DePaul Genuflects to Dershowitz

Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University on June 8, 2007, despite votes in favor of tenure by the school's Political Science Department and a college-level personnel committee. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, tenure was opposed by the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the University Board on Promotion and Tenure, and the university president, Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, the ultimate decision-maker in the case, who reportedly told the Chronicle that he found "no compelling reasons to overturn" the tenure board's recommendation.[1] 

In addition, Holtschneider reportedly told the Chronicle that he "decried the outside interest the case had generated" and stated for the record: "This attention was unwelcome and inappropriate and had no impact on either the process or the outcome of this case."[2] While the outside interference was both inappropriate and probably unprecedented, due on both counts to the prolifically public opposition to Finkelstein's tenure by Harvard Law School's Alan Dershowitz, it seems implausible that Dershowitz's campaign had no impact at DePaul on the final decision to deny tenure to Finkelstein.     

Because few assistant professors with books published by at least three major publishers (in this case the University of California, W.W. Norton, and Verso) are denied tenure, and because even fewer with such books, a vote of support from their department, and glowing student evaluations, are denied tenure, it is difficult to imagine that anything other than outside interference, almost all of it from Dershowitz, led to the denial of Finkelstein's tenure at DePaul.

Dershowitz's intereference in the case was clearly extensive. According to the Chronicle, "Mr. Dershowitz sent the DePaul law school faculty and members of the political-science department what he described, in a letter dated October 3 [2006], as a 'dossier of Norman Finkelstein's most egregious academic sins, and especially his outright lies, misquotations, and distortions.'" Dershowitz told the Chronicle prior to the tenure decision: "It would be a disgrace to DePaul University if they were to grant tenure. It would make them the laughing stock of American universities."[3] In a Wall Street Journal article titled, "Finkelstein's Bigotry," Dershowitz wrote about the vote by Finkelstein's department: "Mr. Finkelstein's radical colleagues voted for tenure, having cooked the books by seeking outside evaluations from two of his ideological soulmates."[4] In the New Republic, Dershowitz called Finkelstein (who is Jewish) an "anti-Semite."[5] And a few weeks before the tenure announcement was due, Dershowitz asked in print: "Will [Finkelstein's] bigotry receive the imprimatur of the largest Catholic university in America?"[6]

Anyone with even minimal awareness of the politics of criticizing Israel in the United States understands the implied threats against DePaul that such statements from Dershowitz embodied. Clearly, Dershowitz sought to leverage Catholic vulnerability about the Holocaust, given the "neutrality" of Pope Pius XII in the midst of the genocide of European Jews, and Finkelstein's scholarship on the Holocaust, which argues that it's exploited by Israel to justify its otherwise illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. Or perhaps President Holtschneider happened to see the photograph of Pope Benedict XVI placed next to one of David Duke on the homepage of the Anti-Defamation League in January of this year—an apparent co-conspirator (with the UN's Kofi Annan) against Israel—and imagined his own picture there pursuant to a grant of tenure to Finkelstein. Or maybe he sought not to expose himself and his university to the kind of Dershowitzian slander that Finkelstein was subjected to, and which Holtschneider witnessed without a public word to Dershowitz that his interference in the case was improper and unacceptable.              

Furthermore, by withholding tenure from Finkelstein while also unconvincingly denying the public context of that decision, Holtschneider sold-out long-standing Catholic "Just War" doctrine to Dershowitz, which features the protection of the rights of civilians in armed conflict.[7] While Dershowitz is in the vanguard, with the American Jewish Congress, of a major effort to modify international humanitarian law to further minimize the rights of civilians with the goal of "unshackling" the United States and Israel in their various military campaigns,[8] Finkelstein supports international humanitarian law and consistently applies it in his scholarship, including to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.[9] By, in effect, choosing Dershowitz over Finkelstein, DePaul betrayed bedrock Catholic principles pertaining to the protection of civilians in armed conflict, and helped boost Dershowitz's Medieval-dungeon views about international humanitarian law and human rights. This is easy to illustrate in the context of Dershowitz's support of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon in summer 2006.[10]

On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah militants raided northern Israel and, without provocation, killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two. This attack was unjustified and a clear violation of Israel's territorial sovereignty; however, Israel's survival was obviously not endangered by the Hezbollah raid. Yet it responded with extensive airstrikes and shelling inside Lebanon that indiscriminately targeted civilians and civilian objects (homes, bridges, hospitals, grocery stores, gas stations) and far exceeded any legitimate requirement of self-defense.

