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    By Dan Williams

    Wed Dec 13, 2006 5:34pm ET

    JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli pundits make much of Prime Minister Ehud
    Olmert's powers of persuasion, but this was one bit of proof that he
    might well have wanted to do without.

    An Israeli television station broadcast candid footage on Thursday that
    appeared to show Olmert, during his first official visit to Rome,
    coaching Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi on what to say during their
    joint press conference.

    "It is important that you emphasize the three principles of the Quartet
    -- that they are not negotiated (sic). They are the basis for
    everything," Olmert says, referring to Western demands that Hamas
    Islamists who run the Palestinian government soften their views before
    peace talks with Israel can begin.

    "Please say this?" Olmert asks his nodding counterpart in English.

    As it happened, Prodi did deliver words to that effect. He further
    endorsed Israel's vision of remaining a Jewish state -- code for ruling
    out an influx of Palestinian refugees. This, Channel 10 television
    suggested, was also at Olmert's prodding.

    "You said something about a Jewish state (in the past). I know that,"
    Olmert is shown telling Prodi as the two confer in what looks like a
    lounge in an Italian government complex.

    While allies coordinating their rhetoric is nothing new in international
    diplomacy, the unvarnished glimpse into Olmert's back-room lobbying may
    prove a fresh embarrassment at home.

    Before Rome, Olmert was in Berlin. That visit was marked by Israeli
    furor at a German television interview in which he seemed to confirm, in
    a reversal of a decades-old secrecy policy, that Israel has the Middle
    East's only nuclear weapons.

    An Olmert spokeswoman insisted he had not abandoned Israel's "ambiguity"
    over its assumed arsenal, but that did not stop opposition lawmakers of
    various political stripes from calling for his resignation.

    Olmert, a former lawyer and career politician, cuts a suave figure that
    is dramatically different to that of his predecessor, Ariel Sharon. An
    ex-general, Sharon was famous -- to his foes, notorious -- for often
    preferring action over talk.

    The inconclusive war against Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas, an
    intractable Palestinian revolt, and arch-foe Iran's nuclear programme
    have stirred resentment among many Israelis at Olmert's style, if
    opinion polls are anything to judge by.

    Olmert and Prodi aides had no immediate comment on the Channel 10
    footage.

    ----------------------------------------

    by Marc Burleigh
    Thu Oct 12, 9:47 AM ET

    PARIS (AFP) - France has sought to calm an uproar in Turkey and in the
    European Union after the French parliament approved a bill that would
    make it a crime to deny that the 1915-17 massacres of Armenians by the
    Ottoman Turks constituted genocide.

    The French foreign ministry insisted that Paris was still "very keen" on
    dialogue with Turkey and wanted its "strong ties" with that country to
    continue.

    But a furious Ankara -- which strongly contests the use of the term
    genocide -- was in no mood to listen, saying that France had dealt "a
    heavy blow" to longstanding bilateral relations.

    Turkish parliamentary speaker Bulent Arinc called the vote "shameful"
    and said it reflected a "hostile attitude".

    The European Commission also criticised the French bill, saying it would
    hinder efforts to heal the wounds caused by the Armenian carnage nine
    decades ago.

    The sharp reactions came after France's lower house of parliament, the
    577-seat National Assembly, approved the bill by 106 votes to 19. It now
    goes to the upper house, the Senate, for another vote.

    If voted into law, it would become a crime in France to deny that the
    killings of the Armenians were genocide. Those violating the law would
    face up to one year in prison and a fine of up to 45,000 euros (57,000
    dollars).

    Although introduced by the opposition Socialist Party, President Jacques
    Chirac's ruling centre-right UMP party did not use its parliamentary
    majority to block the bill. Some UMP parliamentarians voted in favour of
    it but most were simply absent for the vote.

    The clash over the bill highlighted broader tensions between France and
    Turkey over the latter's bid to join the European Union.

    While Chirac has championed Ankara's ambition, he has had to soften his
    support somewhat in the face of domestic opposition even within his own
    party.

    The French government has done what it can to put distance between
    itself and the bill.

    Foreign Ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei said: "We are very keen
    on dialogue with Turkey, as well as on the strong ties of friendship and
    cooperation which link us to that country."

    But the spat dividing them has been festering since 2001, when France
    adopted a law officially calling the Armenian massacres a genocide.

    The new bill seeks to build on that by criminalising those who disagree,
    much in the same manner as a French law that outlaws revisionism
    concerning the Holocaust of World War II.

    Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their ancestors were slaughtered in
    orchestrated killings that can only be seen as genocide.

    Turkey angrily rejects the notion that its Ottoman predecessor was
    responsible for such a gross violation of human rights.

    It admits 300,000 Armenians died when the Ottoman Empire fell apart
    during World War I. But it but says at least as many Turks did too, as
    civil strife raged and the Armenians took up arms for independence
    alongside invading Russian troops.

    An association representing the Armenian disapora in Europe, the
    Brussels-based Euro-Armenian Federation, hailed the French parliamentary
    vote as a "historic step forward".

