Menetrez, Frank J. “Dershowitz v. Finkelstein: Who’s Right and Who’s Wrong?” in Finkelstein, Norman G. Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (exp. ed.). CA: Berkeley, University of California Press, 2008. pp. 363-394. Example of the effect of lie and the effort to disentangle it.

  Parts of this essay were originally published by CounterPunch online (30 April 2007) in an article of the same title. The remainder of this essay is drawn from a previously unpublished manuscript. I am grateful to Noam Chomsky, Scott Dewey, Norman Finkelstein, Howard Friel, Amy Kind, Mark Niles, and Marilyn Schwarts for helpful comments on drafts of portions of this essay, and to Jordan Ray for research assistance.

  In June 2007 DePaul University denied tenure to Norman Finkelstein, an assistant professor of political science. The decision ignited a firestorm of protest from DePaul students and faculty, as well as from faculty across the country and abroad. Finkelstein’s department had voted 9-3 in favour of tenure, and a college-level committee unanimously joined that recommendation, 5-0. But the University Board on Promotion and Tenure (UBPT) voted 4-3 against tenure, and DePaul’s president claimed to “find no compelling reasons to overturn the UBPT’s decision.”

  The tenure denial was a great victory for [] Alan Dershowitz, who had been campaigning vigorously against Finkelstein at least since the fall of 2006. Their feud began when Finkelstein charged that Dershowitz’s book The Case for Israel (2003) was partially plagiarised and wholly false. Finkelstein ultimately published his critique as part of a book of his own, entitled Beyond Chutzpah [] (2005). The book quotes Dershowitz as offering, in an interview, to “give $10,000 to the PLO” if anyone can “find a historical fact in [The Case for Israel] that you can prove to be false” (p. 91). (1) Finkelstein goes on to quote one assertion after another from The Case for Israel, examine Dershowitz’s supporting evidence, and then adduce his own evidence that the assertions are false and Dershowitz’s evidence worthless.

  [ 1 Unless otherwise indicated, page references are to the second edition of Beyond Chutzpah. Where the second edition’s page numbers differ from those in the original hardback edition, page references for the first edition are provided following those for the second edition.]

  Dershowitz has not taken these charges lightly. In June 2006 the chairman of Finkelstein’s department wrote to Dershowitz concerning his charges that Finkelstein “is guilty of various forms of intellectual dishonesty.” The chairman asked Dershowitz to direct him “to the clearest and most egregious instances of dishonesty on Finkelstein’s part.” Dershowitz responded in a seven-page, single-spaced letter dated 18 September 2006, and he enclosed fourteen single-spaced pages of supporting materials. Dershowitz sent a similar but even longer packet of materials – totaling over sixty pages – to a large but unknown number of membres of DePaul’s faculty and administration, including every professor at the law school.

  Dershowitz began his September 2006 letter (hereafter the “Letter”) by stating that “the ugly and false assertions that I will discuss below are not incidental to Finkelstein’s purported scholarship; they are his purported scholarship. Finkelstein’s entire literary catalogue is one preposterous and discredited ad hominem attack after another.” (2) Dershowitz goes on to list a number of alleged lies or fabrications by Finkelstein. He also provides a link to an online copy of chapter 16 of his book, The Case for Peace (2005). (3) That chapter, entitled “A Case Study in Hate and Intimidation” (hereafter “Case Study”) deals exclusively with Finkelstein’s critique of The Case for Israel.

  [ 2 I obtained my copy of the “Letter” from Dershowitz’s web site, but it is no longer posted there. It is currently available on Finkelstein’s site at www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=1319.]

  [ 3 Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved (New Jersey: John Wiley, 2005), pp. 167-88.

  The news media’s coverage of the dispute has not included any serious attempt at evaluating the merits of Dershowitz’s and Finkelstein’s charges and countercharges. [Blowjob Pamela. Sean Hannity. Jake Tapper & Anderson Cooper.] It’s clear enough that these guys don’t like or respect each other, and that each claims the other’s work is a travesty. But the question remains: Who’s right and who’s wrong? In this essay I attempt to provide an answer. I also present compelling evidence that Dershowitz himself committed academic misconduct both before and in the course of his intervention in Finkelstein’s tenure case. I conclude with some reflections on the ramifications of my analysis for both DePaul and Harvard. (4)

  [4 In the interest of truth-telling: Before I began researching this article, I had already read all of Finkelstein’s books and thought highly of them. Nonetheless, when I first looked into Dershowitz’s charges, my aim was to conduct an objective investigation to uncover the truth. If Dershowitz was right that Finkelstein’s work was disgraceful, I wanted to know about it. Also, when I started I had read none of Dershowitz’s books. In the course of my research I consulted his books but ultimately found it unnecessary to read any of them from cover to cover, for reasons that will become clear in what follows.

  Before the original publication of the first article on which the present essay is based, I emailed drafts of this article to both Finkelstein and Dershowitz for comment. Finkelstein gave me several substantive comments, some of which I incorporated. Dershowitz’s response, in its entirety, was “What a rediculous [sic] and biased screed filled with demonstable [sic] falsehoods and half truths[.]” I wrote back, asking him to specify the half-truths and demonstrable falsehoods so that I could correct them. I also asked him for information on three specific issues. His response, in its entirety, was, “Your bias is so obvious you can’t seem to help it[.]” ]

  «Beyond Chutzpah»

  Beyond Chutzpah purports to refute virtually every aspect of The Case for Israel’s account of Israel’s human rights record and the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Consequently, the most striking feature of Dershowitz’s “Letter” is that not one of the numbered items in the “Letter” is taken from Beyond Chutzpah.

  The introduction to the “Letter” does, however, contain one charge against Beyond Chutzpah. Here is the background: In a column published in the Jerusalem Post (11 March 2002), Dershowitz proposed that Israel should retaliate for each Palestinian attack by engaging in “the destruction of a small village which has been used as a base for terrorist operations. The residents would be given 24 hours to leave, and then troops will come in and bulldose all of the buildings.” He added that the destruction of the village “will be automatic. The order will have been given in advance of the terrorist attacks and there will be no discretion.” (5)

  [ 5 I obtained a copy of the column for $3.95 from the Jerusalem Post’s web site, www.jpost.com; a brief summary of the column is available for free.]

  In his book Why Terrorism Works, which was published a few months after the Jerusalem Post column (4 September 2002), Dershowitz referred to the policy he proposed in March 2002 and cited his Jerusalem Post column. But in his book Dershowitz described the Jerusalem Post policy inaccurately, saying that his proposal was for Israel to respond to Palestinian attacks by “destroying empty shouses in a particular village that has been used as a base for terrorists.” (6) He also said that “[t]here is something seriously troubling, of course, about the bulldosing of an entire village, even if its residents have been evcuated,” though he claimed such a policy would be justified nonetheless. (p. 177) The Jerusalem Post column, however, said nothing about evacuating anyone. Rather, it proposed that the village’s residents be given twenty-four hours’ notice and that the destruction of the village at the end of the notice period be “automatic.” It also said nothing about refraining from destroying the village (or any part of it) if some or all of its residents failed – or were unable – to leave. Indeed, Dershowitz’s Jerusalem Post proposal excluded the possibility of exercising such restraint, because the destruction of the village was to be “automatic” and leave no room for “discretion.”

  [ 6 Alan M. Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 177.

  In Beyond Chutzpah, Finkelstein wrote that Dershowitz

  advocates not only individual house demolitions but also “the destruction of a small village which has been used as a base for terrorist operations” after each Palestinian attack. “The response will be automatic.” Such massive destruction, he concludes, will further the “noble causes” of reducing terrorism and promoting peace. … It is hard to make out any difference between the policy Dershowitz advocates and the Nazis destruction of Lidice [a Csech village destroyed by the Nazis in retaliation for the assassination of a Nazi offier], for which he expresses abhorrence – except that Jews, not Germans, would be implementing it. (pp. 175-16)

  Finkelstein cited Dershowitz’s Jerusalem Post column as his source for the quotations concerning the “automatic” destruction of entire villages (p. 175, n. 19). I have checked the quotations myself, and they are accurate.

  That’s the background. Now the charge: In his “Letter,” Dershowitz criticised Finkelstein for

  his oft-maid [sic] claim, found on page 176 of Beyond Chutzpah, that “It is hard to make out any difference between the policy Dershowitz advocates and the Nazi destruction of Lidice, for which he expresses abhorrence – except that Jews, not Germans, would be implementing it.” The trouble is that the policy and passage Finkelstein quotes actually says, “[Israel] would then publicly decree precisely how it will respond in the event of another terrorist act, such as by destroying empty houses in a particular village that has been used as a base for terrorists, and naming that village in advance.” In Finkelstein’s world, “destroying empty houses” in order to deter terrorism is the equivalent of genocide. [emphasis added]

  Dershowitz developed the same argument at greater length in the packet of materials he sent to DePaul’s faculty and administration.