The Hezbollah raid into northern Israel occurred in the morning in Israel on July 12. News outlets throughout the day reported that Israel had bombed Lebanese civilians, villages, roads, bridges, and Hezbollah positions, all preceding the firing of rockets by Hezbollah into Israel the next morning.[11] Referring to the overnight bombing of Lebanon on July 12, the Associated Press reported: "[Israeli] Air Force Gen. Amir Eshel said the [bombing] campaign was likely Israel's largest ever in Lebanon 'if you measure it in number of targets hit in one night, the complexity of the strikes.'"[12]

In response to these events Hezbollah fired its first rockets into Israel, according to a Ha'aretz report: "The [Hezbollah] rocket fire began in the early morning hours of Thursday [July 13], after Israel Air Force jets struck targets across Lebanon following cross-border attacks by Hezbollah...."[13]

The Israeli airstrikes inside Lebanon in response to the Hezbollah raid violated international law on at least four counts: (a) they violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter—the cardinal rule of international law—which prohibits the threat and use of force by states without Security Council authorization (the only exception being a use of force in "self-defense" in response to an "armed attack," when, in the generally accepted formulation by Daniel Webster, "the necessity for action" is "instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation),"[14] (b) Israel's military reprisals were illegal, given the broad prohibition of the use of force in international affairs, including as retaliation in response to an armed provocation, (c) the massively disproportionate scale of the Israeli reprisals, relative to any military necessity and the original Hezbollah provocation, violated international humanitarian law ("laws of war"), and (d) Israel's failure to distinguish between civilian and military targets in its air strikes and artillery fire also violated international humanitarian law.

In addition, on July 12, Israel's highest political and military leaders indicated that they would punish "Lebanon" militarily for the Hezbollah raid. For example, on July 12, Ha'aretz reported that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert "held the Lebanese government responsible for the [Hezbollah] attack, vowing that the Israeli response 'will be restrained, but very, very, very painful.' " The same article reported that "senior Israel Defense Forces officers said Wednesday [July 12] that 'if the abducted soldiers are not returned we'll turn Lebanon's clock back 20 years.' "[15] It is clear from these statements and others issued at the time, that the intent of Israel's highest political and military leaders was to punish "Lebanon," that is, its people and infrastructure, in response to the Hezbollah raid on July 12.

Also, in the immediate wake of Israel's July 31 bombing of a three-story house in Qana in southern Lebanon (which killed 28 Lebanese civilians, including 16 children, and left 13  missing), the New York Times published arguably the single most important fact in its coverage of the 2006 Lebanon conflict. In the last paragraphs of a front-page story about the Israeli airstrikes on Qana of the previous day, the Times reported that Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz had "relieved the [Israeli] army of restrictions on harming civilian population [sic] that lives alongside Hezbollah operatives."[16]

Indeed, on July 16, just four days after Israel initiated its armed reprisals against Lebanon, IsraelNN.com reported that Israeli "Defense Minister Amir Peretz said Sunday [July 16] that IDF troops have been given the go-ahead to set aside routine regulations not to harm civilians, according to Army Radio. Peretz said that civilians in south Lebanon who assist Hizbullah terrorists may also be targeted."[17] In its August 1 report, the Times referred to a column by the prominent Israeli commentator, Nahum Barnea, who wrote the following in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot:

The most pressing question I have is: Did the government, the army, the political echelon and the media not take to blind cheerleading, a move that served only the enemy? The question came up when I heard Defense Minister Amir Peretz explain proudly that he had removed limits on the IDF regulating warfare in areas where civilians live alongside Hizbullah soldiers. I can understand accidentally hurting civilians while fighting a war. But explicit instructions about the civilian population in south Lebanon and the Shiite neighborhoods in Beirut is a rash, fool-hardy action that invited disaster. We saw the results of that policy yesterday, in the bodies of women and children being carried out of the rubble in Kana.[18]

A few days later, the Jewish-American newspaper, the Forward, published an article about the instructions that Israel Defense Minister Peretz had issued.

As Jerusalem defends itself against worldwide condemnation over a deadly air strike that killed dozens of Lebanese children, current and former Israeli officials acknowledge that the Israeli military has loosened the restriction on targeting militants in populated areas.