    Around 400,000 people of Armenian origin are estimated to live in
    France, the most famous being singer Charles Aznavour, born Chahnour
    Varinag Aznavourian to immigrant parents.

    Turkey has cast the French bill as a restriction on freedom of
    expression.

    It has threatened economic reprisals against France if the bill becomes
    law, warning that French firms could be excluded from public tenders and
    a boycott of French goods might be imposed.

    The European Commission, the European Union's executive arm, was also
    unsettled by the draft law.

    "Should this law indeed enter into force, it would prohibit the debate
    and the dialogue which is necessary for reconciliation on this issue,"
    said Krisztina Nagy, the commission's spokeswoman on enlargement.

    "It is very important to see that there is an opening in Turkey to
    conduct debate on that issue," she said, adding that the French bill, if
    it became law, "could have a negative affect on that debate".

    ----------------------------------------

    By Michael Powell
    Washington Post Staff Writer
    Monday, October 9, 2006

    NEW YORK -- Two major American Jewish organizations helped block a
    prominent New York University historian from speaking at the Polish
    consulate here last week, saying the academic was too critical of Israel
    and American Jewry.

    The historian, Tony Judt, is Jewish and directs New York University's
    Remarque Institute, which promotes the study of Europe. Judt was
    scheduled to talk Oct. 4 to a nonprofit organization that rents space
    from the consulate. Judt's subject was the Israel lobby in the United
    States, and he planned to argue that this lobby has often stifled honest
    debate.

    An hour before Judt was to arrive, the Polish Consul General Krzysztof
    Kasprzyk canceled the talk. He said the Anti-Defamation League and the
    American Jewish Committee had called and he quickly concluded Judt was
    too controversial.

    "The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising
    a delicate pressure," Kasprzyk said. "That's obvious -- we are adults
    and our IQs are high enough to understand that."

    Judt, who was born and raised in England and lost much of his family in
    the Holocaust, took strong exception to the cancellation of his speech.
    He noted that he was forced to cancel another speech later this month at
    Manhattan College in the Bronx after a different Jewish group had
    complained. Other prominent academics have described encountering such
    problems, in some cases more severe, stretching over the past three
    decades.

    The pattern, Judt says, is unmistakable and chilling.

    "This is serious and frightening, and only in America -- not in Israel
    -- is this a problem," he said. "These are Jewish organizations that
    believe they should keep people who disagree with them on the Middle
    East away from anyone who might listen."

    The leaders of the Jewish organizations denied asking the consulate to
    block Judt's speech and accused the professor of retailing "wild
    conspiracy theories" about their roles. But they applauded the consulate
    for rescinding Judt's invitation.

    "I think they made the right decision," said Abraham H. Foxman, national
    director of the Anti-Defamation League. "He's taken the position that
    Israel shouldn't exist. That puts him on our radar."

    David A. Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Congress,
    took a similar view. "I never asked for a particular action; I was
    calling as a friend of Poland," Harris said. "The message of that
    evening was going to be entirely contrary to the entire spirit of Polish
    foreign policy."

    Judt has crossed rhetorical swords with the Jewish organizations on two
    key issues. Over the past few years he has written essays in the New
    York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and in the Israeli
    newspaper Haaretz arguing that power in Israel has shifted to religious
    fundamentalists and territorial zealots, that woven into Zionism is a
    view of the Arab as the irreconcilable enemy, and that Israel might not
    survive as a communal Jewish state.

    The solution, he argues, lies in a slow and tortuous walk toward a
    binational and secular state.

    He has, of late, defended an academic paper -- co-authored by professor
    Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of
    Government and John J. Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of
    Chicago -- which argues the American Israel lobby has pushed policies
    that are not in the United States' best interests and in fact often
    encourage Israel to engage in self-destructive behavior.

    These are deeply controversial views -- Foxman of the ADL and writer
    Christopher Hitchens, among others, have attacked the Walt and
    Mearsheimer paper as anti-Semitic. And Judt's advocacy of a binational
    state has drawn a flock of critics, the more angry of whom accuse him of
    "pandering to genocide" as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East
    Reporting in America put it. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum said
    Judt was pursuing "genocide liberalism."

    Foxman has referred to Judt's views of Israel as "an offensive
    caricature."

    The Mearsheimer and Walt paper, however, has drawn praise in some
    quarters in Israel, particularly on the left. So, too some Israeli
    writers, not least Israeli historian and social critic Amos Elon, have
    praised Judt's writings on Israel. Nor are Judt's arguments without
    historical precedent: Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist and
    political philosopher Noam Chomsky, who is Jewish, has advocated a
    binational solution in Israel, a view that three decades ago sparked
    such anger that police stood guard at his college talks. More recently,
    the ADL repeatedly accused DePaul University professor Norman G.
    Finkelstein, who is Jewish and strongly opposes Israeli policies, of
    being a "Holocaust denier." These charges have proved baseless.