  Dershowitz’s quotation concerning “destroying empty houses,” however, comes from his book Why Terrorism Works and does not appear in his Jerusalem Post column. It is therefore not true that “the policy and passage Finkelstein quotes actually says” what Dershowitz claimed it says. Finkelstein accurately quoted the policy and passage from the Jerusalem Post as his source for the quotation. The language Finkelstein quoted does not appear in Why Terrorism Works. It is consequently unmistakable that Finkelstein was quoting (and comparing to Lidice) the Jerusalem Post proposal concerning the destruction of entire villages, not the Why Terrorism Works proposal concerning the destruction of only empty houses.

  The problem here is not merely that Dershowitz is wrong. Everyone makes mistakes. Rather, his charge seems to be an instance of academic misconduct because there is no way he could have honestly (but mistakenly) believed Finkelstein was quoting, and comparing to Lidice, the Why Terrorism Works proposal concerning empty houses, rather than the Jerusalem Post proposal concerning entire villages. Because Dershowitz purported to be correcting the record concerning the “policy and passage Finkelstein quotes,” he must have looked at Finkelstein’s citation to see what source Finkelstein was quoting. And finding that Finkelstein was quoting the Jerusalem Post, Dershowitz quoted an alternative passage from Why Terrorism Works and claimed (falsely) that that’s what the passage Finkelstein quoted really said. That is not a mistake. It appears to be a deliberate misrepresentation.

  It also bears emphasis that this misrepresentation appears in the fourth paragraph of Dershowitz’s four-thousand-word “Letter.” Thus, even readers who lacked the patience to read the whole letter, or who might be inclined to dismiss Dershowitz as biased, would likely be misled. Any reader who assumed that Dershowitz would not brasenly misrepresent the contents of his own or Finkelstein’s writings would be left thinking, “Well, that is pretty bad – Finkelstein accused Dershowitz of proposing the destruction of entire villages, when Dershowitz was talking only about empty houses.”

  If this was not an honest mistake by Dershowitz, but rather a deliberate misrepresentation, then it would seem to constitute academic misconduct. It would be a deliberate attempt to deceive the DePaul faculty concerning the merits of a pending tenure case.

  In addition, when considered in light of the evidence, Dershowitz’s concluding sentence – “In Finkelstein’s world, ‘destroying empty houses’ in order to deter terrorism is the equivalent of genocide” – reveals itself to be false two times over. First, Finkelstein did not say that “destroying empty houses” is similar to the Nazis’ destruction of Lidice. Rather, he said that destroying an entire village, which Dershowitz proposed in the Jerusalem Post, is similar to the Nazis’ destruction of Lidice. Second, Finkelstein did not say that either of Dershowitz’s proposals (destroying entire villages or destroying empty houses) “is the equivalent of genocide.” Rather, he said that one of Dershowitz’s proposals (the destruction of entire villages) appears to be indistinguishable from the Nazis’ destruction of Lidice. The destruction of Lidice was not, by itself, genocide, and Finkelstein never said it was.

  Because I have no independent expertise on Nazi war crimes in general or the destruction of Lidice in particular, I will not offer an opinion on Finkelstein’s claim that the destruction of Lidice is similar to Dershowitz’s Jerusalem Post proposal. It should be noted, however, that Dershowitz himself has not denied their similarity.

  Beyond «Beyond Chutzpah»

 No other charges appearing anywhere in Dershowitz’s “Letter” are directed against Beyond Chutzpah. In the “Case Study”, Dershowitz’s examples of Finkelstein’s alleged “pattern” of “mak[ing] up quotations and facts” (p. 185) were likewise not drawn from Beyond Chutzpah, but there is a straightforward explanation: Both The Case for Peace, which contains the “Case Study,” and Beyond Chutzpah were published in August 2005, so it was impossible for either book to contain a response to the other. But when Dershowitz wrote his “Letter” to the former chair of Finkelstein’s department in the fall of 2006, he had ample time to identify any instances of dishonesty in Beyond Chutzpah. Still, the “Letter” mentions none.

  Some of Dershowitz’s “Letters” do, however, relate to Beyond Chutzpah. Here’s the background for the main example: In The Case for Israel, Dershowitz laments that Israel’s methods of interrogating Palestinian prisoners were “universally characterised as torture” even though “they were nonlethal and did not involve the infliction of sustained pain.” (7) The endnote to that sentence reads as follows: “One person died following shaking, but an independent investigation attributed his death to an unknown preexisting medical condition.” (p. 252, n.9) As support for those claims, the endnote cites a single decision of Israel’s Supreme Court. In Beyond Chutzpah (p. 160), Finkelstein quotes the endnote verbatim and then attempts to refute it.

  [ 7 Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (New Jersey: John Wiley, 2003), pp. 137-38. Unless otherwise indicated, all references are to the original hardback edition.]

  Against Dershowitz’s claim that there has been only one interrogation-related death, Finkelstein quoted the reports of two independent human rights organisations, both of which concluded that there have been multiple such deaths. (pp. 160-161) And against Dershowitz’s claim that the one prisoner who died “following shaking” actually died because of a preexisting medical condition, Finkelstein quoted Amnesty International’s report on that prisoner, entitled Death by Shaking: The Case of Abd al-Samad Harisat. According to Finkelstein, Amnesty reported that Israeli officials originally attributed the death to a preexisting medical condition, but “it so happened that Abd al-Samad Harisat was in good health at the time of his sudden death.” (Beyond Chutzpah, p. 161) The Amnesty report further states that the official autopsy, which was conducted by two Israeli doctors and observed by a Scottish doctor on behalf of the decedent’s family, concluded that Harisat died because of violent shaking. According to Amnesty, the Department of Investigations of Police reached the same conclusion, as did both an “expert opinion” on the official autopsy report and a statement from the Israeli Ministry of Justice. Finkelstein then writes the following (pp. 161-162):

  The Supreme Court decision cited by Dershowitz (HCJ 5100/94) states that “[a]ll agree” that Harisat “expired after being shaken.” The Court decision makes no mention of an “independent investigation” attributing Harisat’s death to “an unknown preexisting medical condition.” Indeed, no record of this independent investigation exists.

  That’s the background. What does Dershowitz have to say in response? In his List, Dershowitz writes:

  Here is what [Finkelstein] said in Chicago on March 18, 2004: “There was a famous case in 1995 of a Palestinian who was shaken to death while in detention. And nobody disputed the facts the Israeli pathologist’s office, the forensic pathologists who were brought into the case, eventually it went to the Israeli High Court of Justice they all agreed. And I’m quoting now from the High Court of Justice Judgment: ‘All agree that Harisad [sic: Harisat] died from the shaking.’ If you go to Dershowitz’s book, he discusses the case and says, quote, ‘An independent inquiry found that he didn’t die from the shaking, but from a previous illness.’ That was just made up.”

  It was Finkelstein who made up the quotation. The Supreme Court actually said that “the suspect expired after being shaken.” The difference between “died from the shaking” and “expired after being shaken” is considerable, especially since the sentence that follows in the decision attributes the death to an extremely rare complication, and the sentence before summarises the literature as having no examples of anyone dying from shaking. This is not a translation error. It is an example of a made-up quotation. Remember, Finkelstein said he was “quoting,” not paraphrasing, yet the words he purports to quote simply do not exist. Finkelstein has never, to my knowledge, responded to this serious charge of fabricating a quotation from the Israeli Supreme Court.

  Finkelstein’s pattern of making up quotations … should alone disqualify him from any tenured academic position.

  Because Dershowitz cites no book or other publication, I will assume that he is quoting an interview or lecture that Finkelstein gave in Chicago on 18 March 2004. I will also assume that he is quoting Finkelstein accurately. Dershowitz makes essentially the same argument in his “Case Study” (p. 185), though there he quotes from a Finkelstein appearance on C-SPAN2. (p. 233, n. 118)

  What should we make of this exchange? On the one hand, in Beyond Chutzpah Finkelstein (1) accurately quotes both Dershowitz and the Supreme Court decision, (2) adduces evidence refuting Dershowitz’s claim that there has been only one Palestinian death from interrogation, (3) asserts that the Supreme Court decision cited by Dershowitz makes no reference to any “independent investigation” that concluded Harisat’s death was not caused by shaking, (4) cites multiple independent investigations that did attribute the death to shaking, and

(5) asserts that there is no record of an independent investigation that reached a contrary conclusion.

