Tali, I am not only thankful for all of your points, I have to agree with them. I’ll probably be revising this article again soon, because I don’t want to be overly generous with Dershowitz, who shows no generosity to anyone except himself.

I may not be an academic, but I have a deep respect for scientific methods. You are very open minded to give Dershowitz an intellectual second chance. That’s what I did, when Chomsky mentioned him in one of his lectures. I went online to see what the man stands for (lest I be accused of making non-collegial remarks without basis). The first thing I found was the above debate. Being well versed in Israeli rhetoric, his “peace proposal” completely slipped under my radar (I was busy grinding my teeth). Since you emboldened it, however, I decided I should go back and give it a second chance (silly peaceniks… suckers for peace-making opportunities…). Learning from the best, I just went word for word (trying not to take the statements out of context) and found the root of the problem.

Out of this cavity, you’ll find a man that won’t do me (or Finkelstein) the same honors. I think you’re wrongfully harsh with Finkelstein. I think he was very correct not to address Dershowitz’s “peace proposal”, as it was completely irrelevant to the debate, which was, in fact, “Dershowitz’s new theses”.

In closing, here’s a link to a video of Dershowitz (which was another thing I watched while researching this “academic”) denying that the accusation of anti-semitism is used as a silencing tactic, by the Jewish lobbies, when, in fact, that is one of Finkelstein’s very important contributions to the “Jewish debate”.

Thank YOU for the platform :)
Tali

Dershowitz has been caught in the act of writing propaganda. To call his book, The Case for Israel, “shoddy scholarship” is actually praise, because one can think of many other ways of characterizing it.

What is Finkelstein’s sin here? He clearly started, as a very young man, as a skeptic. He asked himself lots of hard questions, and did not automatically trust what the authorities said. That, by the way, is what is absolutely necessary for being a scientist of any kind. Having asked questions, he did research, and lo and behold, he uncovered all sorts of problems. Skepticism moved into criticism. Then he encounters a heavy mass of layers of conventions, institutions, arbitrariness, and all sorts of power being exercised to prevent the truth from being known. Anyone with a mind, any intellectual especially, would be outraged. Why should lies be taught and praised as excellent scholarship? They shouldn’t, and hence his activism.

Now, why there are academics whose response to Finkelstein is to call him a stupid, dumb, idiot, rather than recognize the depth and importance of his research, goes to show the caliber of some of the people I have as colleagues. For too many, science means being aligned with power, and politics is only to be found in the criticisms of power, in their view. Few dare to recognize that the politics of the criticism are a reflection of the politics of what is being criticized.

Then there are those who call me political, biased, etc., for criticizing those anthropologists who go and serve the U.S. Army in its campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan…as if those were not fundamentally political and biased missions. That’s another story, but it shows us all once more the kind of pathological hypocrisy that reigns in North America.

Thanks very much again Tali, it was refreshing to read.

This debate was torture for me, because I can’t stand Dershowitz’s smug mug , either. I can’t seriously regard his “ideas on the two-state solution and full withdrawal from the West Bank” seriously, because he is obviously disregarding basic facts that may give him a slight comprehension of the humanitarian situation:

“Israel made in my view a terrible [move]” – I’ve heard this speak before. As you say “voice of reason”. You talk about it from a tactical point of view, as if lives weren’t at stake.

“The problem is Israel should never have occupied people. Land is different from people.” – Does that mean they should have occupied the land? What do you do with the people then? Transfer? Genocide? The minute Israelis decided that someone else’s land was theirs- that was the minute they became occupiers.

“if it can’t find the peace partner to make some unilateral changes” – “Peace partner”- a reference to Barak’s idiotic claim after Camp David that “there is no peace partner”. Also, if you have a partner, why do you need to do anything unilaterally (very abused word in this “conflict”). And since when does Israel “find” anything? This statement is so cynical, I don’t think Dershowitz really knows how much!

“Israel ought to have a schedule for ending settlements.” – Another promise to break. It would be so easy to say “schedule ending the settlements in 5 years” and then find a reason (say terrorism) not to do so. Not to mention that there’s that tinsey problem of Israel- in contrast to its self proclaimed democracy- transferring its own people (as it did in 2005). Personally, I’d love to see a two-state solution, in which the settlers are a minority in the Palestinian state (they can have their precious holy land and eat it too).

“conditioned on best efforts by the Palestinians to end terrorism. That would create incentive to ending terrorist acts… By the way you never condition anything on the end of terrorism, that gives terrorists a veto.” – Fact: The Palestinian RESISTANCE is a direct result of occupation, annexation, torture, house demolition, bone breaking and murder. I think it was Chomsky who pointed out that the Irish stopped the “terror”, when they got their human rights. And how do you measure “best efforts”?