    "There is an often organized and often spontaneous attempt to
    marginalize anyone in the Jewish world who offers a critique of Israeli
    policy," said Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal magazine
    Tikkun. "It's equated with anti-Semitism and Israel denial."

    Foxman says such complaints are silly. "Nobody has called Judt an
    anti-Semite," Foxman said. "People who are critical of Israel and of the
    Jewish people often flaunt their Jewishness. Why isn't that an issue?"

    Judt replies that he only reluctantly talks of his Jewishness, in no
    small part to inoculate himself against charges of anti-Semitism. "For
    many, the way to be Jewish in this country is to aggressively assert
    that the Holocaust is your identification tag," Judt said. "I know
    perfectly well my history, but it never occurred to me that my most
    prominent identity was as a Jew."

    ----------------------------------------
    August 25, 2006

    Gangster Diplomacy
    Elliot Abrams in Jerusalem
    By TOM BARRY

    In the wake of the most recent Israel-Hezbollah conflict, Israel is
    abuzz with criticism of the government and the Israeli Defense Forces
    for having led the nation to war without achieving any of its
    objectives. Many Israelis, including IDF officers, are also charging
    that the Bush administration and U.S. neoconservatives have been
    encouraging Israel to act as the U.S. government's stalking horse in its
    grand strategy to create a "new Middle East" by striking out first
    against Hezbollah-and then Syria and Iran.

    In marked contrast, there is little public debate in the United States
    about the Bush administration's role in supporting Israel's failed and
    criminal war in Lebanon. As recent press reports reveal, President Bush
    and his foreign policy team had given Israel a green light to take out
    Hezbollah at least two months before Hezbollah guerrillas kidnapped two
    Israeli soldiers.

    As was the case in U.S. policy toward Iraq, the neoconservative camp-led
    by such institutes as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI),
    Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Center for Security Policy, and
    the now defunct Project for the New American Century and by such neocon
    pundits and strategists as Max Boot, Charles Krauthammer, Michael
    Ledeen, and Elliott Abrams-has long promoted that the United States and
    Israel implement regime change and preemptive strategies against
    Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran.

    Also like the Iraq War, the neoconservatives inside and outside the Bush
    administration have seen their own causes embraced, to various degrees,
    by Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
    National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza
    Rice, and the president himself.

    Outside the administration the neocons have vociferously pressed for the
    U.S. government to proceed "faster, please," as AEI's Freedom Scholar
    Michael Leeden often says, with its Middle East transformation strategy.
    During the recent hostilities, Ledeen and others, notably Krauthammer,
    Boot, and William Kristol, have advocated that the United States and
    Israel take the war to Syria and Iran.

    Since he joined the Bush administration in 2002 as the chief Middle East
    adviser at the White House's National Security Council, Elliott Abrams
    has quietly pushed for a transformational Middle East policy with Israel
    at its center. If one U.S. official were to be blamed-aside from the
    president, vice president, and secretary of state-for the U.S.
    government's disastrous stance with Israel in the recent war, it would
    be Elliot Abrams. Perhaps more than any other member of Bush's foreign
    policy team, Abrams embodies the administration's zealous, ideological,
    and dangerously delusional vision of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle
    East.

    Abrams, a neoconservative who has dedicated himself to reshaping U.S.
    foreign policy since the mid-1970s, is the Bush administration's point
    man for Middle East transformation. According to Seymour Hersh writing
    in the August 21 New Yorker, Cheney's foreign policy staff and Abrams in
    early summer had signed off on an Israeli plan to wipe out Hezbollah.

    During the first administration Abrams was the NSC chief of Middle
    Eastern and Northern African Affairs. "I have two-thirds of the axis of
    evil," he boasted, according to a New Yorker essay (Feb. 10, 2005).
    Abrams wears two hats in the second Bush administration, serving as the
    chief of the president's "Global Democracy Strategy" and also serving as
    a top deputy to National Security Adviser Hadley. Although closely
    involved in all Middle East policy, Abrams' official NSC role is
    addressing "Israeli-Palestinian" affairs. But Abrams has long insisted
    on referring to Israel-Palestine tensions as an "Israel-Arab" conflict
    that is artfully disguised as a self-determination conflict.

    As he has in the past, Abrams has either preceded or accompanied
    Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her trips to the Middle
    East-where the main destination is Jerusalem. After more than a week
    watching Israel unleash its might against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Abrams
    went to Jerusalem in late July as part of a three-person high-level
    delegation led by Rice and also including C. David Welch, a career
    diplomat who is assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs.

    Although he has spent most of his time in Jerusalem over the past
    several weeks, Abrams has shuttled back and forth from Washington and
    has played a central role in holding together the
    neoconservative-militarist Washington consensus on Israel-Arab/Iran
    policy.

    Bush's choice of Elliott Abrams as his top Middle East expert and the
    administration's point man in the current war speaks volumes about the
    president's own views on "global democracy" and Middle East affairs.
    Bush's selection of Abrams to play a leading role in two key aspects of
    the administration's aggressive foreign policy-U.S.-led democratization
    and Middle East transformation-also points to the White House's high
    comfort level with the foreign policy agenda promoted by the
    neoconservative camp.

