Alan Dershowitz, the bane of human rights advocates in the US and every where else, has been given his day in court to vent for Israel on Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington’s left wing blogosphere newspaper.
Alan is not my favorite Democrat, far from it, mainly because his hypocrisy is so evident. When you discuss Israel, he falls into the deepest abyss of right wing Zionist ethnocentricism. He appears liberal and humanistic, and even advocates for human and civil rights, but when it comes to Israel, he falls into the exceptionalist trap. Alan is so rightward in his support of Israel, he is even able to justify the killings of Palestinian children, who he implies are terrorists.
Still let’s give Alan his day in court, even though he uses the occasion to ply Israeli propaganda by the barrel full and gives the usual exceptionalism to Israel’s occupation, colonialism, and state terrorism, the root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As most objective observers throughout the world marvel at Israel’s efficiency and generosity in leading the medical aid efforts in Haiti, some bigots insist on using these efforts as an occasion to continue their attack on the Jewish state. Both the neo-Nazi hard right and the neo-Stalinist hard left cannot help but to demonize Israel, regardless of what Israel does.
The neo-Nazi website ReportersNotebook.com features a blog entitled “The Zionization of Disaster Relief.” It accuses Israel of “exploiting the suffering of poor, defenseless Haitians on behalf of Israeli Triumphalism.” It complains that Israel is rendering medical aid to Haiti only to deflect attention from its crimes against the Palestinians.
The hard left, even in Israel, complains that Israel should not be sending medical assistance to such a faraway place. Instead it should be sending it to nearby Gaza.
Well, Alan, some of us did notice. As just one example, many medical patients in need of essential care that is unavailable in Gaza, who were denied exit, have died. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel has long decried the deadliness of the Gaza siege, and Israel, with the help of the US and Egypt, is causing those deaths, not some natural event like an earthquake.
According to Alan, the reason Israel is not helping the Palestinians is that it is at war with them. Yes, he claimed that, in spite of what is the obvious reality to almost everyone.
In addition to the distorted reality that Alan helps to project, Israeli victimology, in particular, and his conflation of the Palestinian fight for freedom and self-determination with terrorism, which is central to Israeli propaganda today, he ignores mention of the very source of the conflict: Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people, the colonization of their lands, which has been going on for over 40 years, the weekly killings and assassinations of Palestinian resistance fighters, house demolitions, destruction of farmlands and orchards, the theft of water resources, etc., to say nothing of the brutal attack against Palestinian civilians in Gaza one year ago, which was described as a series of human rights crimes by the UN.
No one can look at Gaza today and not believe that Israel’s assistance to Haiti, although humanitarian, is not also hypocritical. And people who notice the discrepancy are not anti-Semitic, as Alan would have us believe. So yes Alan, the death and destruction in Haiti exceeds that found in Gaza. However, it is Israel, with the assistance of the US and Egypt, that has created death and destruction in Gaza, not nature.