“in 1937 when the commission recommended noncontiguous Jewish homeland and Israelis accepted it and the Arabs rejected it. In 1947 when the U.N. allocated that portion of Palestine that had majority of Jews in it to a Jewish state, and the portion of Palestine that had Palestinian majority in it to an Arab state, could have had a two state solution.” – Check your facts, professor!

Dershowitz is an unoriginal thinker (if he thinks at all), as Finkelstein assesses, and quite the blind supporter of Israel. Never read the waste-of-paper, which he refers to as “academic research”, and after this debate- I don’t plan to, for the simple reason that this video demonstrates it will be full of demagogy.

Sorry for blogging on your blog, I thought this merited response :)
Tali

I agree it is much better to read the original work rather than a redaction or selective quotes from it. Still and all, that can be a problem, especially when the original is in a language one doesn’t read. For many of my students, Weber is a really good example since few of them read German and only 1 in the past 10 years could read “academic” German. This makes all of us reliant on some type of middleman. Sure, I could probably translate Tacitus or Xenophon – if I wanted to take 6 months to do so. It’s a really tricky issue to go to the originals, although it is an ideal [wry grin].

Oh, yeah, the clash between them is great [GRIN]. Personally, I would like to see more such exchanges, albeit in a much more civil manner, where “collegiality” means you can get together for a friendly pint afterwards and not a form of PC thought control [wry grin].

I noticed that Dershowitz (he is a lawyer after all), spoke repeatedly of “willful, material intent.” He was preparing a loophole for himself, as if to say that he did not intentionally copy without proper attribution, and that much of what he was accused of copying without due attribution to Joan Peters, is “out there.” Finkelstein is instead insisting on applying a plagiarism policy that I am familiar with, and I was a bit surprised that Dershowitz was not familiar with it. Finkelstein is playing the game, and beating the powers that be at their own game, showing that even the elite does not hold itself accountable to its own standards. I can appreciate it on that level, but I would not want to insist on those rules of plagiarism.

There is one point I would concede to Finkelstein and my past professors here: If I only read Twain in Peters, then I need to be intellectually honest enough to admit that I really did not read much of Twain, may not have understood him, may not have caught the deliberate misquoting (for which Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial has been exposed in numerous instances, and yet she retains the high praises of Dershowitz), and thereby create a kind of paper trail for anyone else to reconstruct how I developed my thinking. It’s a way for people to (in)validate my work. In the meeting of minds that is reading, Dershowitz should not be blocking out the middleman/middlewoman that he relied upon. In court, his supposed citation of Twain, which actually came from Peters, would be struck out by the judge as “hearsay.”

Otherwise, didn’t you find the clash between these two to be one of those most riveting academic exchanges we have seen? I noticed that Amy Goodman, for once, actually looked distressed.

Really good post! If you are agreeable, I will assign as required reading for one of my classes next year. There is so much to think about in it that, at the moment, I’m just going to let it steep in my brain :-).

One point that I will toss out, and I’ll probably elaborate on it later in a post of my own, surrounds the plagiarism issue and blogging. How often, do you think, that “ideas” are “in the air”? I don’t know about you, but I’ve sat down with friends (students, colleagues, etc.), got into conversations and heard people literally construct arguments that paralleled published works when they had never read those works, sometimes using the same “data”.

I think that there is an inbuilt flaw in the concept of plagiarism as it is currently applied (but not as conceived). This flaw is an assumption of total, conscious knowledge and presumed causality – i.e. if someone replicates what someone else wrote, then a) they must have read it, b) consciously accessed it and c) they must have “stolen” it. Each of these assumptions have problems [wry grin].

Can we assume that everyone of our students and colleagues has read everything? Only an idiot (or bureaucrat) would assume that given the amount of material published even if we only include books and articles. If we look at the blogsphere it is even worse…

How about the assumption of consciously accessing it? Again, that assumption is flawed, showing a complete misunderstanding of how the brain operates. All too often, people “store” ideas or memories without referencing “tags” in separate memory tracks (ever tried to remember who wrote a tune that you can remember but haven’t looked at in years?). Since plagiarism requires intent, at least at Carleton (most of the time), can someone be convicted of it if they cannot consciously access the material?

The final point, the intention to “steal” the work, has all sorts of resonances with property rights issues. Given the length of copyright, can I rip off Socrates or Tacitus (hey, I can do my own translations on them or just quote them in the originals) without plagiarism occurring since there is no copyright? Or, to take another twist on the problem, what happened to the concept of “general knowledge”? When I was doing my undergraduate, we had the assume of general disciplinary knowledge that did not require referencing because everyone in the discipline “knew” where it came from, although over the past 10-12 years, I have seen this concept disappear in how we deal with student plagiarism cases.

It strikes me that one of the issues in the specific case you are looking at – the concept of the university “owning” the time of academics – ties in with this property rights issue.