  On the other hand, in his “Letter” Dershowitz: (1) ignores what Finkelstein wrote in Beyond Chutzpah, (2) quotes some oral presentations in which Finkelstein misquoted two passages that he later quoted accurately in Beyond Chutzpah, and (3) charges Finkelstein with having “made up the quotation[s].” Dershowitz never responded to, let alone refuted, any of Finkelstein’s substantive claims in Beyond Chutzpah concerning the number of interrogation deaths, the actual independent investigations of Harisat’s death, or the fact that Dershowitz’s cited source does not mention an independent investigation that attributed the death to a preexisting medical condition.

  Thus, continuing to assume that Dershowitz is accurately quoting Finkelstein, we can draw the following conclusions. Finkelstein appears to have made two oral misquotations of material he quoted correctly in Beyond Chutzpah. Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel appears to contain multiple serious falsehoods concerning Israel’s violent interrogation of Palestinian prisoners.

  Moreover, in the Case Study, Dershowitz attempts to conceal the inaccuracies in The Case for Israel by misrepresenting both his own endnote and the Supreme Court opinion that he cited in it. Dershowitz writes (p. 234, n. 120):

  What the High Court said was that “medical literature has not, to date, reported a case in which a person died as the direct result of having been shaken.” It did reference a case, different from the one I discussed in my book, in which “the suspect expired after being shaken,” but explained that “according to the state, that case was a rare exception, [where] death was caused by an extremely rare complication which resulted in pulmonary edema” (emphasis added). … In addition, Finkelstein misquotes me as saying “he didn’t die from the shaking.” I actually said, “one person died following shaking,” and he knows I was discussing a different case.

  Dershowitz thus claims that the case in which, according to the Supreme Court, “the suspect expired after being shaken” is not the same case Dershowitz discussed in The Case for Israel. That cannot be true: The endnote in The Case for Israel refers to only “[o]ne person [who] died following shaking”; Dershowitz mentions that one person as the one potential exception to his claim that Israel’s interrogation methods are “nonlethal.” The only source Dershowitz has ever cited concerning that one person is this Supreme Court opinion. But the Supreme Court opinion mentions only one case of a person dying after shaking, so they must be the same case.

  It should also be noted that in this endnote from the “Case Study”, Dershowitz largely admits that The Case for Israel’s reference to an “independent investigation” was incorrect. Recall that, in The Case for Israel, Dershowitz cited this Supreme Court opinion as his only source concerning the “independent investigation” that found the death was caused by an unrelated medical condition. Now, in the Case Study endnote, Dershowitz acknowledges that the Supreme Court did not assert in its own voice that Harisat’s death was caused by “an extremely rare complication.” The court did mention that assertion, but the court neither endorsed it nor attributed it to an independent investigation. Rather, as quoted by Dershowitz, the court said that “according to the state,” the death was caused by an “extremely rare complication.” That is, the assertion that Harisat’s death was caused by a rare complication was made by the Israeli government lawyers who were defending the security services’ interrogation methods. The court’s opinion states no basis for the lawyers’ assertion–for all the court tells us, the lawyers might have just made it up.

  Dershowitz’s “Letter” contains no other items related to Beyond Chutzpah. (It mentions the plagiarism issue, which I address below, but the List unequivocally states that Dershowitz is “not answering that charge here.”) But his “Case Study” does contain two others. (p. 185) Dershowitz writes that

  Finkelstein claims that in The Case for Israel I “never once–I mean literally, not once–mention[ed] any mainstream human rights organisation. Never a mention of Amnesty’s findings, never a mention of Human Rights Watch’s findings, never a mention of B’Tselem’s findings … none.” But a simple check of the index reveals that I repeatedly discuss–and criticise–the findings of these very organisations.

  Dershowitz again cites the C-SPAN2 appearance as his source for the quotation. (p. 233, n. 117) Again, I will assume he is quoting it accurately.

  Here is what Finkelstein writes in Beyond Chutzpah (pp. 92-93):

  The most fundamental – and telling – fact about the chapters of The Case for Israel devoted to human rights issues is that never once does Dershowitz cite a single mainstream human rights organisation to support any of his claims. …

  Not only does Dershowitz systematically ignore their findings, but in order to justify having done so, he seeks to malign the human rights organisations themselves.

  Finkelstein then goes on to discuss some of The Case for Israel’s criticism of human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and B’Tselem (an Israeli organisation monitoring human rights violations in the occupied territories). (p. 93)

  Again, what should we make of this exchange? On the one hand, in Beyond Chutzpah, Finkelstein pointed out that Dershowitz, in The Case for Israel, purports to defend Israel’s human rights record but never once cited a mainstream human rights organisation in order to support his claims; rather, Dershowitz cited such organisations only to discredit them. On the other hand, Dershowitz (1) quoted an incorrect oral statement by Finkelstein to the effect that The Case for Israel never cites mainstream human rights organisations at all, (2) pointed out that The Case for Israel does indeed cite mainstream human rights organisations (in order to discredit them), and (3) charged Finkelstein with “mak[ing] up … facts.”

  Again, Finkelstein appears to have made a fairly trivial oral misstatement. Dershowitz, however, appears to have implicitly admitted that he did precisely what Beyond Chutzpah charged him with doing: The Case for Israel, his best-selling defense of Israel’s human rights record, cites mainstream human rights organisations only to discredit them, never for support.

  The “Case Study” contains one other charge relating to Beyond Chutzpah. Background: Dershowitz writes in his book Chutzpah, concerning the plight of the Arab Palestinians who were expelled in 1948, that the expulsion “is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal or other projects that require large-scale movement of people.” (8) In Beyond Chutzpah, Finkelstein accurately quoted part of that statement (he omitted “or other projects that require large-scale movement of people”). (p. 47) Later, he cites several prominent Israeli scholars (Baruch Kimmerling, Ilan Pappe, and Benny Morris) as having described the 1948 expulsion as an “ethnic cleansing.” (p. 53, n. 29)

  In the Case Study, Dershowitz writes the following: “Another made-up quotation by Finkelstein is his claim that in my book Chutzpah I analogised ‘ethnic cleansings’ to ‘urban renewal.’ I say nothing of the kind in Chutzpah. I never even mention ‘ethnic cleansing.’” (p. 185) As his source, Dershowitz cites a talk by Finkelstein at the Vancouver Public Library in 2004. (p. 234, n. 121)

  It is true that the relevant passage in Chutzpah does not employ the phrase “ethnic cleansing.” It is also true that in Chutzpah Dershowitz drew an analogy between urban renewal and the 1948 expulsion of the Arab Palestinians, which, according to Finkelstein, has been described by prominent Israeli scholars as “ethnic cleansing.” In his “Letter”, Dershowitz does not challenge Finkelstein’s claim about what the Israeli scholars say, so I have not independently verified it. I also have not checked the accuracy of Dershowitz’s quotation from Finkelstein’s appearance at the Vancouver Public Library. But it should be noted that it is not clear from Dershowitz’s own rendering of the quotation that Finkelstein ever attributed the phrase “ethnic cleansing” to Dershowitz.

  That’s it. Apart from the plagiarism issue, nothing else in either the List or the Case Study (or elsewhere in The Case for Peace) relates to Beyond Chutzpah.

  Skeptical readers may wonder whether Dershowitz’s charges could really be this silly and inconsequential. Such readers should not take my word for it. The “Letter” is available on Finkelstein’s web site, and it contains a link to an online copy of the “Case Study”. The texts of The Case for Israel, The Case for Peace, Chutzpah, and Beyond Chutzpah, including endnotes, are also searchable online at Amazon.com. (Not all pages are viewable online, but many of the relevant ones are.)
  Recall now that in Beyond Chutzpah Finkelstein quoted and purported to refute claim after claim after claim from The Case for Israel. Recall also that one year later, Dershowitz, in his “Letter” of the “clearest and most egregious instances” of Finkelstein’s dishonesty, Dershowitz’s sole attempt to refute any of the claims in Beyond Chutzpah (plagiarism aside) appears to have been based on a deliberate misrepresentation of what Finkelstein wrote. And note that the foregoing discussion seems to tell us something about just how “clear and egregious” some of the instances on the “Letter” are.

  From these facts it appears reasonable to conclude that, with the possible exception of the plagiarism issue, Dershowitz has been unable to find a single false statement in Beyond Chutzpah. And it follows that, as far as Dershowitz himself can now determine, his own book The Case for Israel is full of falsehoods concerning Israel’s human rights record and the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, while Finkelstein’s book contains none.