After an Israeli air force raid Sunday on the Lebanese village of Qana left dozens of civilians dead, many of them children, human rights groups accused Israel of committing a "war crime." Many critics—including Israeli ones—are questioning the military's policy of bombing in densely populated Lebanese areas. As of earlier this week, more than 550 civilians had been killed in Lebanon during the current conflict, with Lebanese officials claiming that the civilian death toll has exceeded 750. Following the Qana deaths, Israeli authors and intellectuals signed a petition calling for an immediate cease-fire and protesting the killing of civilians. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel called for an official commission of inquiry to investigate the military's bombing policies in Lebanon.[19]

The instructions by Israel's defense minister to disregard well-known rules in international law that protect civilians in armed conflict, in addition to statements from Israel's top leaders that it would punish "Lebanon" for the Hezbollah raid on July 12, clearly indicate that Israel, from the beginning, rejected the civilian protections embodied in international humanitarian law throughout its bombing campaign in Lebanon.

Two days after the July 31 Israeli bombing of the three-story house in Qana, Human Rights Watch issued a report, which stated:

The Israeli government initially claimed that the [Israeli] military targeted the house [in Qana] because Hezbollah fighters had fired rockets from the area. Human Rights Watch researchers who visited Qana on July 31, the day after the attack, did not find any destroyed military equipment in or near the home. Similarly, none of the dozens of international journalists, rescue workers and international observers who visited Qana on July 30 and 31 reported seeing any evidence of Hezbollah military presence in or around the home. Rescue workers recovered no bodies of apparent Hezbollah fighters from inside or near the building. The IDF subsequently changed its story, with one of Israel's top military correspondents reporting on August 1 that, "It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time."[20]

One day later, on August 3, Human Rights Watch issued a major report on the Lebanon war. Not only did HRW state that Hezbollah had no involvement in any of the Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians documented in the report, but the nature of numerous attacks by Israeli war planes and helicopters clearly indicated that Lebanese civilians were targeted by Israel. The HRW report was very clear on these counts, beginning with the first page of the executive summary: 

The Israeli government claims that it targets only Hezbollah, and that fighters from the group are using civilians as human shields, thereby placing them at risk. Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack. Hezbollah occasionally did store weapons in or near civilian homes and fighters placed rocket launchers within populated areas or near U.N. observers, which are serious violations of the laws of war because they violate the duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. However, those cases do not justify the IDF's extensive use of indiscriminate force which has cost so many civilian lives. In none of the cases of civilian deaths documented in this report is there evidence to suggest that Hezbollah forces or weapons were in or near the area that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the attack.[21]

HRW's more extended findings in the August 3 report were presented as follows:

The [HRW] report breaks civilian deaths into two categories: attacks on civilian homes and attacks on civilian vehicles. In both categories, victims and witnesses interviewed independently and repeatedly said that neither Hezbollah fighters nor Hezbollah weapons were present in the area during or just before the Israeli attack took place. While some individuals, out of fear or sympathy, may have been unwilling to speak about Hezbollah's military activity, others were quite open about it. In totality, the consistency, detail, and credibility of testimony from a broad array of witnesses who did not speak to each other leave no doubt about the validity of the patterns described in this report. In many cases, witness testimony was corroborated by reports from international journalists and aid workers. During site visits conducted in Qana, Srifa, and Tyre [in southern Lebanon], Human Rights Watch saw no evidence that there had been Hezbollah military activity around the areas targeted by the IDF during or just prior to the attack: no spent ammunition, abandoned weapons or military equipment, trenches, or dead or wounded fighters. Moreover, even if Hezbollah had been in a populated area at the time of an attack, Israel would still be legally obliged to take all feasible precautions to avoid or minimize civilian casualties resulting from its targeting of military objects or personnel.[22]    

HRW's report was corroborated three weeks later by a report by Amnesty International, issued on August 23, which stated:

During more than four weeks of ground and aerial bombardment of Lebanon by the Israeli armed forces, the country's infrastructure suffered destruction on a catastrophic scale. Israeli forces pounded buildings into the ground, reducing entire neighbourhoods to rubble and turning villages and towns into ghost towns, as their inhabitants fled the bombardments. Main roads, bridges and petrol stations were blown to bits. Entire families were killed in air strikes on their homes or in their vehicles while fleeing the aerial assaults on their villages. Scores lay buried beneath the rubble of their houses for weeks, as the Red Cross and other rescue workers were prevented from accessing the areas by continuing Israeli strikes. The hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who fled the bombardment now face the danger of unexploded munitions as they head home.

