Dore Gold and Alan Dershowitz Argue for American Support of Israel - The Doha Debates

Former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, Dr. Dore Gold and Professor Alan Dershowitz, appeared on the Doha Debates, hosted at Georgetown University. The subject of the debates was Should the United States get tough on Israel? Dr. Gold argues that peace will come through negotiations. Dershowitz states that "getting tough on Israel" weakens Israel in the mind of its enemies. http://www.jcpa.org


A Crisis in U.S.-Israel Relations: Have We Been Here Before?
By Dore Gold

-As a result of the June 1967 Six-Day War, Israel entered the eastern parts of Jerusalem and the West Bank in a war of self-defense. It is very important to recall that Israel entered these areas after it was attacked, and after it requested that the Jordanians not join the Egyptian war effort. There were Jordanian artillery attacks throughout Jerusalem and all of Israel, as well as movement of Jordanian ground forces into areas that were previously no-man's land.
-There is presently a marked shift underway in U.S. policy on Jerusalem. True, no U.S. administration accepted Israel's annexation of Jerusalem in July 1967. Nonetheless, in the past we saw the U.S. and Israel coming to a modus vivendi with respect to Israeli policy in Jerusalem, when Israel built various neighborhoods in the eastern parts of the city, from Ramat Eshkol to Gilo to Ramot.
-A neighborhood called Har Homa in southeastern Jerusalem was established in 1997 during the Clinton administration to ease the considerable shortage of housing in the Jewish sector. On two occasions, the Arab bloc initiated a draft resolution in the UN Security Council to condemn Israel for constructing Har Homa. On both occasions, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Bill Richardson, vetoed those resolutions under instructions from the Clinton administration.
-The Oslo Agreements in 1993 do not require a freeze on construction in the neighborhoods of Jerusalem. Furthermore, under the Oslo Agreements, Jerusalem was treated as having a completely different status than the West Bank and the city was kept under Israeli control, while seen as an issue for permanent status negotiations in the future.
-It is possible to discern a growing view, which has been reported in the Washington Post, that the Obama administration intends to put on the table its own plan for Middle East peace, based on a nearly full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines, that most Israeli planners view as militarily indefensible. As the Palestinians see this scenario unfold, their incentive to re-enter negotiations will decline as they look forward to the prospect that an American peace plan will be imposed. If indeed there is such a plan being prepared, then the recent U.S.-Israel tensions over construction in east Jerusalem may only be Act I in a much longer drama that the two countries are about to face.
Please see the full article:
http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=1&DBID=1&LNGID=1...

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[Destroyzog19a]

Israel's survival has nothing to do with America. We are falling apart from within (and I won't go into the Jewish hands that are behind that) and we need to start looking out for ourselves and protecting our borders instead of putting the survival of Israel and the Jews ahead of our own survival.

[FIGHTFANNERD3]

this guy rocks

[danndan6]

it's a loan it's not aid. when the bank gives you a loan, you dont call it aid....IT'S A LOAN

[bigsoundz]

SSHENDER, you state that Peter's book is "sloppy scholarship" and Dershowitz has copied large sections of his own book from Peters' book (without attributing it = plagarism). In other words, we can conclude that Dershowitz is a "sloppy scholar" that plagarizes from "sloppy scholarship." What more needs to be said? End of debate.

By the way, Dershowitz lost the above debate, and the Finkelstein debate if public opinion is used to measure win/loss.

[sshender]

Peters has been accused by the revisionists and enemies of Israel of misusing quotes, taking them out of context and over-relying on anecdotal evidence. I find this ironic since this is exactly what the revisionists have been revealed to have done. I suppose they should be familiar with their own technique.

Yet the real question is whether the errors in her scholarship discredit her thesis. If one eliminates the problematic sources and quotes, does the argument fall apart? I think it does not

[sshender]

To be sure, some of the criticism leveled at Peters is warranted. The book does contain a certain amount of sloppy scholarship. In particular, Peters' apparent misapplication of certain statistics regarding population growth in Palestine in the early 20th century is questionable. Enemies of Israel and historical revisionists have used these errors to condemn and discredit the book.

[sshender]

Moreover, Dershowitz was not "obliterated" in any of his debates. I am not sure whether you can characterize any debate as being won by any side. Chomsky at least had the decency to stick to the subject, while Fink went on a rhetorical rampage about minor technical mistakes made by Dersh, and avoided debating the key issues raised in Dersh's book. Dershowitz was cleared of plagiarization charges, and only Chom & Fink think that Peters' book had been "discredited".

[sshender]

The full debate is freely accessible on the official Doha Debates website, and uploading the whole piece will probably be in breach of copyright. In fact, Dersh did not debate either Fink or Chomsky on the issue of "whether the US needs to get tough on Israel", and the content of their existing debated has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue debated in this forum.