  Conspiracy Theories

  Although published at the same time as Beyond Chutzpah, the “Case Study” constitutes Dershowitz’s most thorough discussion of Finkelstein’s assault on The Case for Israel. The thesis of the “Case Study” is that Finkelstein’s attack was the product of a “well-orchestrated campaign” devised by a left-wing anti-Israel conspiracy whose members are Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, and Finkelstein. The chapter opens with an introductory description of the conspiracy. (pp. 167-170) Next come subsections consisting of attacks on each of the alleged conspirators. (pp. 170-172 [Chomsky], pp. 172-175 [Finkelstein], p. 175 [Cockburn]) The next subsection describes the conspiracy’s previous work, including its campaign to discredit Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial (1984), the book Finkelstein accuses Dershowitz of plagiarising. (pp. 175-180)

  Finally, in the last subsection of the chapter, Dershowitz turns to the conspiracy’s attacks against him. (pp. 180-188) The bulk of his discussion, however, either deals exclusively with the plagiarism charge (pp. 180-184) or describes the power and extensive influence of the conspiracy. (pp. 186-188) (E.g., “Finkelstein can get anything he writes published, regardless of its demonstrable falsehoods, because Noam Chomsky has enormous influence on the hard-left press.” Beyond Chutzpah was in fact published by the University of California Press after undergoing a rigorous peer-review process.) Apart from the plagiarism issue, just one page of the twenty-two page chapter is devoted to arguing that some of Finkelstein’s claims about Dershowitz are false. (p. 185)

  That one page contains, by my count, five separate charges against Finkelstein. I have already dealt with three of them (shaking, citation of human rights organisations, and ethnic cleansing) in the previous section. The remaining two do not require extensive discussion. One is based on a quote for which Dershowitz cites no source, so it can fairly be ignored. The other involves a quote from a talk Finkelstein gave in Calgary in 2004. According to Dershowitz, “Finkelstein has even alleged that the autobiographical account of my life in Chutzpah [1991]–growing up as an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn in the 1940s and 1950s–does not ‘have much to do [with] what has actually happened in [my] life.’” (p. 185, alterations by Dershowitz) I have not checked the accuracy of the quote, because I cannot imagine why anyone would care enough to debate it.

  [Mnemotechnique] Apart from that one page, plus the plagiarism issue, Dershowitz’s arguments in his “Case Study” suffer from the well-known defect inherent in all ad hominem arguments: They attack the messenger but leave the message untouched. That is, it does not matter whether Dershowitz’s conspiracy theory is true. Even if it were true, that would not show that any of Beyond Chutzpah’s claims about The Case for Israel (and about Dershowitz’s other writings) are false.

  Because Dershowitz’s conspiracy theory thus has no bearing on the merits of the dispute between Finkelstein and Dershowitz, I will not discuss it further.

  Plagiarism: The Big Picture

  When Finkelstein first attacked The Case for Israel in a debate with Dershowitz on the radio program Democracy Now! in 2003, one of his principal charges was that Dershowitz had plagiarised significant portions of his book from Peters’ From Time Immemorial. Finkelstein has not dropped that charge, but he has repeatedly stated that it is of secondary importance, the main issue being the truth about Israel’s human rights record. In Beyond Chutzpah, he relegates the plagiarism discussion to one of the book’s three appendices, introducing it with the observation that, next to Dershowitz’s alleged whitewash of Israel’s human rights record, “Dershowitz’s academic derelictions seem small beer.” (p. 273; 229)

  In the Democracy Now! debate, Finkelstein also charged that Dershowitz did not write The Case for Israel himself. Dershowitz claims he can prove he wrote it, because he is still in possession of his own handwritten manuscript for the book. (“Case Study”, p. 181) Finkelstein informs me that he requested a copy of that manuscript, but Dershowitz refused to provide it. [Stephen King] In any event, Finkelstein did not include the charge in Beyond Chutzpah. I therefore will not discuss it further.

  Some background on Peters’ book is needed to ground an assessment of the plagiarism controversy. From Time Immemorial argues that at the time of Israel’s founding in 1948, many of the Arab inhabitants of the areas that became the state of Israel were actually recent immigrants – they and their ancestors had not lived there “from time immemorial.” When the book was originally published in the United States in 1984, it received glowing reviews in periodicals across the country and quickly became a best seller. Later, when a number of scholars (of whom Finkelstein was the first) examined the book carefully, they concluded that it was of no scholarly value whatsoever. It ignores important parts of the documentary record, misuses the sources on which it does rely, and contains straightforward logical errors.

  Consequently, Peters’ book has been rejected as worthless by the scholarly community around the world, including in Israel. Skeptical readers should not take my word for it. Yehoshua Porath, one of Israel’s leading scholars on the Arab population of Palestine during the pre-state period, described the book as a “sheer forgery,” adding that “[i]n Israel, at least, the book was almost universally dismissed as sheer rubbish except maybe as a propaganda weapon.” (New York Times, 28 November 1985). Porath, who describes his own politics as “centrist,” also tore the book to shreds in a review published in The New York Review of Books. (16 January 1986) The review is freely available online, together with a subsequent exchange of letters that is also quite illuminating. (27 March 1986) Given the well-known scholarly repudiation of Peters’ book, no scholar would rely on it, any more than a scholar would rely on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

  Now, back to the plagiarism issue: In Beyond Chutzpah, Finkelstein argued that in the first two chapters of The Case for Israel Dershowitz plagiarised Peters by lifting numerous quotations and citations directly from Peters’ book without acknowledging that he found them there. (Beyond Chutzpah, p. 230)

  Dershowitz countered that although he was led to some primary sources by seeing them cited in Peters’ book, he always tried to check them before citing them. If he could not find the primary source himself, he cited Peters. If he was able to check the primary source, he cited it directly, without mentioning Peters. He claimed that his failure to cite Peters in such circumstances is proper. (“Case Study”, p. 182)

  Finkelstein’s principal response was that Dershowitz’s quotations and citations of primary sources contain obvious errors that Dershowitz could not have made if he had checked the primary sources himself, and that Dershowitz’s errors are identical to Peters’ errors concerning the same primary sources. (Beyond Chutzpah, pp. 274-75; 230-31) Finkelstein infers that Dershowitz copied the quotations and citations from Peters rather than checking the primary sources himself.

  Dershowitz has never, to my knowledge, responded to Finkelstein’s argument concerning the identical errors in The Case for Israel and From Time Immemorial. He has not argued, for example, the alleged errors do not exist, or that his errors are not identical to Peters’, or that the identity of the errors is just a coincidence and the errors are easy to make even when one checks the primary sources.

  Finkelstein’s argument concerning the identical errors strikes me as persuasive, and Dershowitz’s failure to respond to the argument strikes me as telling. But I expect that reasonable minds could differ.

  In the next section I present what I consider to be overwhelming evidence that Finkelstein’s argument is sound. If Dershowitz had uncovered a little-known but true and important piece of scholarship on the Middle East and had plagiarised it, passing off the original author’s work as his own, he would surely have been guilty of a serious breach of academic integrity and would have done an injustice to the original author, who would have been deprived of deserved credit. At the same time, however, Dershowitz would have been doing a substantial public service by bringing the original author’s true and important insights to a much wider audience than they had previously received. If that were what he had done, on balance I would probably be glad he had done it.

  But that is not what he did. Instead, he relied upon a bestselling book that has been condemned by the international scholarly community. Even if his citations to Peters were impeccable – even if he is right that they are in fact impeccable – it is still true that he repackaged material from Peters’ discredited bestseller, From Time Immemorial, and added to it his own imprimatur, as a Harvard law professor, in his bestseller The Case for Israel.

  On this issue, Dershowitz has only two potential lines of defense. He could argue that he does not really rely on Peters’ book in The Case for Israel, or he could argue that, contrary to the international scholarly consensus, Peters’ book really is a legitimate source on which a serious scholar can reasonably rely.

  To some extent, Dershowitz pursued both defenses. In The Case for Israel, for example, Dershowitz wrote that “Peters’s conclusions and data have been challenged. … I do not in any way rely on them in this book.” (p. 246, n.31) Likewise, in his Case Study, Dershowitz wrote, “I disagreed with some of [Peters’] conclusions and said so in my book The Case for Israel.” (pp. 175-176) As proof that he had “said” he “disagreed with some of her conclusions,” Dershowitz noted that in The Case for Israel he wrote, “Palestine was certainly not a land empty of all people. It is impossible to reconstruct the demographics of the area with any precision, since census data for that time period are not reliable.” (The Case for Peace, p. 229, n. 60, quoting The Case for Israel, p. 24) The quote does not mention Peters, so it is not in fact an example of Dershowitz having said that he disagreed with Peters’ conclusions. Moreover, to my knowledge not even Peters ever claimed that Palestine was “a land empty of all people” before Zionist immigration.