The Israeli Air Force launched more than 7,000 air attacks on about 7,000 targets in Lebanon between 12 July and 14 August, while the Navy conducted an additional 2,500 bombardments. The attacks, though widespread, particularly concentrated on certain areas. In addition to the human toll—an estimated 1,183 fatalities, about one third of whom have been children, 4,054 people injured and 970,000 Lebanese people displaced—the civilian infrastructure was severely damaged. The Lebanese government estimates that 31 "vital points" (such as airports, ports, water and sewage treatment plants, electrical facilities) have been completely or partially destroyed, as have around 80 bridges and 94 roads. More than 25 fuel stations and around 900 commercial enterprises were hit. The number of residential properties, offices and shops completely destroyed exceeds 30,000. Two government hospitals—in Bint Jbeil and in Meis al-Jebel—were completely destroyed in Israeli attacks and three others were seriously damaged.

One paragraph later, the Amnesty report continued:

Amnesty International delegates in south Lebanon reported that in village after village the pattern was similar: the streets, especially main streets, were scarred with artillery craters along their length. In some cases cluster bomb impacts were identified. Houses were singled out for precision-guided missile attack and were destroyed, totally or partially, as a result. Business premises such as supermarkets or food stores and auto service stations and petrol stations were targeted, often with precision-guided munitions and artillery that started fires and destroyed their contents. With the electricity cut off and food and other supplies not coming into the villages, the destruction of supermarkets and petrol stations played a crucial role in forcing local residents to leave. The lack of fuel also stopped residents from getting water, as water pumps require electricity or fuel-fed generators.

Israeli government spokespeople have insisted that they were targeting Hizbullah positions and support facilities, and that damage to civilian infrastructure was incidental or resulted from Hizbullah using the civilian population as "human shields". However, the pattern and scope of the attacks, as well as the number of civilian casualties and the amount of damage sustained, makes the justification ring hollow. The evidence strongly suggests that the extensive destruction of public works, power systems, civilian homes and industry was deliberate and an integral part of the military strategy, rather than "collateral damage".[23]

The fact that such destruction was "deliberate," as Amnesty International reported, and "indiscriminate," as Human Rights Watch reported, is without question, given the documentation in both reports. Israel's highest political and military officials at the time confirmed this intent in their statements, as did the instructions by Israeli Defense Minister Peretz to the IDF to disregard the legal protections of civilians. Yet, Dershowitz supported Israel's bombardment of Lebanese civilians and infrastructure, despite its horrific effects, as reported in detail by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in their reports.   

In addition, neither organization found evidence of Hezbollah fighters implicated in Israel's numerous aerial attacks on Lebanese civilians fleeing southern Lebanon. In its August 3 report, HRW found that "on a daily basis Israeli warplanes and helicopters struck civilians in cars who were trying to flee [southern Lebanon], many with white flags out the windows, a widely accepted sign of civilian status." HRW also reported that "Israel repeatedly attacked both individual vehicles and entire convoys of civilians who heeded the Israeli warnings to abandon their villages."[24]

Instead of censuring the Israeli government for these attacks, Alan Dershowitz blamed Lebanon's civilians. In commentary dated August 7—that is, three days after the August 3 HRW report was issued—and titled "Lebanon Is Not a Victim," Dershowitz refers to the Lebanese civilians killed by Israel as "civilians," using quotation marks as if to somehow indict the Lebanese men, women, and children who were bombed and killed by Israel in their homes and in their cars. Dershowitz also referred to Lebanese civilians as "collaborators," apparently because many voted for or otherwise supported the Lebanese government current at the time, which had nothing directly to do with the Hezbollah raid of July 12. He then agued that these "collaborators"—that is, Lebanese civilians—were Israel's legitimate military targets. And, according to Dershowitz, the hundreds of Lebanese children who were killed and wounded were victims of their parents, who, as he argued, used them as human shields in their own bedrooms and kitchens:

It is virtually impossible to distinguish the Hezbollah dead from the truly civilian dead, just as it is virtually impossible to distinguish the Hezbollah living from the civilian living, especially in the south. The "civilian" death figures reported by Lebanese authorities include large numbers of Hezbollah fighters, collaborators, facilitators and active supporters. They also include civilians who were warned to leave, but chose to remain, sometimes with their children, to serve as human shields. The deaths of these "civilians" are the responsibility of Hezbollah and the Lebanese government, which has done very little to protect its civilians.

Lebanon has chosen sides—not all Lebanese, but the democratically chosen Lebanese government. When a nation chooses sides in a war, especially when it chooses the side of terrorism, its civilians pay a price for that choice. This has been true of every war.