    Neoconservative and Neo-Reaganite

    Abrams, a proud self-declared "neoconservative and neo-Reaganite," is
    the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, an activist couple
    who played a leading role in establishing neoconservatism as an
    influential political tendency in the 1970s. There's no doubting Abrams'
    neoconservative and neo-Reaganite credentials. Like many other
    second-generation neocons, Abrams got his political start as member of
    the right-wing Social Democrats USAand as legal counsel to the hawkish
    and avidly pro-Israel Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson. In the late 1970s
    Abrams worked with other right-wing Democrats in the Coalition for a
    Democratic Majority as part of an unsuccessful attempt to turn the
    post-Vietnam War Democratic Party back toward hard-line anticommunism,
    and then along with other Cold Warrior Democrats became Reagan
    supporters and Republicans.

    When not in government service, Abrams has been affiliated with key
    neoconservative institutes and pressure groups, including Ethics and
    Public Policy Center, Project for the New American Century, Center for
    Security Policy, Committee for U.S. Interests in the Middle East,
    Committee for the Free World, and the Nicaraguan Resistance Foundation.

    As a Reaganite, Abrams served in President Reagan's State Department, in
    the first term as assistant secretary of state for human rights and then
    as assistant secretary for inter-American affairs. As a State Department
    diplomat, Abrams helped coordinate illegal government support for the
    Nicaraguan contras, known by Reaganites as "freedom fighters," and
    worked with Lt. Col. Oliver North to triangulate arms sales through
    Israel to Iran with the proceeds channeled to the Nicaraguan contras-an
    illegal operation about which he falsely denied knowledge in
    congressional testimony resulting in his criminal conviction.

    During the Reagan administration, Abrams was the government's nexus
    between the militarists in the National Security Council and the
    public-diplomacy operatives in the State Department, White House, and
    National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Abrams worked closely with Otto
    Reich, who directed the White House's Office of Public Diplomacy, which
    was in charge of disseminating "white propaganda" to the U.S. public,
    media, and policymakers to build support for the Reagan administration's
    interventionist policies in Latin America and elsewhere.

    Before joining the Bush administration, Abrams served as the first
    chairman of the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, a government
    commission established at the initiative of House Majority Leader Newt
    Gingrich and a coalition of neoconservatives and Christian Right
    organizations.

    Regarding Abrams's biased stance on Middle East affairs, Dr. Laila
    al-Marayati, a former member of the U.S. Commission on International
    Religious Freedom, wrote: "From the vantage point of the [U.S.
    Commission on International Religious Freedom], as an American and as a
    Muslim, I had the unfortunate opportunity of witnessing-clearly and
    unequivocally-the deep bias that Abrams brings to his new position As
    chairman of the commission at the time, Abrams led the delegation to
    Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but did not go to Jerusalem with three of us as
    he was of the opinion that there are no problems with religious freedom
    in Israel that would warrant the attention of the commission Bypassing
    Israel was not the only way Abrams undermined the Commission's visit to
    the Middle East Abrams managed to snub the leading Islamic cleric in
    Egypt which nearly created a diplomatic nightmare that was only narrowly
    averted by the intervention of the U.S. ambassador."

    "Peace through Strength" in the Middle East

    As part of his neo-Reaganite identity, Abrams in the 1990s argued for a
    renewal of Reagan's "peace through strength" foreign policy,
    particularly in the Middle East. In 1992 Abrams helped form the
    Committee for U.S. Interests in the Middle East, which was actually a
    committee to ensure that U.S. policy was aligned with the Likud party in
    Israel.

    Other members included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith , Frank Gaffney, and
    John Lehman, among dozens of other neoconservatives and pro-Israel
    hawks. The committee spoke out against what it perceived was a dangerous
    distancing between the Bush administration and Israel, evident in its
    pressure for Israel to pull out of some occupied territories and halt
    its campaign to expand settlements in these zones. "Mr. President, we
    don't agree that the current policy of antagonism toward Israel is in
    the U.S. national interest."

    A charter member of the Project for the New American Century, Abrams
    signed all PNAC statements published before 20001, including two calling
    for regime change strategy in Iraq, before he joined the Bush
    administration. In 2000 Abrams participated in the ad hoc Lebanon Study
    Group, which was jointly sponsored by the Middle East Forum and the U.S.
    Committee for a Free Lebanon. The group called for the United States to
    rid Syria of its alleged weapons of mass destruction, initiate strict
    sanctions against Syria, and for Syria to remove its troops from
    Lebanon.

