Dershowitz will also be visiting Sderot later this week, taking part in what organizers expect will be the largest-ever on-line rally. Those involved, including Dershowitz, are hoping to have a million people click and sign on during the rally.
A Target on His Back "I'll be under the rockets in Sderot myself, with a big target on my back," Dershowitz said, "just like all the other citizens of Sderot. I want to feel what it's like to be in Sderot and Ashkelon at these times, with the terrorists playing Russian rocket roulette with the lives of Israeli citizens.
Israel should adopt a zero tolerance policy for rockets. I have written that every rocket that flies from Gaza into Israel is a violation of UN Charter Article 51 - an armed attack giving Israel the full and complete right to proportional self-defense. It also doesn't mean that for every life taken, you can take one life, as the international community absurdly believes. It simply means that you don't react totally out of proportion, and neither do you look at the actual damage caused, but rather, you look at the risks of an attack.
If each rocket can potentially kill people, then just because they missed, it doesn't remove the risk that had been there. Israel doesn't have to wait until inevitably a rocket hits a school bus or a kindergarten or an ambulance; it can look at the risks, not just the actual consequences. Let's get to reality. Hassan Nasrallah has gone on television and warned the civilians of Haifa, Tel Aviv and all of Israel that Hezbollah will be firing rockets into their cities.
According to Dershowitz's logic, they have been warned and if they stay, they are "complicit. Actually, so far Hezbollah has killed more soldiers than civilians. Israel cannot come close to saying the same. One of Dershowitz's arguments is that terrorists try to maximize civilian casualties and democracies try to minimize them.
Is he calling Israelis terrorists again? The fact that Israel can annihilate everyone in Lebanon and chooses not to is a small comfort to me. I'm being literal. It shows they are not interested in the death and oppression of all Arabs. That is a little comforting. But I hope to God we have a higher standard for them than that.
Dershowitz, on the other hand, seems to take great comfort in this fact. Israel could have killed everybody and since it only killed ten civilians for every one Hezbollah fighter, it is trying to "minimize" civilian casualties.
Here it comes. This is the point when Dershowitz brings out the oldest canard in the book. If it was up to the Arabs, they would kill all the Jews - so every thing we do in "self defense" is justified.
Here's the only problem with that idea - history disproves it. In the past, Muslims and Arabs have ruled over Jews for thousands of years and they never vowed to wipe them all out or carried it out. It was the Europeans under Germany that tried this in the Holocaust. And it was the Europeans that tried this during the Inquisition in Spain. In fact, the Muslim Ottoman Empire took in over , Jews from Spain when the Christians threatened to kill them all.
Now, some blowhard Muslim leaders claim they are going to wipe Israel off the map. But in the beginning of this conflict, Israel said that they were going to wipe out Hezbollah. Remember, Dershowitz says many of the civilians killed in Lebanon were actually Hezbollah. He argues there's no difference between these Lebanese civilians and Hezbollah. So, in that case he is arguing that there is no difference between the maniacal declarations of Iran's leaders and the declarations of Israel's leaders.
Another point Dershowitz loves to make is that Hezbollah is hiding behind their civilians. They mainly do this by living and operating out of their home cities. What are they supposed to do? Build a camp in the middle of the desert and let Israel blow it away with their fighter jets? Maybe if Hezbollah had an air force, then they could build independent military structures and try to defend them through their conventional army.
But they don't have any of that. They don't fight from the cities because they want civilians to die, they fight from there because that's the only place they have.
I would guess that Hezbollah would be happy to take on Israel in a "fair fight," where they both had equal weapons and fought outside of civilian centers.
But demanding that they commit suicide by putting up a naked base in the middle of nowhere with no ability to defend it is not only irrational, it is pointless. No sane enemy would do that. So, Hezbollah must disarm and jump out in the open where they can be clearly killed by aerial bombardment? Yes, perhaps in the fantasy world Alan Dershowitz lives in, that's how it might go. In the real world of guerilla warfare when there is asymmetrical military power, that is never how it's going to go.
I love how Israel demands that Hezbollah disarm and disband. Yeah, Hezbollah demands Israel does likewise. Why is it that the one position is considered a reasonable outcome and the other is a terrorist demand? Israel forces , civilians from their homes, and they are the good guys.
It is immoral in the extreme to compare Israel to Gaza or to compare the Israeli military to Hamas terrorists. It would be better, of course, if a permanent ceasefire could be arranged under which Hamas would stop firing rockets at civilians and Israel would no longer need to target Hamas terrorists. Egypt could play a more positive role by trying to bring about a ceasefire instead of unilaterally condemning the victims of war crimes, as it has done. But until Hamas stops terrorizing more than a million Israeli civilians, the Israeli military will have no choice other than to use its technological advantage to prevent and deter Hamas terrorism.
It is the obligation of every sovereign state, first and foremost, to protect its civilian population from terrorist attacks. The international community and the media must begin to differentiate between war crimes committed by terrorists and legitimate acts of self-defense engaged in by a responsible military. Failing to emphasize that distinction encourages terrorism and erodes the moral basis of the important principle of just warfare.
Alan M. Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard, is a practicing criminal and constitutional lawyer and the author, most recently, of The Trials of Zion. Dershowitz Nov. Get email notification for articles from Alan M. Dershowitz Follow. Open gallery view.
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