We must stop viewing Lebanon as a victim and begin to see it as a collaborator with terrorism. . . . People make choices and they bear the consequences of choosing to collaborate with terrorism. Lebanon has chosen the wrong side and its citizens are paying the price.[25]

Dershowitz also wrote, as if without humanity, in light of the slaughter and destruction that Israel had already brought to Lebanon by this time (August 7), including the killing of literally hundreds of children with its daily airstrikes and artillery:  

Lebanon has now declared war on Israel and its citizens are bearing the consequences. Lebanon is no more a victim of Hezbollah than Austria was a victim of Nazism. In fact a higher percentage of Lebanese—more than 80%—say they support Hezbollah. The figures were nearly as high before the recent civilian deaths.

This is considerably higher than the number of Austrians who supported Hitler when the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938. Austria too claimed it was a victim, but no serious person today believes such self-serving historical revisionism. Austria was not "Hitler's first victim." It was Hitler's most sympathetic collaborator.

So too with Lebanon, whose president has praised Hezbollah, whose army is helping Hezbollah, and many of whose "civilians" are collaborating with Hezbollah.[26]

After blaming Lebanese civilians for their own deaths and injuries from Israeli airstrikes, Dershowitz then sought to punish Human Rights Watch for its August 3 report. About that report, Dershowitz wrote:

"Who will guard the guardians?" asked Roman satirist Juvenal. Now we must ask, who is watching Human Rights Watch, one of the world's best-financed and most influential human rights organizations? It turns out that they cook the books about facts, cheat on interviews, and put out pre-determined conclusions that are driven more by their ideology than by evidence.

These are serious accusations, and they are demonstrably true.

Consider the highly publicized "conclusion" reached by Human Rights Watch about the recent war in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel. This is their conclusion, allegedly reached after extensive "investigations" on the ground:

"Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack."

After investigating a handful of cases, Human Rights Watch found that in "none of the cases of civilian deaths documented in this report [Qana, Srifa, Tyre, and southern Beirut] is there evidence to suggest that Hezbollah forces or weapons were in or near the area that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the attack."

No cases! None! Not one!

Anyone who watched even a smattering of TV during the war saw with their own eyes direct evidence of rockets being launched from civilian areas. But not Human Rights Watch. "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" That's not Chico Marx. It's Human Rights Watch. Their lying eyes belonged to the pro-Hezbollah witnesses its investigators chose to interview—and claimed to believe. But their mendacious pens belonged to Kenneth Roth, HRW's Executive Director, and his minions in New York, who know how to be skeptical when it serves their interests not to believe certain witnesses. How could an organization, which claims to be objective, have been so demonstrably wrong about so central a point in so important a war? Could it have been an honest mistake? I don't think so. Despite its boast that "Human Rights Watch has interviewed victims and witnesses of attacks in one-on-one settings, conducted on-site inspections . . . and collected information for hospitals, humanitarian groups, and government agencies," it didn't find one instance in which Hezbollah failed to segregate its fighters from civilians.

Nor apparently did HRW even ask the Israelis for proof of its claim that Hezbollah rockets were being fired from behind civilians, and that Hezbollah fighters were hiding among civilians. Its investigators interviewed Arab "eye witnesses" and monitored "information from public sources including the Israeli government statements." But it conducted no interviews with Israeli officials or witnesses. It also apparently ignored credible news sources, such as The New York Times and The New Yorker.[27]

This is what Dershowitz wrote, but it does not accurately reflect what the HRW report actually said. With respect to HRW's "conclusion," quoted by Dershowitz as follows—"Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack"—the very next sentence in the HRW report, which Dershowitz omitted, read:

Hezbollah occasionally did store weapons in or near civilian homes and fighters placed rocket launchers within populated areas or near U.N. observers, which are serious violations of the laws of war because they violate the duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties.[28]

Thus, it was not the case that HRW reported no instances in which Hezbollah may have used civilians or civilian objects to store weapons or place rocket launchers; rather, HRW reported that no such instances were implicated in the Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians that were documented in the August 3 report. And this is obvious upon reading the report.

In addition, HRW investigated dozens of cases—not "a handful of cases," as Dershowitz wrote—in which it found no evidence of Hezbollah involvement at the time of or prior to Israeli attacks on the civilian targets. By inaccurately citing only "a handful of cases," Dershowitz conveys a false impression that HRW's finding of no Hezbollah involvement in Israeli attacks is less significant than it actually was.

