Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian

intervista a Alan Dershowitz
Interview: Alan Dershowitz
By Simon Round
Created 30 Apr 2009 - 10:02
    * The Simon Round interview
Alan Dershowitz rose to worldwide prominence as the lawyer who acted
for OJ Simpson, Mike Tyson, Mia Farrow and Claus von Bülow in high-
profile court cases. But arguably his toughest job is one which has
brought him little, if any, financial reward, and precious little
respect from many of his peers. Dershowitz is one of Israel’s greatest
defenders. It has been, he says, “a very bad career move”.
The 70-year-old professor of law at Harvard University was in London
this week to talk on behalf of One Family, a charity dedicated to
helping Israeli victims of terror, and their families. He spends much
of his time working for Israeli causes and has seen his reputation as
an academic come under attack as a result.
“Before I became a strong advocate for Israel I had the highest rating
for a teacher by students at Harvard law school. I’m a very good
teacher. People stand on line for my seminars. Since I started
publicly supporting Israel, my student evaluation scores have gone
down dramatically. Ninety per cent of students still give me the
highest rating of five, but the 10 per cent that hate me because of my
advocacy of Israel give me zero, so that brings down the average. If I
was seeking tenure it would be devastating for my career. Universities
have told me that they would love to give me an honorary doctorate but
that the student protests would be too significant.”
Dershowitz, who despite his age still brims over with restless energy,
is unbowed by the criticism. He says he became a lawyer to defend the
underdog and fight for liberal causes. Israel, he feels, fits into
both of these categories. “Until Israel became a pariah among the hard-
left and around the world, I didn’t spend much of my time on it at
all. I worked for the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and the
civil rights movement in the US. Today, there is no country in the
world which has a better claim to the support of liberal progressives
and civil rights campaigners than Israel. It doesn’t mean I don’t care
about what happens in Darfur or Rwanda, where I was very critical of
my friend Bill Clinton. I’m not a single-issue person, but I spend so
much time on Israel because it is so unfairly condemned around the
world.”
Particularly pernicious is, as he sees it, the now-commonly held
perception that Israel is now a Middle East superpower — a David
turned Goliath. “That’s a brilliant PR ploy. When you look at a map of
the Middle East today, there is a crescent — and I use the term
advisedly — of danger threatening Israel, starting with Iran, Iraq,
then Syria, Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas. This is not to mention the
Palestinian Authority and Jordan. Jordan is charging Israel with war
crimes. I cannot believe the chutzpah of King Abdullah who routinely
tortures dissidents and rules a country which has killed far more
Palestinians than Israel ever has.”
Dershowitz sees an insidious antisemitism underpinning the anti-Israel
rhetoric from the hard-left and the hard-right. He has campaigned
tirelessly against the academic boycott of Israelis, in this country
(where he joined forces with eminent British lawyer Anthony Julius to
attack the practice as racist and possibly illegal) and in the US,
where his work has yielded encouraging results. “In America, physics
Nobel prize winner Steve Weinberg and I issued a statement saying that
we had been given honorary doctorates by Israeli universities and
that, for the purposes of the academic boycott, we regarded ourselves
as Israeli. So far, 11,000 academics of every religious background and
every political persuasion have joined our protest. Even anti-Zionists
like Noam Chomsky have opposed the boycott. It is a collective
punishment aimed only at Jewish Israelis.”
That the boycott gained considerable support in the UK does not
surprise Dershowitz, who is worried at the rise of antisemitism here.
“I never thought I would live to see the day that Britain had worse
antisemitism than Poland, but this is the situation today. This is not
just Muslim and far-right antisemitism. I’m talking about genteel
dining room conversation — a contemptuous attitude towards Jewish
values, particularly towards Jews who have sympathy for Israel. You
can’t be both a Zionist and have any credibility on the left anymore.
And Jewish anti-Zionists are even more ferocious than non-Jewish anti-
Zionists because they are so desperate to prove their left
credentials.”
Dershowitz emphasises that he is anything but a right-winger himself.
He has at times criticised Israel, particularly for its use of cluster
bombs in Lebanon. He is also reserving judgement on Israel’s
deployment of white phosphorus in Gaza. And he does not oppose
Palestinian statehood despite his view that the Palestinians have been
their own worst enemies.
“I always say I’m pro-Palestininan and pro-Israeli. The Palestinians
have a moderate case for a state even though they turned one down in
1938, they turned one down in 1947, and again in 2000. On a moral
scale, the Kurds deserve a state more than the Palestinians. However I
have never agreed with [Israeli] civilian settlements in the West
Bank.”
For all his work on issues surrounding the Middle East, Dershowitz
still practises criminal law. It is quite simply what he always wanted
to do. “I never had an existential moment when I asked myself what I
was going to do. I always wanted to be a lawyer and I knew exactly the
kind of lawyer I wanted to be.”
He recalls an encounter with his Orthodox rabbi as a teenager. “I was
a bad student in high school. The rabbi told me that I didn’t have
such a good brain and I needed to figure out something where I could
use my mouth a lot but not my brain. He said I could either be a
lawyer or a Conservative rabbi.”
He may be one of the most famous lawyers in the world, but this does
not always work in his favour when he is in court. “I turn down a lot
of cases and I say to a lot of potential clients: ‘You don’t need
OJ’s lawyer.’ I have to make a decision about when I am going to add
value to a case. Luckily, I don’t need cases to pay my bills.”
He claims that his career has always been about championing the
underdog, despite the fact that many of his clients have been rich and
prominent. “I have seen some of the most powerful people in the world
cry because they are so scared. When the government comes after you
with all of its power —– that’s scary. Anyway, more than half of my
clients pay nothing at all. I charge my wealthy clients a lot and put
10 per cent in a fund which I use to pay the expenses of my poorer
clients. When the government gangs up on the poor shnook in the
street, someone has to stand up for him.”
So how does he decide to take a case on?
“I need to feel something. It could be the client, the cause, it could
be the injustice of the case, it could be the sentence. Something has
to get my juices going. Something has to motivate me strongly.”
Motivation is a big thing for Dershowitz. He admits that he would find
it boring to devote his career to any single pursuit, be it as a
lawyer, an academic, a novelist or political activist. He has seen
himself played on screen by Ron Silver in the adaptation of his own
book, Reversal of Fortune, about the notorious von Bülow case — when
British socialite Claus von Bülow was accused of attempting to murder
his wife by insulin injection.
He spends a lot of time working but says he is no workaholic. “I love
to play. I love, opera, hiking and museums. The one thing I don’t do
is sit. I have a tremendous amount of energy.”
This inability to contain himself in one sphere of activity is also
reflected in his religious practice. He describes himself as a “post-
denominational” Jew and is a member of the neighbourhood Orthodox
synagogue where he grew up in Brooklyn, a Conservative Synagogue, a
Reform synagogue and reconstructionist congregation. He also advises
the Chabad movement.
He laughs: “You could say I have all my bases covered.”