  Despite Dershowitz’s attempts to distance himself from certain aspects of Peters’ book, the fact remains that by his own admission (“Case Study”, p. 182) he relied upon Peters at least for some primary sources that he was unable to locate himself. Given the scholarly consensus concerning Peters’ book, no serious scholar would have done that.

  As regards the legitimacy of relying on Peters, Dershowitz wrote in his “Case Study” that, although From Time Immemorial has its flaws, it “was supported by evidence and contributed an important new element to the debate.” (p. 176) To support that claim he cited reviews of Peters’ book that appeared in the Washington Post in 1984 and the Financial Times in 1985. (p. 229, n. 61) Regardless of what those reviews do or don’t prove about Peters’ contribution to scholarly debate in the mid-1980s, they prove nothing about whether Peters’ book was considered a reputable scholarly source in 2003, when Dershowitz published The Case for Israel.

  Dershowitz further stated that “[a]ll Finkelstein … managed to show was that in a relatively small number of instances, Peters may have misinterpreted some data, ignored counterdata, and exaggerated some findings — common problems in demographic research that often appear in anti-Israel books as well, including those of Chomsky.” (p. 177) He cites no authority for that assessment, and he never set forth or engaged with Finkelstein’s arguments in detail. (Readers who are curious about Finkelstein’s critique of Peters can find it in his Image and Reality of the Israel/Palestine Conflict (2d ed. 2003) and judge for themselves.)

  I take it that Dershowitz has not succeeded in refuting the international scholarly consensus that From Time Immemorial is neither a serious piece of scholarship nor a source on which a serious scholar would reasonably rely. Moreover, Dershowitz’s weak disclaimers – e.g., certain aspects of Peters’ book have been “challenged,” and the book suffers from “common problems in demographic research” – actually make matters worse. They create the misleading impression that the book’s flaws are common in other reputable works in the field, and that the book is merely the subject of scholarly controversy. It is not. [Mnemotechnique] Serious scholars no longer debate {Peters’ book} – they dismiss it.

  There is consequently no way out for Dershowitz here. Either he knew that Peters’ book was discredited or he didn’t. If he did know it, then he intentionally used a thoroughly disreputable source. If he didn’t know it, then he was too ignorant of mainstream scholarly work on Israel/Palestine to deserve to be taken seriously. Either way, by relying on Peters in The Case for Israel and expressly defending her in The Case for Peace, he took himself outside the realm of serious, informed discussion of the topic on which he was writing.

  Plagiarism: The Evidence

  I now turn to a detailed evaluation of Finkelstein’s argument concerning alledgedly identical errors in The Case for Israel and From Time Immemorial. I have examined the texts relevant to one of the quotations implicated in Finkelstein’s argument, and I see no reasonable alternative to the conclusion tht the argument is sound. Dershowitz must have copied the quotation from Peters, not from the original source.

  The quotation is from Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abraod (see Beyond Chutzpah, p. 275; 231). It appears on pages 23-24 of The Case for Israel and pages 159-60 of From Time Immemorial. Dershowitz’s version of the quotation omits two of the sentences that Peters’s version includes. Dershowitz also omitted Peters’s italics and added a few errors that Peters did not make. Apart from those discrepancies, Peters’s and Dershowitz’s versions of the quotation are identical, character for character.

  I have checked Peters’s and Dershowitz’s versions of the quotation against the 1996 Oxford University Press edition of The Innocents Abroad, which is the edition Dershowitz cited. Peters’s version contains many errors, and Dershowitz’s version reproduces every one of them. The errors are summarised in the accompanying table.

  The Identical Errors

	Peters/Dershowitz	Twain	Comments
1	the valley (line 1)	this valley (p. 485)	Peters and Dershowitz change “this” to “the” but fail to signal that they have altered the original.
2	miles hereabouts (line 4)	miles, hereabouts, and (p. 485)	Peters and Dershowitz omit the commas around “hereabouts” but fail to signal the omission.
3	Come to Galilee for that … these (line 5)	Come to Galilee for that. If these (p. 508)	Peters and Dershowitz omit the concluding period after “that” but fail to signal the omission. This cannot be attributed to a stylistic choice to omit the concluding period if a sentence is followed by an ellipsis, because on several occasions (e.g., lines 9, 10, and 11) both Peters and Dershowitz include concluding periods followed by ellipses.
4	Capernaum: (line 8)	Capernaum; (p. 508)	Peters and Dershowitz change the semicolon to a colon but fail to signal that they have altered the original.
5	six funeral palms (line 9)	six funeral plumes of palms (p. 508)	Peters and Dershowitz omit the words “plumes of” but fail to signal the omission.
6	palms. … (line 9)	palms; yonder (p. 508)	Peters and Dershowitz omit both the semicolon after “palms” and the remainder of the sentence but erroneously place the ellipsis after the concluding period instead of before it. (a)
7	palms. … We reached (line 9)	palms; …….. We reached (pp. 508, 520)	In the original, the sentences are separated by 12 pages and numerous intervening paragraphs, but Peters and Dershowitz separate them by a single ellipsis and no paragraph break, thus erroneously representing that the sentences are part of a single paragraph. This cannot be attributed to a stylistic choice to mit all paragraph structure, because Peters and Dershowitz did not omit all paragraph structure from the quote – they include a paragraph break at lines 10 and 11.
8	Tabot safely.… (line 10)	Tabor safely, and (p. 520)	Peters and Dershowitz omit both the comma after “safely” and the remainder of the sentence but erroneously place the ellipsis after the concluding period instead of before it.
9	We never saw a human being on the whole route. (line 10)	We never saw a human being on the whole route, much less (p. 520)	Peters and Dershowitz omit both the comma after “route” and the remainder of the sentence but fail to supply an ellipsis, either before or after the period.
10	the whole route. / Nazareth is (line 10, 11)	the whole route ………… Nazareth is (pp. 520, 607)	In the original, the sentences are separated by 87 pages and numerous intervening paragraphs, and “Nazareth is forlorn” occurs in the middle of a paragraph, not at the beginning. But Peters and Dershowitz separates the sentences with a single paragraph break and no ellipses, erroneously representing them as the end and beginning of consecutive paragraphs.
11	Nazareth is forlorn. … (line 11)	Nazareth is forlorn; (p. 607)	Peters and Dershowitz change the semicolon to a period but fail to signal that they have altered the original.
12	accursed (line 11)	accursed, (p. 607)	Peters and Dershowitz omit the comma but fail to signal the omission.
13	ruin (line 11)	ruin, (p. 607)	Peters and Dershowitz omit the comma but fail to signal the omission.
14	today (line 12)	to-day (p. 607)	Peters and Dershowitz omit the hyphen but fail to signal the omission. (In the original, the hyphen is not merely breaking the world at the end of a line of text; the word appears in the middle of a line.)
15	Savior’s (line 15)	Saviour’s (p. 607)	Peters and Dershowitz omit the letter “u” but fail to signal the omission.
16	sang, “Peace on earth, good will to men,” (lines 16, 17)	sang Peace on earth, good will to men, (p. 607)	Peters and Dershowitz add a comma after “sang” and quotation marks before “Peace” and after “men,” but fail to signal that they have altered the original.
17	living creature. … (line 17)	living creature, and (p. 607)	Peters and Dershowitz omit both the comma after “creature” and the remainder of the sentence but erroneously place the ellipsis after the concluding period instead of before it.
18	Chorzin (line 18)	Chorazin (p. 608)	Peters and Dershowitz omit the letter “a” but fail to signal the omission.
19	them, (line 19)	them (p. 608)	Peters and Dershowitz add the comma but fail to signal that they have altered the original.
20	Savior’s (line 20)	Saviour’s (p. 608)	Peters and Dershowitz omit the letter “u” but fail to signal the omission.

  Note: Line numbers refer to the lines of the Twain quote as it appears on pages 23-24 of The Case for Israel (2003 hardback edition), numbering the lines of the quote consecutively and without interruption from line 1 on page 23 to line 21 on page 24.

  [ a It is possible that the errors in this row and in rows 8 and 17 are the result of type-setting conventions that Peters’s and Dershowitz’s publishers may have followed. To my knowledge, none of the other identical errors can be so explained.]

  In addition, both Peters and Dershowitz (in the original hardback edition of The Case for Israel) cited the same passage of Twain (i.e., pages 349, 366, 375, and 441-42) as their source for the quotation (The Case for Israel [2003 hardback edition], p. 246, n. 5; From Time Immemorial, p. 485, nn. 131, 133, 134). But those page citations are incorrect, both for the 1881 London edition of Twain, which Peters cited, and for the 1996 Oxford edition, which Dershowitz cited. In fact, none of the quoted text appears on any of the cited pages in either edition of The Innocents Abroad. In the 2004 paperback edition of The Case for Israel, Dershowitz corrected this error by citing the proper pages of the 1996 Oxford edition (i.e., pages 485, 508, 520, and 607-8), but he made no changes in the text of the quotation (The Case for Israel [2004 paperback edition], pp. 23-24, 246, n. 5).