Dershowitz's reproduction of a brief excerpt of what he described as the report's "conclusion" (see above) is also of interest: he omitted the preceding two sentences in the report, which were highly incriminating of Israel's conduct, and which were far more suitable to excerpt as representative of the report's conclusion: 

Since the start of the conflict, Israeli forces have consistently launched artillery and air attacks with limited or dubious military gain but excessive cost. In dozens of attacks, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some cases, the timing and intensity of the attack, the absence of a military target, as well as return strikes on rescuers, suggest that Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians.[29]

While accusing HRW of disingenuously failing to cite evidence of Hezbollah involvement in Israel's attacks on Lebanese civilians, Dershowitz supplied his own evidence to make a case for their involvement. For example, he wrote that HRW "ignored" a New York Times story about Hezbollah using civilian shields in southern Lebanon. Here is how Dershowitz began his excerpt from the Times report that he accused HRW of ignoring:  

"Hezbollah came to Ain Ebel to shoot its rockets," said Fayad Hanna Amar, a young Christian man, referring to his village. "They are shooting from between our houses."[30]

Rather than ignore the Times report, as Dershowitz charged, Human Rights Watch in fact quoted these same words while citing the same report from the New York Times:

Christian villagers fleeing the village of 'Ain Ebel have also complained about Hezbollah tactics that placed them at risk, telling the New York Times that "Hezbollah came to [our village] to shoot its rockets. . . . They are shooting from between our houses."[31]

Dershowitz also cited eight other reports from other news organizations that he claimed demonstrated the use of civilian shields by Hezbollah; he produced these articles to demonstrate that Human Rights Watch had "cooked the books" by ignoring them. Here are the titles, sources, and dates of four of the eight reports Dershowitz cited: 

• "The Battle for Lebanon," New Yorker, August 8, 2006;
• "Diplomacy Under Fire," MacLeans, August 7, 2006;
• "Hezbollah's Deadly Hold on Heartland," National Post, August 5, 2006;
• "Laying Out the Qana Calculation: Disarming Hezbollah Prevents More Crises," Chicago Tribune, August 2, 2006.

The obvious problem with Dershowitz citing these four reports, while arguing that HRW deliberately ignored them, is that all four reports were published either after or nearly simultaneous to the August 3 HRW report. Once again, one must ponder the methodology and motivation applied by Dershowitz in his attacks on Human Rights Watch—in this case accusing it of neglecting to cite articles in its August 3 report that were published after August 3.  

The four remaining reports cited by Dershowitz also provided no evidence that Hezbollah used Lebanese civilians or civilian homes or vehicles as shields prior to or during any of the Israeli attacks on civilians in southern Lebanon documented in the HRW report. Looking at these four reports one report at a time, here is the entire excerpt that Dershowitz uses from one of them:

Days after fighting broke out between Israel and Hezbollah on July 12, [Samira] Abbas said Hezbollah fighters went door-to-door in Ain Ebel, asking everyone to give up their cell phones. "They were worried about collaborators giving the Israelis information," she said.

While she was there, Abbas said, she heard from relatives that her house in Bint Jbeil had been destroyed. She said Hezbollah fighters had gathered in citrus groves about 500 yards from her home.—Mohamad Bazzi, "Mideast Crisis: Farewell to a Soldier; Reporting From Lebanon; Running Out of Places to Run," Newsday, July 28, 2006.[32]   

Gathering in a citrus grove 500 yards from a civilian home that had been destroyed by an Israeli airstrike hardly constitutes Hezbollah culpability for the Israeli destruction of the house. Dershowitz provided no additional information or excerpts from this report.[33] 

This leaves three reports cited by Dershowitz. One of these reports—"Revealed: How Hezbollah Puts the Innocent at Risk; They Don't Care," Sunday Mail (Australia), July 30, 2006—apparently pertained to photographs of a single truck-mounted anti-aircraft gun taken in "the east of Beirut."[34] While it may or may not have been the case that Hezbollah used civilians as shields in Beirut, the predominant geographic focus of Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians in HRW's August 3 report was southern Lebanon, which sustained most of the civilian casualties. Thus, this report had little relevance to HRW's August 3 report. In addition, the placement of an anti-aircraft gun in a neighborhood that is being bombed by Israeli aircraft hardly constitutes an illegal or otherwise unethical placement of a defensive weapon.     