    Also in 2000 Abrams authored a chapter in a PNAC volume titled Present
    Dangers that was designed as a policy blueprint for the incoming
    president. "Our military strength and willingness to use it will remain
    a key factor in our ability to promote peace," wrote Abrams.
    "Strengthening Israel, our major ally in the region, should be the
    central core of U.S. Middle East policy, and we should not permit the
    establishment of a Palestinian state that does not explicitly uphold
    U.S. policy in the region," he asserted. Presaging the Middle East
    policy of the George W. Bush administration, Abrams wrote: U.S.
    interests "do not lie in strengthening Palestinians at the expense of
    Israelis, abandoning our overall policy of supporting the expansion of
    democracy and human rights, or subordinating all other political and
    security goals to the 'success' of the Arab-Israel 'peace process'."

    In his writings in Commentary, the neoconservative magazine of the
    American Jewish Committee, Abrams expressed his support for right-wing
    Likud positions, including those of prime ministers Benjamin Netanyahu
    and Ariel Sharon. Abrams has consistently rejected any "land for peace"
    formula for Israel-Palestinian negotiations, calling the Oslo Accords an
    "illusion" and criticizing the "policy of concessions" of the Israeli
    government. What is more, Abrams, who has family members living in
    Israel, has repeatedly called for the United States to publicly back
    Israel's sovereignty claims over Jerusalem by moving the U.S. embassy
    from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

    Peace in the Middle East, according to Abrams, will be the product of
    Israeli and U.S. military strength. In October 2000, Abrams wrote:
    "After a decade of self-delusion, American Jews must face up to reality.
    The Palestinian leadership does not want peace with Israel and there
    will be no peace." Criticizing dovish American Jewish organizations for
    supporting the "peace process," Abrams advocated a tough response and
    wrote that "years of U.S. pressure on Israel must end." Following Ariel
    Sharon's election as prime minister, Abrams wrote that Sharon embodied a
    new approach "of firmness and resistance to violence or the threat of
    violence." Abrams likened the return of Sharon to head the Israel
    government as similar to the return of Winston Churchill to government
    when Great Britain's survival was threatened.

    There's no doubt that Abrams is an ardent proponent of Israel and a
    fierce critic of Hezbollah in the enfolding Middle East crisis. On a
    trip back to Washington from Israel in late July, Abrams briefed a
    delegation of Jewish organizations seeking assurance that the
    administration would unconditionally back Israel. On July 20 Abrams, who
    serves unofficially as the president's liaison to Jewish organizations
    on Middle East issues, told the delegation that Hezbollah is "a monster
    that needs to be dealt with."

    Abrams' strong opinions extend to the religious and national identity of
    U.S. Jews. A radical separatist, Abrams argues that Jews should not date
    or attend elementary schools with non-Jews. According to Abrams,
    "Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful
    to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the
    nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be
    apart-except in Israel-from the rest of the population."

    Abrams takes care to insist that his positions imply no "disloyalty" to
    the United States, but at the same time insists that Jews must be loyal
    to Israel because they "are in a permanent covenant with God and with
    the land of Israel and its people. Their commitment will not weaken if
    the Israeli government pursues unpopular policies."

    Ideologue Turns Diplomat

    Outside Washington, particularly in the Muslim world, it might seem that
    the U.S. government is unified around its support for Israel's military
    campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon. However, traditional fissures between the
    militarists and the neoconservatives on one side, and the diplomats and
    the realists on the other belie the apparent unity in support for
    Israel.

    This divide cuts right through the administration's three-person team
    that is managing the U.S. response to the crisis. A New York Times
    report (Aug. 10), titled "Rice's Hurdles on Middle East Begin at Home,"
    noted that Rice has been accompanied in the Middle East "by two men with
    different outlooks on the conflict," namely the NSC's Abrams and the
    State Department's Welch. According to the NYT, "Mr. Abrams, a
    neoconservative with strong ties to Mr. Cheney, has pushed the
    administration to throw its support behind Israel" and during Rice's
    travels Abrams has "kept in direct contact with Mr. Cheney's office."

    One administration official told the NYT that Welch and Abrams serve as
    "counterfoils" with Abrams "articulating the Israeli stance."

    While President Bush's supporters on the right are generally pleased
    with the administration's strong backing of the Israeli position, many
    criticize the State Department and Rice. Leading the attack is Richard
    Perle, who along with former DOD undersecretary for policy Douglas Feith
    has worked with Abrams since the mid-1970s when both advised Senator
    Jackson. In a Washington Post op-ed (June 25) that served to coalesce
    conservative forces against Rice, Perle wrote that, having moved from
    the National Security Council to the State Department, Rice is "now in
    the midst of-and increasingly represents-a diplomatic establishment that
    is driven to accommodate its allies even when (or, it seems, especially
    when) such allies counsel the appeasement of our adversaries."

    A month later an article titled "Dump Condi" (July 25) in Insight
    Magazine, a publication of the Washington Timesand written by its
    editors, approvingly reported: "Conservative national security allies of
    President Bush are in revolt against Secretary of State Condoleezza
    Rice, saying she is incompetent and has reversed the administration's
    national security and foreign policy agenda." All of Rice's main
    critics, who include Newt Gingrich and William Kristol, charge that Iran
    is taking advantage of Rice's inexperience and incompetence, as well as
    the State Department's purported tradition of "appeasement."