  The cumulative weight of these identical errors strikes me as considerable. I do not see how Dershowitz could, purely by coincidence, have precisely reproduced all of Peters’s errors if he was working from the original Twain. Rather, the only reasonable inference seems to be that he copied the quotation from Peters. But Dershowitz does not cite Peters as his source for the quotation. He cites Twain.

  As I noted earlier, Dershowitz has never, to my knowledge, responded to Finkelstein’s argument concerning the identical errors in The Case for Israel and From Time Immemorial. With respect to the Twain quote, for example, he has said only that it cannot be seriously suggested that he did not find the quote on his own, because he claims that he can prove he has been quoting The Innocents Abroad in debates since the 1970s, long before Peters’s book was published (See “Case Study”, pp. 182, 232, n. 106). (The only “proof” Dershowitz has ever identified is his appearance in a televised debate on PBS’s The Advocates in 1970. I obtained a transcript of the debate and found that Dershowitz never quoted a word of, or even mentioned, Twain. I also asked Dershowitz if he had any other “proof” besides his appearance on The Advocates, but he refused to respond.)

  Regardless of how long Dershowitz has been quoting Twain, however, I see no way of avoiding the inference that Dershowitz copied The Case for Israel’s Twain quotation directly from From Time Immemorial, not from original source. I likewise see no way of avoiding the inference that, having copied the quotation from Peters, Dershowitz never checked it against the original source, because he failed to correct a single one of Peters’s twenty errors (including the omission of eighty-seven pages of text without an ellipsis). Moreover, Dershowitz himself, rather than a research assistant, must have personally copied the quotation from Peters, because Dershowitz has insisted, in both the “Letter” and the “Case Study” (p. 181), that he wrote every word of the text of The Case for Israel by hand.

  Plagiarism: The Coverup

  Dershowitz knew about Finkelstein’s identical errors argument long before he wrote his “Letter” to the former chairman of Finkelstein’s department in September 2006. Finkelstein first raised the issue in an exchange with Dershowitz that was published in The Harvard Crimson on 3 October 2003. Alexander Cockburn, expressly relying upon Finkelstein, raised the issue again in an exchange with Dershowitz that was published on 27 October 2003 in The Nation magazine. Dershowitz responded to Cockburn in The Nation’s 15 December 2003 issue, but he never addressed the identical errors argument. Dershowitz did, however, correct some of the errors Finkelstein had pointed out, including the page citations for the Twain quote, in the paperback edition of The Case for Israel, which was published in August 2004 (see The Case for Israel [2003 hardback edition], pp. 20, 245, n. 16; The Case for Israel [2004 paperback edition], pp. 20, 246, n. 16). Finkelstein also included the identical errors against in Beyond Chutzpah (see, e.g., pp. 274-75; 230-31), which was published in August 2005. And the materials Dershowitz distributed to DePaul’s faculty and administration made clear that he had carefully scrutinised Beyond Chutzpah in its entirety. For all of these reasons, there seems to be no room for doubt that Dershowitz knew about Finkelstein’s identical errors argument for years before he wrote his “Letter” and sent it to DePaul in September 2006.

  As I noted in the previous section, however, Dershowitz has never responded to the argument. In fact, to my knowledge, he has never acknowledged that Finkelstein made such an argument. Instead, Dershowitz has sought to portray the entire plagirism controversy as a dispute about citation style. In the “Case Study”, he contended that Finkelstein’s charge of plagiarism was merely that Dershowitz should have cited Peters for every source that he first encountered in Peters’s book, rather than citing her only for those sources he did not independently check himself. (See p. 182 [“This became the charge of plagiarism – that I cited some quotations to their original sources rather than all of them tto the secondary source in which I first came across them”].) Dershowitz took a similar approach in his “Letter,” stating with respect to the plagiarism controversy that “much of it turns on the definition of plagiarism: whether it is proper to find a quotation in one source, check it against the original source, and cite to the original, rather than the secondary, source.”

  Dershowitz’s characterisations of the dispute are demonstrably incorrect. The identical errors argument, which lies at the heart of Finkelstein’s case, shows that the plagiarism charge is not a technical matter about citation style or about the definition of plagiarism. Rather, it is a factual dispute about whether Dershowitz copied primary source material directly from Peters without citing Peters and without checking the primary source himself. Again, Dershowitz has known this since the fall of 2003. It thus appears that Dershowitz’s strategy from the start has been to pretend that this factual dispute does not exist and to hope that no one will notice.

  Dershowitz claims that he personally asked Harvard to investigate Finkelstein’s plagiarism charges (“Case Study,” p. 233, n. 113). Dershowitz has also stated unequivocally, in both the “Letter” and the “Case Study”, that Harvard did investigate and reject the charges in their entirety. In the “Letter”, Dershowitz wrote that he “was completely cleared of that charge [i.e., plagiarism] by an independent Harvard University investigation.” (See also “Case Study”, pp. 183 [“Finkelstein was furious that Harvard cleared me of his entirely false and politically motivated charges of plagiarism”], 184, 233, n. 113.) In Beyond Chutzpah, Finkelstein likewise reported that the director of Harvard Law School’s office of communications informed him that Harvard “looked into the charges against Dershowitz and ‘found that no plagiarism had occurred’” (p. 298; 254).

  Neither Dershowitz nor Harvard, however, has identified the specific issues or arguments that Harvard alledgedly investigated and rejected. In particular, neither of them has ever said whether Harvard investigated the identical errors issue.

  In order to obtain a definitive answer to that question, I emailed Harvard Law School’s associated dean for academic affairs, Catherine Claypoole, with a copy to Dershowitz. After describing the background, I asked, “When Harvard looked into the plagiarism charges against Professor Dershowitz, did Harvard investigate the issue of alledgedly identical errors in From Time Immemorial and The Case for Israel?” A staff assistant forwarded my message to the law school’s commmunications office.

  While I was waiting to hear from the administration, I began receiving heated and not entirely coherent responses from Dershowitz. The most noteworthy feature of Dershowitz’s responses from Dershowitz. The most noteworthy feature of Dershowitz’s replies is that despite repeated opportunities to answer my question about whether Harvard had investigated the identical errors issue, he never did. He did not even say that he believed they had investigated it. Rather, he stuck to his previous pattern of refusing to acknowledge that the issue even existed, and he repeated his claim that he had been quoting some of the relevant primary sources long before Peters’s book was published.

  Ten days after emailing Dean Claypoole, I still had heard nothing from the communications office, so I contacted its director, Mike Armini. Less than one hour later, he sent me the following message: “Hello Mr. Menetrez. I don’t have anything more to add other than what I said a couple of years ago. The accusations made by Professor Finkelstein were investigated by Harvard University and it was determined that plagiarism did not occur. This has been widely reported. We do not plan to provide any further detail on this matter. Are you writing for a specific publication?” In reply, I asked whether Armini was declining to confirm or deny that Harvard investigated the identical errors issue. He did not respond. I sent two more follow-up inquiries but never heard from him again.

  Having failed to obtain an answer from the law school’s administration, I wrote to Dershowitz and posed the same question I had originally directed to the academic affairs office. In the course of the long and peculiar correspondence that ensued, Dershowitz again repeated his claim that he has been quoting Twain since the 1970s, which is of course irrelevant to my question about the scope of Harvard’s investigation. He also echoed Armini’s general claim that Harvard investigated all of Finkelstein’s allegations. But Dershowitz kept to his long-standing pattern of refusing to acknowledge that Finkelstein’s allegations include the identical errors argument, so his claim that Harvard investigated all of Finkelstein’s allegations is, in this context, meaningless.

  Like Armini, Dershowitz never specifically confirmed that Harvard investigated Finkelstein’s identical errors argument. Nor did he claim that he believed, perhaps mistakenly, that Harvard investigated it. Nor did he express surprise or disquiet at Armini’s failure to confirm that Harvard investigated the argument. And at certain points he actually feigned ignorance of the entire matter, asking me for specific examples of allegedly identical errors even after I had referred him to the Finkelstein and Cockburn articles mentioned above, which contain specific examples.