This leaves the final two reports cited by Dershowitz. One of these reports was an ambiguous one-line excerpt in a July 28, 2006, communication from a UN post in Naqoura in southern Lebanon. Here is the entirety of what Dershowitz excerpted from that communication:

It was also reported that Hezbollah fired from the vicinity of five UN positions at Alma Ash Shab, AtTiri, Bayt Yahoun, Brashit, and Tbinin.—United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), Naqoura, July 28, 2006 (Press Release)

Presumably, for Dershowitz this single sentence constitutes evidence that Hezbollah used UN positions at these locations in Lebanon as shields that would justify Israeli attacks on those positions. However, the four immediately preceding sentences in the Naqoura communication, which Dershowitz omitted, read as follows:

There were two direct impacts on UNIFIL positions from the Israeli side in the past 24 hours. Eight artillery and mortar rounds impacted inside an Indian battalion position in the area of Hula, causing extensive material damage, but no casualties. One artillery round impacted the parameter wall of the UNIFIL headquarters in Naqoura. There were five other incidents of firing close to UN positions from the Israeli side.[35]

Thus, the same press release from which Dershowitz squeezed one sentence to supposedly suggest that Hezbollah positions near various UN posts might be implicated in Israeli attacks on such posts in actuality suggests that Israel had attacked UN posts without any reports of Hezbollah positions at the posts. 

This leaves only one report left among the eight cited by Dershowitz that were supposed to show that HRW had "cooked the books" in its August 3 report. In this final instance, he cited an article from the CanWest News Service in Canada that featured an interpretation of an email written by Major Paeta Hess-von Kruedener of Canada before he was killed by Israeli shelling at the UN post near Khiam in southern Lebanon. Dershowitz excerpted three paragraphs from the CanWest report which describe the contents of the email, and two additional paragraphs with an interpretation of that email by a retired Canadian general. The email by Hess-von Kruedener was written on July 19. In it he wrote: "What I can tell you is this. We have on a daily basis had numerous occasions where our [UN] position has come under direct or indirect fire from both (Israeli) artillery and aerial bombing." And: "The closest [Israeli] artillery has landed within 2 meters (sic) of our position and the closest 1000 lb aerial bomb has landed 100 meters (sic) from our patrol base."[36] According to Dershowitz, the key evidence of Hezbollah involvement—and thus a justification in his mind for the Israeli attacks on the UN post—is this sentence in Hess-von Kruedener's email: "This has not been deliberate targeting, but has rather been due to tactical necessity."[37] CanWest then consulted Canadian Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, who commented, as Dershowitz noted: "What that means is, in plain English, 'We've got Hezbollah fighters running around in our positions, taking our positions here and then using us for shields and then engaging the (Israeli Defense Forces).' "[38]

While it is possible that General MacKenzie's interpretation is accurate, there is no certainty that it is. One day after this CanWest report was published on July 27, the Toronto Star reported that MacKenzie had spoken "to a crowd of 8,000 supporters of Israel at a solidarity rally in Toronto two days ago."[39] In addition, while the email by Hess-von Kruedener was dated July 19, the UN post at Khiam was fatally attacked by Israel on July 25, killing Hess-von Kruedener and three other unarmed UN observers from Austria, Finland, and China; assuming that MacKenzie's interpretation of Hess-von Kruedener's email message was correct with respect to events on July 19 or earlier, they were not necessarily applicable to events on July 25. Furthermore, Dershowitz omitted an important response to Hess-von Kruedener's email that was printed in the last three paragraphs of the article he cited:   

A senior UN official, asked about the information contained in Hess-von Kruedener's e-mail concerning Hezbollah presence in the vicinity of the Khiam base, denied the world body had been caught in a contradiction.

"At the time [July 25], there had been no Hezbollah activity reported in the area," he said. "So it was quite clear they [Israelis] were not going after other targets; that, for whatever reason, our position was being fired upon.

"Whether or not they thought they were going after something else, we don't know. The fact was, we told them where we were. They knew where we were. The position was clearly marked, and they pounded the hell out of us."[40]

In its August 3 report, Human Rights Watch also reported that the UN post was attacked by Israel on July 25 with "no Hezbollah presence or firing near the U.N. position during the period of the attack." Finally, referring to the same incident, Reuters reported on September 29 that "Israel used a precision-guided bomb to launch a direct hit on four U.N. peacekeepers killed in southern Lebanon last July, the United Nations said on Friday of its probe into the incident." According to Reuters, the "U.N.-appointed board of inquiry could not affix blame because Israel did not allow the access to operational or tactical level commanders involved in the July 25 disaster at Khiam," but the UN did provide a senior official who briefed reporters, saying that the Israeli munitions were "precision-guided and meant to hit the targets they hit, which was the United Nations."[41] 

In summary, Dershowitz cited nine news articles as evidence—the only so-called "evidence" that he produced—that Human Rights Watch had "cooked the books" against Israel in its August 3 report. As it turned out, there was no such evidence in these articles to support his charge. Nevertheless, Dershowitz concluded: "Human Rights Watch no longer deserves the support of real human rights advocates. Nor should its so-called reporting be credited by objective news organizations."[42]

