Talk:Alan Dershowitz

Quotes

The Vanishing American Jew (1997)

• Without tsuris—troubles—we will cease to be Jewish. We need to be persecuted, impoverished, discriminated against, hated, and victimized in order for us to retain our Jewishness. … Many Jewish leaders, both religious and secular, have argued that Jews need enemies—that without anti-Semitism, Judaism cannot survive.

• Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism and a secular Jew, believed that "our enemies have made us one… It is only pressure that forces us back to the parent stem." In a prediction that reflects an approach to the survival of Judaism strikingly similar to that of the founder of the Lubavitch Hasidim, Herzl warned that if our "Christian hosts were to leave us in peace… for two generations," the Jewish people would "merge entirely into surrounding races." Albert Einstein agreed: "It may be thanks to anti-Semitism that we are able to preserve our existence as a race; that at any rate is my belief." Jean-Paul Sartre, a non-Jew, went even further, arguing that the "sole tie that binds [the Jewish people together] is the hostility and disdain of the societies which surround them." He believed that "it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew."

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• I have been defending Israel's right to exist, and to defend itself against terrorism, for many years-on college campuses, in television appearances and in debate.

• Israel and the Palestinians must resolve their own differences. The United States can play an important role as facilitator and guarantor.

• It simply cannot be disputed that for decades the Palestinian leadership was more interested in there not being a Jewish state than in there being a Palestinian state.

• Not only I am not a cheerleader for Israel, I am extremely critical of certain Israeli policies, as I am of certain American, British, and French policies. As a strong supporter of the right to criticize, I encourage reasonable comparative and contextual criticism of all countries.

• The court of last resort is no longer the Supreme Court. It's "Nightline."