 civil rights movement in the US
forse non tutte le critiche sono ingiustificate, si legga per esempio il
celebre articolo di Dershowitz sulla legalizzazione della tortura:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/0
1/22/ED5329.DTL
-- 
Luca Logi - Firenze - Italy        e-mail: 
ll...@dada.it
   Home page: 
http://www.angelfire.com/ar/archivarius
                   (musicologia pratica)

 forse non tutte le critiche sono ingiustificate,
ovvio, si tratta di un ebreo. probabilmente recita ogni giorno quella
maledizione contro i piselli di cui il dottor (1) Luca Logi conosce
l'esistenza. Peccato non riesca a fornire fonti in proposito.
(1)  non certo perché si sia laureato, ma -come ricordato dal maestro,
professore e dottor Logi stesso- a norma del decreto legge 212/2002
relativo al riordino dei titoli di studio del settore artistico, dal
quale si può dedurre che ha titoli equivalenti a *due* (dicasi due)
lauree triennali.
----
"una facile scusa per dimenticare il presente" (Luca Logi /
rodewalder / Golda Meir)
cfr 
http://raionim.blogspot.com/2008/12/una-facile-scusa.html

 ovvio, si tratta di un ebreo
no, si tratta di un figlio di puttana, che sia  ebreo è un problema
solo per i tribali