    Abrams' close association with Ms. Rice-when he worked under her at the
    National Security Council during Bush's first term and more recently as
    one of the secretary of state's top Middle East advisers-has raised
    questions among conservatives about his ideological integrity. When
    Prime Minister Ariel Sharon advocated unilateral disengagement from the
    Gaza Strip, many neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, and national
    security radicals were critical, along with such radical Likudniks as
    former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while Abrams voiced support
    for Sharon's initiatives.

    However, those close to Abrams have never doubted him. When
    conservatives started wondering if he was capitulating to conservative
    moderates like Rice and to the State Department "appeasers" during
    Bush's first term, then-defense undersecretary Douglas Feith and Daniel
    Pipes of the Middle East Forum told those in the pro-Israel community to
    hold their fire-that Abrams knew what he was doing was in the best
    interests of Israel.

    Working inside government, both during the Reagan and Bush
    administrations, Abrams has proved adept at advancing his own radical
    policy agendas through all key departments of the executive branch. With
    his own neoconservative, pro-Israel credentials well established, Abrams
    has focused on the pragmatic implementation of policy agendas rather
    than holding fast to ideological positions. As a senior administration
    official told the New York Times: "The genius of Elliott Abrams is that
    he's Elliott Abrams. How can he be accused of not sufficiently
    supporting Israel?"

    A novice in Middle East affairs, Condoleezza Rice-while national
    security adviser and currently as secretary of state-has relied on
    Abrams for his unnuanced view of Middle East affairs. A friend of Rice
    told the New Yorker: She sees Abrams "not just as a good manager but a
    good strategist. As an NSC administrator, you want someone who can think
    several moves ahead, who has a peripheral vision and an instinct to get
    where you want to go-someone who can really play the high-stakes game."

    Abrams is a neoconservative ideologue who as a government operative has
    turned ideology into strategy and policy. But are his instincts and
    vision for the Middle East in keeping with U.S. national interests and
    Mideast realities? Richard John Neuhaus, a longtime Abrams colleague
    since the 1970s and fellow neoconservative, told the New Yorker: "What
    runs through Elliott's thinking is a deep, almost quasi-religious
    devotion to democracy. He thinks real democratic change can happen in
    the Middle East. It's breathtaking, in a way."

    In his dual role as chief of the White House's global democracy
    initiative and as NSC deputy adviser, Abrams is well positioned to
    ensure that his radical ideas about a U.S.-led democracy crusade and
    about an Israel-centric Middle East determine the directions of U.S.
    foreign policy-the former providing a moral cover for the latter.

    But Abrams and others in the Bush administration are finding that its
    "democratic globalist" and "power through strength" ideologies are badly
    backfiring.

    As part of his job spearheading what the president calls the "global
    democratic revolution," Abrams helped organize a Washington meeting for
    Iranian dissidents, coincidently on the same day he ensured
    representatives of Jewish organizations that the Bush administration
    would continue its virtually unqualified support of Israel. But most of
    the invited Iranian dissidents brushed off the invitation saying that
    U.S. government involvement in Iranian affairs undermined the struggle
    for democracy. Akbar Ganji, who had been imprisoned by the Iranian
    government in 2000, declined the White House's invitation, saying that
    such meetings undermined the credibility of the Iranian opposition. In a
    speech in Washington, Ganji said that the war in Iraq had fostered the
    growth of Islamic fundamentalism and hampered the democracy movement in
    the Middle East.

    The "peace through strength" vision of spreading Pax Americana and
    ensuring Israel's security has proved illusory and wrong-headed. Rather
    than ridding the region of anti-Israel and anti-U.S. regime, the
    invasion and occupation of Iraq supported by Abrams and other neocon
    ideologues have created a new breeding ground for non-state Islamic
    terrorists and a state that shows signs of becoming part of a new
    anti-Israel bloc in the region. Meanwhile, the U.S.-backed Israeli
    campaign to hunt down other declared monsters-Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran,
    and Syria-may indeed lead to a new Middle East, but one in which Israel
    is much less secure and the United States still more hated.

    Tom Barry is policy director of the International Relations Center.

    ---------------------------------------

    August 12 / 13, 2006

    Descent Into Moral Barbarism
    Should Alan Dershowitz Target Himself for Assassination?
    By NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

    As Israel's military bravely fires away shells and missiles to lay waste
    the fragile human and physical infrastructure of Lebanon, Harvard Law
    Professor Alan Dershowitz, waging battle on a second front to legitimize
    Israel's criminal aggression, bravely fires away op-eds from his foxhole
    at Martha's Vineyard to lay waste the fragile infrastructure of
    international law. These are but the latest salvoes in Dershowitz's long
    and distinguished career of apologetics on behalf of his Holy State.