  One of Dershowitz’s messages did appear to yield one new piece of potentially relevant information, but the appearance was quickly disspelled. While still failing to acknowledge that the identical errors argument had ever been made by Finkelstein, Dershowitz did nonetheless refer to the argument at one point: He claimed that he had brought the argument to the attention of Harvard’s administration some time before I emailed Dean Claypoole in August 2007. He did not, however, say exactly when he did it. In response, I asked him to identify any members of the administration whom he had told about the argument before Harvard conducted its investigation. He refused.

  Incidentally, Dershowitz could easily have altered Harvard’s administration to the plagiarism charges without telling them about the identical errors argument, because when Finkelstein (in his Democracy Now! debate with Dershowitz on 24 September 2003) and Cockburn (in a column in the 13 October 2003 issue of The Nation) first accused Dershowitz of plagiarism, neither of them mentioned the identical errors argument. If Harvard’s investigators read only the debate transcript and Cockburn’s column of 13 October 2003, they would never have encountered the identical errors issue at all. But again, Dershowitz knew about the issue no later than December 2003, and probably as early as 3 October 2003.

  Once my correspondence with Dershowitz was concluded, I forwarded all of it to Harvard’s administration, to give them an opportunity to comment on it if they wished. I received no response.

  The failure of both Harvard and Dershowitz to provide a straight answer to my question about whether Harvard investigated Finkelstein’s identical errors argument, despite my persistent inquiries spanding nearly one month, strongly suggests that Harvard did not investigate the argument and that Dershowitz has known it all along. There is no other plausible interpretation of their refusal to answer my question or of Dershowitz’s continuing refusal to acknowledge that the argument has been central to Finkelstein’s charge of plagiarism ever since October 2003.

  Moreover, putting aside my email correspondence with Harvard and Dershowitz, I believe the evidence concerning the Twain quote independently establishes that Harvard did not know about the identical errors argument before conducting its investigation, because I take for granted that the Harvard administration is neither hopelessly corrupt nor intellectually incompetent. If the administration had known about the argument, they would have investigated it, because they are not corrupt. If they had investigated it, they would have found the same massive evidence that I found, because they are not incompetent. And if they had found that massive evidence, they would not have cleared Dershowitz, because they are not corrupt.

  Nor could Harvard have missed the fact that copying the Twain quote from Peters without citing Peters would be a straightforward violation of Harvard’s own standards for student writing (see Beyond Chutzpah, p. 298; 254). Harvard’s pamphlet Writing with Sources: A Guide for Students (1998) states: “QUOTING OR CITING A PASSAGE YOU FOUND QUOTED OR CITED BY ANOTHER SCHOLAR: when you havven’t actually read the original source, cite the passage as ‘quoted in’ or ‘cited in’ that scholar – both to credit that person for finding the quoted passage or cited text, and to protect yourself in a case he or she has misquoted or misrepresented …” (Section 2.1). No honest and competent investigation by Harvard would have held Dershowitz to a lower standard than Harvard sets for its freshmen. (9)

  [ 9 Harvard Law School’s guidelines for student writing do not expressly address this specific issue, but the guidelines are at least as demanding as those spelled out Writing with Sources. The law school guidelines provide that “[a]ll work submitted by student for any academic or non-academic exercise is expected to be the student’s own work. In the preparation of their work, students should always take great care to distinguish their own ideas and knowledge from information derived from sources.” The guidelines go on to state that “[t]he responsibility for learning the proper forms of citation lies with the individual student. Quotations must be properly placed within quotation marks and must be fully cited.” Finally, under the guidelines, “[s]tudents who submit work that is not their own without clear attribution of all sources, even if inadvertently, will be subject to disciplinary action” (http://www.law.harvard.edu/academics/registrar/help/VAcademicHonesty.php).

  If Harvard never investigated the identical errors issue and Dershowitz has always known that, and if I am also right that Finkelstein’s charge concerning the Twain quote is sound, then Dershowitz has committed academic misconduct on several levels. First, he plagiarised the Twain quotation from Peters without citing her, just as Finkelstein originally alleged.

  Second, Dershowitz made repeated and public misrepresentations about that misconduct, characterising Finkelstein’s plagiarism charges as politically motivated and wholly lacking in merit. See, for example, the “Case Study”: “[T]here was no plagiarism” (p. 182); “Finkelstein’s claim of plagiarism against me is laughable” (p. 182); “Finkelstein, of course, knows that his politically motivated accusations against me are complete fabrictions …” (p. 184).

  Third, in his “Letter” Dershowitz deliberately attempted to deceive the DePaul faculty concerning the merits of Finkelstein’s then-pending tenure case by falsely claiming that Harvard had independently investigated Finkelstein’s plagiarism charges – which Dershowitz knew included the identical issues issue – and “completely cleared” him. In so doing, Dershowitz threw the full institutional weight of Harvard University behind his efforts to cover up his own misconduct, which Finkelstein had exposed.

  Enough Is Enough

  When I began my research on the dispute between Dershowitz and Finkelstein, I intended to evaluate every charge that Dershowitz’s “Letter” levels against Finkelstein. I started with the charges related to Beyond Chutzpah, both because they seemed the most relevant to Finkelstein’s tenure case and because I thought they would be the easiest to investigate, since the documentary record concerning those charges is extensive and readily accessible. After wrapping those up, I intended to move on to the other items on Dershowitz’s “Letter”. But I have abandoned that project. Here’s why:

  The first numbered item on the “Letter” is entitled “Burt Neuborne.” The first sentence after the title reads: “Finkelstein actually tried to get Burt Neuborne, a professor of law at NYU and one of the country’s top civil liberties and Supreme Court advocates, disbarred.” Here’s some background on Neuborne and Finkelstein: Neuborne was one of the lead attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the litigation against Swiss banks to recover funds in dormant accounts that had belonged to Holocaust victims. The banks ended up settling the suit for $1.25 billion. In his book The Holocaust Industry (2d ed. 2003), Finkelstein is harshly critical of the conduct of that litigation, arguing that the banks were “blackmailed” into settling for an amount far in excess of what was justified by the evidence (which is roughly $60 million, according to Finkelstein), and that much of the $1.25 billion recovery will not actually be paid to Holocaust survivors (hence Finkelstein’s label of the affair as a “double shakedown”: first the banks are “shaken down” for more than they owe, and then the Holocaust survivors are “shaken down” by being denied the recovered funds). Neuborne vigorously disputes virtually every aspect of Finkelstein’s account.

  There is an item posted on Finkelstein’s web site (www.normanfinkelstein.com) entitled “Should Burt Neuborne be Disbarred?” The text of the item, however, says nothing about disbarment. Rather, it consists almost entirely of a letter from Neuborne that was published in The Nation in December 2000. (The letter responded to another letter in The Nation from Finkelstein, which itself was a response to a previous letter from Neuborne.) Dershowitz reproduces Neuborne’s December 2000 letter in its entirety in his “Letter”, but he gets the date wrong (2006 instead of 2000). On his web site, Finkelstein prefaces and follows Neuborne’s December 2000 letter with some brief critical comments, in which he again calls Neuborne a “blackmailer,” and an “outrageous liar” as well.

  Those are strong words, to be sure. But Dershowitz claims that “Finkelstein actually tried to get Burt Neuborne … disbarred.” The posting on Finkelstein’s web site does not constitute an attempt to get anyone disbarred. Neuborne is a member of the New York bar. The only way to try to get a New York lawyer disbarred is to send a letter of complaint to a disciplinary committee appointed by the New York state courts.

  So I wrote to Finkelstein and asked him whether he had ever tried to get Neuborne disbarred and, if not, whether he was aware of any basis for the charge, other than the posting on his web site. He replied, “Of course not.”

I also wrote to Neuborne. I quoted Dershowitz’s charge verbatim and asked Neuborne if it was true. I also asked specifically whether Finkelstein had sent a complaint letter to a court-appointed disciplinary committee. Neuborne’s reply began, “Frankly, I pay almost no attention to Mr. Finkelstein, so I can’t say for certain what he’s done.” Neuborne referred me to the posting on Finkelstein’s web site but said he hadn’t seen it himself, because he has never visited the web site. He also said he thought Finkelstein called for his disbarment in a letter to The Nation. I checked; he didn’t. And even if he had, writing a letter to The Nation does not constitute an attempt to get anyone disbarred.

  But, I thought, what if Finkelstein is lying? How could I find out whether he really did send a complaint letter to a disciplinary committee?

  It turns out I can’t. Disciplinary proceedings are strictly confidential. The information becomes public only if the committee determines that the complaint has sufficient merit to warrant disciplining the attorney. I didn’t bother to check Neuborne’s disciplinary record, because I have absolutely no reason to believe it is anything but spotless. Also, I learned that the disciplinary committees sometimes investigate and resolve meritless complaints without ever informing the subject attorney. So the fact that Neuborne does not know of any complaint letter filed by Finkelstein does not prove that no such letter exists.

