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the Norman Finkelstein controversy The [Images added by this website] Second Thoughts: Alan M Dershowitz The Harvard Crimson Friday, October 03, 2003 Opinion Finkelstein Proclaims ‘The Glove Does Fit’ By NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN ALAN Dershowitz either cannot or refuses to understand why there is a controversy surrounding The Case for Israel ( Letter , “Plagiarism Accusations Political, Unfounded,” Sept. 30). Perhaps I can enlighten him.

Quite simply, the book he claims to have written is a hoax: (1) substantial swatches are lifted from another notorious hoax on the Israel-Palestine conflict, (2) it is replete with egregious falsifications, and (3) the few scholarly sources actually cited are mangled beyond recognition. In this reply, I will only illustrate points (1) and (2). These, along with point (3), will be fully documented in a forthcoming monograph.

In 1984, Joan Peters published From Time Immemorial , which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty on the eve of Zionist colonization, and that Palestinians are in fact foreigners who surreptitiously entered Palestine after the Zionists “made the desert bloom.” The book is now widely recognized as a fraud. Baruch Kimmerling (of the Hebrew University) and Joel S.

Migdal , in their authoritative study, Palestinians: The Making of a People , published by Harvard University Press, observe that Peters’s book is “based on materials out of context, and on distorted evidence,” and, citing my own conclusion that the book “is the most spectacular fraud ever published on the Arab-Israeli conflict,” report that “similar evaluations were expressed by notable historians” in Israel and Europe.

Dershowitz states that he uses only a “few sources” cited in the Peters hoax. In fact, fully 22 of the 52 endnotes in chapters 1 and 2 are lifted straight from her without any form of attribution. In his defense, Dershowitz claims that no foul play is involved because he checked Peters’s original sources before citing them, a laughable argument were an undergraduate to make it before a plagiarism committee. Dershowitz focuses on a lengthy citation from Mark Twain to argue this point.

Yet, although Dershowitz reproduces Peters’s page references to Twain’s book in his own endnote, the relevant quotes do not appear on these pages in the edition of Twain’s book that Dershowitz cites. Furthermore, Dershowitz cites two paragraphs from Twain as continuous text, just as Peters cites them as continuous text, but in Twain’s book the two paragraphs are separated by 87 pages. It would be impossible for anyone who checked the original source to make this error.

Dershowitz similarly “checked” Peters’s other sources. Quoting a statement depicting the miserable fate of Jews in mid-19th century Jerusalem, Peters cites a British consular letter from ” Wm. T. Young to Viscount Canning .” Dershowitz cites the same statement as Peters, reporting that Young “attributed the plight of the Jew in Jerusalem” to pervasive anti-Semitism.

Turning to the original, however, we find that the relevant statement did not come from Young but, as is unmistakably clear to anyone who actually consulted the original, from an enclosed memorandum written by an “A. Benisch” that Young was forwarding to Canning.

One wonders if Dershowitz also consulted Peters’s original source for the term “turnspeak” — a coinage of Peters, which she says was inspired by George Orwell ‘s 1984 , but which Dershowitz, confounded by his massive borrowings from Peters, not once but twice credits directly to Orwell (“George Orwell’s ‘turnspeak,'” “Orwellian turnspeak”).

On which pages of 1984 did Dershowitz find “turnspeak”? ” LET it be absolutely clear,” Dershowitz states elsewhere, “that my demographic conclusions are very different from Peters’s.” Really?

The centerpiece of Peters’s book is a demographic study purporting to prove that many of the 1948 Palestinian Arab refugees were actually recent arrivals to the area of Palestine that became Israel from other parts of Palestine. Far from reaching different conclusions on this key point, Dershowitz repeats Peters’s fraudulent claim, even fabricating the flat-out lie that the “United Nations recogniz[ed] that many of the refugees had not lived for long in the villages they left.”

Dershowitz’s book is replete with absurd falsifications. The Mufti of Jerusalem during the British mandate years, Haj Amin al-Husseini , was undoubtedly a despicable human being. But rather than sticking to the facts, he copies mostly from a single newspaper column by an obscure right-wing Zionist ideologue.

Dershowitz avows that ” Adolf Eichmann visited Husseini in Palestine;” the mufti was “taken on a tour of Auschwitz by Himmler ;” “The grand mufti of Jerusalem was personally responsible for the concentration camp slaughter of thousands of Jews;” the mufti organized a commando unit “to poison Tel Aviv’s wells”; “The mufti was apparently planning to