Israel. They all came up to me afterward and said the same three words: "We didn't know!"

"We didn't know Israel first offered a two state solution, a Palestinian state, but the Arabs rejected it!"

"We didn't know in 1967 Israel accepted Resolution 242, in which the United Nations called for the return of territories captured in exchange for full peace and secure boundaries."

All Arab states rejected it saying, "no peace, no recognition, no negotiations," but students today said, "We didn't know!"

These Harvard students didn't know that in the years 2000 and 2001 Ehud Barak along with President Bill Clinton had initially offered the Palestinians everything they were asking for -- a state made up of 97% of the West Bank and all of Gaza, a capital in Jerusalem, control of East Jerusalem, control of the Temple Mount, 30 billion dollars in a compensation package, and symbolic return of several thousand refugees. Instead of accepting it or coming back to the negotiating table, Arafat walked away and started the intifada and all the violence. The Harvard students kept saying, "We didn't know!"

"We didn't know that Prince Bandar at Taba called Arafat's rejection of the offer a crime against the Palestinian people and against all the people of the region."

The students just didn't know.

Barry Rubin, in his Jerusalem Post column also attributes the change in attitude towards Israel, that Dershowitz mentions, to:

The greatest hasbara disaster in history: Why, many ask, did international attitudes turn so sharply and fiercely against Israel, even raising anti-Semitism to the highest point since the 1930s?

While there are many factors involved, I would suggest the most important reason lay in the reinterpretation of the conflict – engineered, ironically, by Israel and the US during the Oslo process.

Before that time, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was seen along familiar lines: external aggression and subversive terrorism trying to destroy an existing state, Israel. But Israel, Jews around the world, and the US explained throughout the 1990s that the Palestinians simply wanted their own state and an end to occupation, and if offered this would make peace.

Since it was inconceivable that anyone would reject such benefits, the world concluded that the true bad guys were not really making the offer. Paradoxically, Israel's approach of taking risks and offering concessions for peace ended by transforming the paradigm into the equally familiar one of an evil occupying force brutally suppressing a people that simply wanted self-determination.

The issue was no longer seen as extremist aggressors ruthlessly trying to destroy a smaller victim, but as imperialists and colonialists greedily trying to oppress others.