Beyond Chutzpah
October 23rd, 2005 by ktula
I am currently reading Beyond Chutzpah by Norman Finkelstein. Neve Gordon, who teaches human rights at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, wrote a pretty decent review on Beyond Chutzpah. Prior to the book being published, Alan Dershowitz hired a law firm to threaten the University of California Press into not publishing the book. When that failed, cry baby Dershowitz sent letters to the university’s board of trustees and even to Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, asking them to intervene. When that shameless attempt failed as well, Dershowitz and other die-hard Israel supporters exerted pressure on bookstores to cancel the speaking tour of Beyond Chutzpah.
In Beyond Chutzpah, Finkelstein meticulously picked apart Dershowitz’s dubious claims that Israel has a “generally superb human rights records” in his book The Case for Israel as easily as an untrained 120-pound Rottweiler ripping apart a poorly-made chew toy. Indeed, it is amazing that apologists like Dershowitz chose to ignore and disregard the indisputable findings of mainstream human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem to make that spurious claim. In the words of Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, people like Dershowitz are trying to “justify what cannot be justified.” Finkelstein said it best in the conclusion of Beyond Chutzpah when referring to The Case for Israel:
‘Yet the biggest fraud is the title itself. Dershowitz hasn’t written a case for Israel. How could anyone genuinely concerned about the Israeli people counsel politics certain to sow seeds of hatred abroad and moral corruption within? What he has in fact written is the case for the destruction of Israel. Letting others - Palestinians as well as Jews - pay the price while he plays the “tough Jew”: isn’t this what Dershowitz’s chutzpah really comes down to?’
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