    Since becoming a born-again Zionist after the June 1967 war Dershowitz
    has justified each and all of Israel's egregious violations of
    international law. In recent years he has used the "war on terrorism" as
    a springboard for a full frontal assault on this body of law. Appearing
    shortly after the outbreak of the second intifada, his book Why
    Terrorism Works (2002) served to rationalize Israel's brutal repression
    of the uprising. In 2006 Dershowitz published a companion volume,
    Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways, to justify Israel's preventive
    use of force against Iran. It is painfully clear from their content that
    Dershowitz possesses little knowledge or for that matter interest in the
    timely political topics that purport to be the stimuli for his
    interventions. In reality each book is keyed to a current Israeli
    political crisis and seeks to rationalize the most extreme measures for
    resolving it. If Why Terrorism Works used the war on terrorism as a
    juggernaut to set back the clock on protection of civilians from
    occupying armies, Preemption uses the war on terrorism to set back the
    clock on the protection of states from wars of aggression. Dershowitz's
    current missives from Martha's Vineyard take aim at the protection of
    civilians in times of war.

    The central premise of Dershowitz is that "international law, and those
    who administer it, must understand that the old rules" do not apply in
    the unprecedented war against a ruthless and fanatical foe, and that
    "the laws of war and the rules of morality must adapt to these [new]
    realities." This is not the first time such a rationale has been invoked
    to dispense with international law. According to Nazi ideology, ethical
    conventions couldn't be applied in the case of "Jews or Bolsheviks;
    their method of political warfare is entirely amoral." On the eve of the
    "preventive war" against the Soviet Union, Hitler issued the Commissar
    Order, which mandated the summary execution of Soviet political
    commissars and Jews, and set the stage for the Final Solution. He
    justified the order targeting them for assassination on the ground that
    the Judeo-Bolsheviks represented a fanatical ideology, and that in these
    "exceptional conditions" civilized methods of warfare had to be cast
    aside:

    In the fight against Bolshevism it must not be expected that the enemy
    will act in accordance with the principles of humanity or international
    lawany attitude of consideration or regard for international law in
    respect of these persons is an errorThe protagonists of barbaric Asiatic
    methods of warfare are the political commissars. Accordingly if captured
    in battle or while resisting, they should in principle be shot.

    It was simultaneously alleged that the Red Army commissars (who were
    assimilated to Jews) qualified neither as prisoners of war protected by
    the Geneva Convention nor civilians entitled to trial before military
    courts, but rather were in effect illegal combatants. Plus ça change,
    plus c'est la même chose.

    It is similarly instructive that, although Dershowitz is represented,
    and represents himself, in the media as a liberal and civil libertarian,
    the sort of arguments he makes crops up most often at the far right of
    the political spectrum. For example, in the recent landmark decision
    Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court found that the petitioner, a
    Yemeni national captured in Afghanistan and held in Guantanamo Bay, was
    entitled, under both domestic statute and international law, to minimum
    standards of a fair trial, which the Commission Order, setting the
    guidelines for military commissions, didn't meet. A centerpiece of Judge
    Clarence Thomas's dissent was that "rules developed in the context of
    conventional warfare" were no longer applicable because  quoting
    President Bush  "the war against terrorism ushers in a new paradigm"
    and "this new paradigmrequires new thinking in the law of war." Inasmuch
    as "we are not engaged in a traditional battle with a nation-state," he
    went on to argue, the Court's decision "would sorely hamper the
    President's ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy." It's
    hard to know where Thomas (and Bush) ends and Dershowitz begins.

    The main thrust of Preemption is to justify an Israeli assault on Iran's
    nuclear facilities. Although the book purports to the lofty goal of
    constructing a jurisprudence for criminal intent prior to commission of
    an actual crime, Dershowitz's range of historical reference is pretty
    much limited to the Bible and Israel, and it is plainly not the Bible
    that is uppermost in his mind. To justify the Israeli assault on Iran
    Dershowitz sets up Israel's attack on Egypt in June 1967 as the paradigm
    of legitimate preemptive war and its attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor in
    1981 as the paradigm of legitimate preventive war. His argument seems to
    be that if the legitimacy of the June 1967 attack is beyond dispute and
    the legitimacy of the 1981 attack has come to be seen as beyond dispute,
    then the legitimacy of a preventive war against Iran should also be
    beyond dispute.

    Before analyzing this argument it is instructive to look at the current
    legal consensus on preemptive and preventive war. Dershowitz asserts
    that an "accepted jurisprudence" doesn't exist. In fact, however, there
    is an enduring consensus, which recent events haven't shaken. In 2004 a
    high-level U.N. panel commissioned by the Secretary-General published
    its report on combating challenges to global security in the 21st
    century. The report reaffirmed the conventional understanding of Article
    51 of the U.N. Charter, which prohibits the unilateral use of force by a
    State except to ward off an "armed attack" or if a "threatened attack is
    imminent, no other means would deflect it and the action is
    proportionate" (emphasis in original), the latter commonly denoted
    preemptive use of force. The report went on to prohibit the unilateral
    use of force by a State to ward off an inchoate armed attack, or what's
    commonly denoted preventive use of force, reaffirming that the Security
    Council is the sole legitimate forum for sanctioning the use of force in
    such a circumstance. "For those impatient with such a response," it
    explained, the answer must be that, in a world full of perceived
    potential threats, the risk to the global order and the norm of
    non-intervention on which it continues to be based is simply too great
    for the legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct from
    collectively endorsed action, to be accepted. Allowing one to so act is
    to allow all.