  But here’s the problem: In this investigatory endeavour, Dershowitz is in no better position than I am. Neither of us can lawfully get at the relevant records, assuming they exist. If Dershowitz is in possession of disciplinary records of a complaint by Finkelstein against Neuborne, he apparently didn’t get them from Finkelstein or Neuborne, because they know of no such records. So Dershowitz would have to be in unauthorised possession of highly confidential information about a fellow attorney’s disciplinary history. That would be a serious transgression and, I assume, not one that Dershowitz would want to trumpet.

So, giving Dershowitz the benefit of every doubt, I have to conclude that he has no more evidence to support his charge than I do. That is, he has nothing more than the posting on Finkelstein’s web site. But Dershowitz knows as well as I do that the posting on Finkelstein’s web site does not constitute an attempt to get anyone disbarred.

  Recall that Dershowitz did not say “Finkelstein called for Neuborne’s disbarment,” or “Finkelstein asked whether Neuborne should be disbarred.” Rather, in his “Letter” he wrote “Finkelstein actually tried to get Burt Neuborne … disbarred.” Thus, Dershowitz drafted his charge in a way that readers would interpret to mean Finkelstein took at least some of the procedurally necessary steps to get Neuborne disbarred. And, giving Dershowitz the benefit of every doubt, he has no evidence that that’s true.

  Thus, putting aside Finkelstein’s unequivocal denial (which we have been given no reason to question), the best that can be said for the charge is that we cannot independently confirm whether it is true or false. But the only reasonable inference from the available evidence is that the charge, interpreted in the way that any ordinary reader of the “Letter” would interpret it, is fraudulent, because Dershowitz has no evidence to support it.

  On that basis, I concluded that the first sentence of the first item on Dershowitz’s “Letter” of the “clearest and most egregious instances” of Finkelstein’s lies is itself a fraud. And on that basis I concluded that my original project – to sift through and evaluate every single claim on Dershowitz’s List – should be abandoned.

  My work on the project, however incomplete, does nonetheless raise the following interesting question: If this is the best that an adversary as clever and dedicated as Dershowitz can come up with, how could Finkelstein possibly not deserve tenure?

  The Damage Done

  It would be wrong to dismiss the dispute between Dershowitz and Finkelstein as merely a personal squabble between two professors. Rather, the affair should be of institutional concern for both DePaul and Harvard. The institutional concern for DePaul is self-evident: The injection of deliberately deceptive material into a pending tenure case is an extremely serious matter because it has the potential to undermine the integrity of the university’s promotion decisions.

  That concern is particularly acute in this case because it appears that Dershowitz’s deception not only had the potential to influence Finkelstein’s tenure review process but also that they did in fact play a decisive rôle. Recall that Dershowitz did not just send a seven-page letter – together with fourteen pages of supporting materials – to the former chair of DePaul’s political science department. He also sent a familiar but more extensive packet of materials to a large proportion of DePaul’s faculty and administration, including every professor in the law school. And although DePaul’s Faculty Governance Council received assurances that “the integrity of the [tenure review] process would be protected” from Dershowitz’s interference, the council’s chairman, Gil Gott, has stated that, to his knowledge, “no specific protections were introduced to remedy already-existing problems, such as any lingering false impressions that Alan Dershowitz’s packet may have created in the minds of faculty members or administrators who served on or influenced decision-making bodies in the case” (Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 June 2007)

  DePaul’s president has claimed nonetheless that Finkelstein’s tenure review process “maintained its independence” from the lobbying efforts of “outside interests.” But there is good evidence that Dershowitz’s campaign did undermine the process, because they university’s stated basis for denying tenure to Finkelstein appears to be transparently pretextual. According to the president, the UBPT voted against Finkelstein because his “scholarship does not meet DePaul’s tenure standards.” The UBPT based that judgement on its determination that Finkelstein’s writings might not contribute “to the public discourse on sensitive social issues” because Finkelstein’s alledged “inflammatory style” and use of “personal attacks.”

  Here are some of the relevant facts: Finkelstein has published five books, one of them co-authored. Four were published before DePaul hired him as a tenure track assistant professor. Some of those four were reissued in expanded editions while he was at DePaul. His fifth book, Beyond Chutzpah, was published while he was at DePaul, and it was published by a more prestigious university press than any of his previous works. Beyond Chutzpah does not differ materially in style or in use of “personal attacks” from Finkelstein’s previous books, and to my knowledge, not even Dershowitz has ever claimed that it does. If anything, Beyond Chutzpah strikes me as more moderate in tone than its predecessors.

  Tenure track faculty are given annual reviews evaluating their performance in all areas relevant to eligibility for tenure. Finkelstein’s annual reviews at DePaul expressed nothing but enthusiasm about his scholarship. Even the annual review dealing with his manuscript for Beyond Chutzpah contained not a word of criticism of Finkelstein’s scholarship. (10)

  [ 10 I obtained this information concerning Finkelstein’s annual reviews from Finkelstein himself, and he sent me the full text of the scholarship section of the annual review that dealt with Beyond Chutzpah.]

  DePaul’s stated grounds for denying Finkelstein tenure consequently seem impossible to take seriously. The style of his first four books cannot have disqualified him from receiving tenure, because they were already in print when DePaul hired him into a tenure track position. Thus, those books must have made him a promising candidate for tenure, not the reverse. If those books nonetheless contained falws that Finkelstein needed to avoid in his subsequent book in order to get tenure, not the reverse. If those books nonetheless contained flaws that Finkelstein needed to avoid in his subsequent work in order to get tenure, then his annual reviews would have said so. In fact, they said nothing of the sort. And Beyond Chutzpah, which (1) was issued by a more prestigious academic press than anything Finkelstein had published before, (2) contained nothing new in terms of “inflammatory style” or “personal attacks,” and (3) received not a word of criticism from his department in his annual review, can only have strengthened his case for tenure.

  I conclude that the president’s claim – that Finkelstein’s scholarship does not meet DePaul’s standards for tenure – cannot be true. And even the UBPT conceded that “[b]y all accounts” Finkelstein is “an excellent teacher, popular with his students and effective in the classroom.” It follows that there must be some other explanation for why Finkelstein was denied tenure. Dershowitz’s campaign seems the most likely candidate.

  Harvard’s Role

  All of these considerations serve to heighten the institutional concerns for Harvard. First, both plagiarism and deliberate misrepresentation of a professor’s work, particularly in the context of a pending tenure case, are matters of academic integrity, and Harvard presumably takes such matters very seriously. Second, because of Dershowitz’s repeated but apparently false claim that Harvard “completely cleared” him of Finkelstein’s charges, Harvard has been made an unwitting accomplice in Dershowitz’s wrongdoing. If my analysis is sound, then Dershowitz deliberately deceived DePaul not only about the plagiarism itself but also about the investigation that Harvard allegedly conducted. He used his purported acquittal by Harvard to bolster his own false claim of innocence, which in turn supported his claims that Finkelstein’s charges were “politically motivated” and “complete fabrications.”

  Now that Dershowitz’s misrepresentation have been exposed, Harvard cannot permit them to go uncorrected. If someone were revealed as falsely claiming to be a Harvard professor, perhaps making speeches or writing letters of recommendation in Harvard’s name, Harvard would never stand for it – the university would issue an official statement setting the record straight. Dershowitz’s deceptions are no less serious. He has sought to sabotage Finkelstein’s tenure case on the basis of an official exoneration by Harvard that, on one of Finkelstein’s central allegations, apparently never took place.

  I do not mean to be suggesting whether, or in what way, Harvard should discipline Dershowitz for the misconduct I have described. How Harvard addresses misbehaviour by its faculty members is Harvard’s business, not mine. But this is not just between Harvard and Dershowitz, or between Dershowitz and Finkelstein. Rather, Harvard has a moral obligation to Finkelstein to acknowledge, at a bare minimum, that it has never completely cleared of Dershowitz of Finkelstein’s plagiarism charges, because it has never rejected Finkelstein’s argument concerning the identical errors in The Case for Israel and From Time Immemorial.

  As of this writing, Dershowitz appears to have succeeded in protecting his own career by destroying Finkelstein’s. It is now probably too late to remedy all the harm that Dershowitz’s conduct has caused, both to the review of Finkelstein’s tenure application and to public perceptions of Finkelstein and his work. But some sort of acknowledgement or apology by Harvard concerning Dershowitz’s wrongdoing might go some distance towards clearing the air and making amends.

  Frank J. Menetrez holds a J.D. (2000) and a Ph.D. (1996) from the [UCLA].