While seeking to further discredit the August 3 report by Human Rights Watch, Dershowitz appeared to impugn HRW's witnesses, apparently on the grounds of their ethnicity or nationality, since most HRW witnesses were Arab Lebanese nationals. This apparently is why Dershowitz placed the words "eye witnesses" in parentheses below:   

[HRW's] investigators interviewed Arab "eye witnesses" and monitored "information from public sources including the Israeli government statements." But it conducted no interviews with Israeli officials or witnesses.[43]

In this passage Dershowitz asserted that HRW conducted no interviews with Israeli officials or witnesses, yet, in its August 3 report, HRW stated: "Human Rights Watch also conducted research in Israel, inspecting the IDF's use of weapons and discussing the conduct of forces with IDF officials."[44] This is the second instance—in addition to the New York Times article that HRW supposedly did not cite—where Dershowitz falsely accused HRW of ignoring sources that were in fact cited in its report.

While continuing to impugn HRW's methodology, Dershowitz wrote, perhaps mistakenly, the word "for" instead of "from" in a key sentence pertaining to that methodology. Here is what Dershowitz reproduced as an excerpt from the HRW report, with his mistake highlighted: "[HRW] collected information for hospitals, humanitarian groups, and government agencies." However, the HRW report in actuality stated that Human Rights Watch had "collected information from hospitals, humanitarian groups, and government agencies." Thus, according to the Dershowitz-generated text, HRW's sources for its report consisted only of Arab "eye witnesses" (quotation marks added by Dershowitz). In one way or another, he eliminated the New York Times, Israeli officials, hospitals, humanitarian groups, and government agencies from the list of sources used and cited by HRW in its report.

Similarly, when Amnesty International issued its report on August 23 documenting Israel's destruction of Lebanon's civilian infrastructure, Dershowitz called the report "biased," and wrote that Amnesty was "in a race to the bottom" with Human Rights Watch to see "which group can demonize Israel with the most absurd legal arguments and most blatant factual misstatements." In a manner similar to his charge that Human Rights Watch had "cooked the books" in its August 3 report, Dershowitz described Amnesty as a "once-reputable organization" and asserted that it was "sacrificing its own credibility" when it "misstates the law and omits relevant facts" in its reports on Israel.[45] Like his attack on the August 3 HRW report, Dershowitz's assault on Amnesty's August 23 report was designed to discredit the report so that the press and public would disregard it; instead, it highlighted Dershowitz's own penchant for (in his words) "misstating the law and omitting relevant facts" when arguing on behalf of Israel's illegal policies.    

Finally, in the Wall Street Journal on July 19, 2006, that is, one week into Israel's military campaign against Lebanon, Dershowitz wrote: "Israel must be allowed to finish the fight that Hamas and Hezbollah started, even if that means civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon. A democracy is entitled to prefer the lives of its own innocents over the lives of the civilians of an aggressor, especially if the latter group contains many who are complicit in terrorism."[46] Whatever rhetorical indiscretions that Norman Finkelstein may have committed, which were cited by his dean as contrary to "Vincentian personalism" as the basis for the dean's recommendation to deny tenure,[47] Finkelstein has never advocated the killing of one group of civilians over another, and has deployed both his scholarship and public rhetoric in a determined defense of international humanitarian law. Thus, Finkelstein's scholarship and public rhetoric, much of it mischaracterized and misquoted by Dershowitz, is in reality more closely aligned with root Catholic doctrine on "just war" and the protection of civilians, it appears, than the president, dean of humanities, and the members of the tenure committee at DePaul, all of whom chose to align themselves instead, at least in the public eye, with the Dershowitzian rejection of international humanitarian law and its legal protection of civilians in armed conflict.           

In order to deconstruct Dershowitz's serial misrepresentations, one must painstakingly review them, which explains why he is able to make one ludicrous charge after another about Norman Finkelstein's scholarship, and thus influence the public, and thus DePaul, with respect to the recent tenure case. For Dershowitz, no target, and no charge, is out of bounds. Recall, for example, that Dershowitz accused both the political science department at DePaul and Human Rights Watch of "cooking the books"—a charge that he did not substantiate in either case, and with respect to Finkelstein's department, was totally out of line and hideously unprofessional. How is it that Dershowitz's McCarthy-like public rampage against Finkelstein's tenure case was apparently tolerated by Dershowitz's dean and Harvard's president? And by DePaul's president and Finkelstein's dean?

The tenure process for Norman Finkelstein at DePaul was almost certainly, in fact, most evidently, was tainted by Dershowitz. A review of that process would seem to be in order by both DePaul and Harvard.