"Making
Arab families move - intact -
from one Arab village or town to
another may constitute a human
rights violation. But in the
whole spectrum of human rights
issues - especially taking into
account the events in Europe
during the 1940's - it is a
fifth-rate issue analogous in
many aspects to some massive
urban renewal or other projects
that require large-scale movement
of people." - Alan
Dershowitz | Open
Letter to Prof. Alan DershowitzMay 11, 1999
Alan M. Dershowitz Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law 520 Hauser Hall Harvard Law School 1575 Massachusetts Avenue Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138 USA Alan Dershowitz: Did you really say this? The following
statement has been attributed to your
book,
Chutzpah: As
a civil libertarian and human rights
activist, I was never much moved by the
claims of these refugees. Political
solutions often require the movement of
people, and such movement is not always
voluntary. Making Arab families move -
intact - from one Arab village or town
to another may constitute a human
rights violation. But in the whole
spectrum of human rights issues -
especially taking into account the
events in Europe during the 1940's - it
is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many
aspects to some massive urban renewal
or other projects that require
large-scale movement of people. For
example, the building of the Aswan High
Dam in Egypt necessitated the
relocation of 100,000 Arabs and the
destruction of numerous Arab villages.
There were certainly numerous
precedents following both world wars,
as well as other dislocating events of
history - including the establishment
of new states. There were so many
refugee groups throughout the postwar
world, and in so much worse condition,
that it is difficult to understand why
this particular dislocation assumed
such international proportions.For
example, following the end of World War
II, approximately fifteen million
ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled
from their homes in Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania,
Yugoslavia, and other Central and
Eastern European areas where their
families had lived for centuries. Two
million died during this forced
expulsion. Czechoslovakia alone
expelled nearly three million Sudeten
Germans, turning them into displaced
persons. The United States, Britain,
and the international community in
general approved these expulsions, as
necessary to secure a more lasting
peace. [...] President
Franklin Roosevelt's assistant
Harry Hopkins memorialized his
boss's view that although transfer of
ethnic Germans "is a hard procedure, it
is the only way to maintain
peace. Excerpted from: http://www.carasso.com/roger/dershowitz.html If you did say it, then questions
arise. If the above is indeed something
that you have said, then certain
reflections spring to mind that I would
like to hear your thoughts on. Doesn't your thinking resemble
Slobodan Milosevic's? For example,
it might appear that consistency requires
you to view the Serbian ethnic cleansing
of Kosovo as a "fifth-rate issue" of the
sort that might arise in the course of any
large urban renewal project or in the
building of any large dam. This might
strike not a few observers as a
breathtakingly original view of the Kosovo
crisis, and might lead them to ask whether
you had been much in demand as a guest
speaker among Serbian expatriates in North
America, or on Serbian television, perhaps
appearing together with Slobodan Milosevic
to explain to the world why "the only way
to maintain peace" was this simple
solution of relocating the Kosovars. One
could add to such a defense of Milosevic's
ethnic cleansing that as many of the
cleansed Kosovars will end up as permanent
residents of such countries as Canada, the
United States, and Germany, their standard
of living will be enhanced by the
relocation, which together with their
pride in having helped "maintain peace" by
moving, should more than compensate them
for any temporary inconvenience that they
may have experienced. One could add
finally that as Israel remained in high
esteem following its relocation of
Palestinians, there might be little to
prevent Milosevic's Yugoslavia from
remaining in comparably high esteem
following its similar relocation of
Kosovars. Doesn't your thinking resemble
Hitler's? And of course your
advocating tolerance toward relocation
invites us to examine under a fresh light
Hitler's initial policy of relocating Jews
out of Germany, a policy heretofore viewed
unsympathetically by so many who had not
access to your blanket defense that such
relocations fall in line with "numerous
precedents" and are "the only way to
maintain peace." Does relocating intact families to new
villages constitute a kinder, gentler
variety of ethnic cleansing? It is highly
relevant to judging the culpability of
Israeli ethnic cleansing that, as you
point out, the Israelis went out of their
way to keep Arab families "intact", and
that the Israeli ethnic cleansing
relocated the intact families merely "from
one Arab village or town to another."
These pieces of information do help to
explain how even a human rights activist
like yourself can come to feel that the
complaints of the ethnically cleansed
Palestinians amount to no more than a
"fifth-rate issue." I suppose that in your
estimation Israelis murdering entire
Palestinian families would constitute
cases of keeping Arab families "intact,"
and that the number of families in which
only some members were murdered is too
small to invalidate the generalization
that families were kept "intact"? And I
suppose too that you have been convinced
by evidence which you could have cited but
did not that an empty house equivalent to
the one abandoned awaited each relocating
intact family, and employment equivalent
to the employment abandoned was also at
hand, and similar arable land, and
comparable access to water, and empty
schools waiting to be filled with the
laughing relocated children, and mosques
in the new location that otherwise would
have been under-utilized, but which with
the influx of the relocated intact
families began to resound with the sounds
of worship? Will you apply your thinking
consistently to future events? I imagine
too that if the day should ever come when
six million Israelis find the hostility of
their environment grown so intense that
they decide to evacuate the Middle East,
you will view this too as akin to an urban
renewal project - though a minor one in
comparison to say the
fifteen-million-ethnic-Germans renewal
project you mention above - and that you
will at that time justify the evacuation
of Israel as simply following "numerous
precedents" and as being "the only way to
maintain peace"? Doesn't your thinking lack originality?
Your quite remarkable contribution to
thinking on such issues seems to lie in
your conclusion that peace is so precious
a commodity, that to attain it, the ethnic
cleansing of millions, and perhaps even
tens of millions, of people is not too
high a price to pay. Quite a remarkable
contribution, truly, and yet not wholly
original, as many thinkers of the stature
of, say, Attila or of Stalin or of Pol Pot
have reasoned their way to a similar
conclusion, and have been translating that
conclusion into practice from earliest
times right up to the present day. What kind of peace do you see ethnic
cleansing bringing? A final question that
I would like to leave you with has to do
with the nature of the "peace" which you
say has been won by the ethnic cleansing
of Palestinians by Israelis. Specifically,
can you think of any other nation which,
taking its size into consideration, has
incited such a vast number of people
throughout the world to dedicate
themselves to its destruction? I invite
you to review a number of countries which
are comparable to Israel in that they are
small, are democratic, allow a free press,
and enjoy a high standard of living -
countries like Belgium or Denmark or
Switzerland. Would you say that Israel has
won a peace and a stability and a security
comparable to theirs? Would you say that
the number of people dedicated to the
destruction of Israel is not appreciably
greater than the number of people
dedicated to the destruction of Belgium or
Denmark or Switzerland? If your answer is
that the peace enjoyed by Israel does
indeed appear to be markedly inferior to
the peace enjoyed by Belgium or Denmark or
Switzerland, then I would invite you to
reconsider the appropriateness of your
comparing Israeli ethnic cleansing to a
massive urban renewal project or to the
building of a large dam, as urban renewal
and dam building - for reasons that you
may want to begin thinking about -
typically do not incite any widespread
dedication to a recompensatory
destruction. Lubomyr
Prytulak |