    Although Dershowitz puts forth Israel's attack on Egypt in June 1967 as
    the paradigm of preemptive use of force, both as a matter of fact and
    theory this claim is patently untenable. The scholarly consensus is that
    an Egyptian armed attack was not imminent while it is far from certain
    that diplomatic options had been exhausted when Israel struck.
    Dershowitz himself acknowledges that "it is not absolutely certain" that
    Egypt would have attacked, and that "Nasser may not have intended to
    attack." He finesses this with the assertion that Israeli leaders
    "reasonably believed" that an Egyptian attack was "imminent and
    potentially catastrophic." Yet, apart from some transparently
    self-serving public statements there isn't a scratch of evidence to
    sustain this claim either. Again, Dershowitz himself cites (in an
    endnote) the acknowledgment of former Prime Minister Begin, who was a
    member of the National Unity government in June 1967, that Israel "had a
    choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai do not prove that
    Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves.
    We decided to attack him." Even if for argument's sake it were true that
    Israeli leaders honestly erred, how can resort to preemptive force on
    the mistaken belief that an attack was imminent constitute the paradigm
    of legitimate use of preemption  or, to use Dershowitz's coinage, how
    can a "false positive" be the paradigmatic case? Rather the contrary, if
    June 1967 were the paradigm of preemption, it would undercut the
    legitimacy of any such resort to force. Dershowitz seems not to be aware
    that he has made a case not for but against preemptive war.

    Dershowitz next nominates Israel's attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor
    as "paradigmatic" of legitimate use of preventive force. He mounts his
    case from multiple angles, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly,
    but always falsely. In the first instance, Dershowitz puts preemptive
    war at one pole of a continuum and preventive war at the opposite pole.
    Although asserting that "the distinction between preventive and
    preemptive military action is important," and that there are "real
    differences between these concepts," he more often than not uses the
    terms interchangeably. For instance, he goes back and forth depicting
    the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor and the 2003 U.S.
    attack on Iraq both as preemptive and preventive uses of force. By
    collapsing the distinction between them, whereby not even a flea's hop
    separates the two poles on his continuum, Dershowitz in effect
    legitimizes preventive war as preemptive war by another name. In like
    manner he redefines preemption so as to include preventive use of force:
    "preemption is widely, if not universally, regarded as a proper option
    for a nation operating under the rule of law, at least in some
    circumstances  for example, when a threat is catastrophic and
    relatively certain, though nonimminent." If this is preemption, one
    wonders what prevention would be.

    In addition, although acknowledging that the U.N. panel explicitly ruled
    out preventive use of force, Dershowitz nonetheless maintains that it
    has come to be seen as legitimate. To demonstrate this he alleges that
    Israel's attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor has become recognized as "the
    proper and proportional example of anticipatory self-defense in the
    nuclear age" and "the paradigm for proportional, reasonable, and lawful
    preventive action" in the "emerging jurisprudence of preventive military
    actions," notwithstanding the "lack of imminence and certainty" of the
    Iraqi threat to Israel. He bases this resounding conclusion on a recent
    article in Foreign Affairs which "would certainly seem to have justified
    Israel's bombing of the Osirak reactor." Plainly the import of the U.N.
    panel's findings pales by comparison.

    Finally, invoking a philosopher's wisdom that "no one law governs all
    things," Dershowitz maintains that although preventive war might be
    illegitimate for all other States it remains a legitimate option for
    Israel. This is because the U.N., which is the court of last appeal for
    inchoate armed threats, is biased against it. Accordingly, unlike all
    other States, Israel cannot be held accountable to international law or,
    put otherwise, international law might apply to everyone else but it
    doesn't apply to Israel: "it cannot expect the United Nations to protect
    it from enemy attack, andwith regard to international law and
    international organizations, it lives in a state of nature." To
    demonstrate the U.N.'s inveterate hostility to Israel, Dershowitz
    specifically cites "Russia's and China's veto power" in the Security
    Council, which has allegedly blocked action supportive of it. Yet, not
    once in the past 20 years has Russia or China used the veto for a
    Security Council resolution bearing on Israel. On the other hand, the
    U.S. has exercised its veto power 23 times in just the past two decades
    (1986-2006) in support of Israel. Moreover, due to the U.S. veto Israel
    has been shielded from any U.N. sanctions, although the Security Council
    has imposed them on 15 member States since 1990, often for violations of
    international law identical to those committed by Israel. Not for the
    first time Dershowitz has turned reality on its head.

    On a related note Dershowitz correctly observes that Israel "was not
    condemned by the Security Council" in June 1967, although its resort to
    force violated the U.N. Charter, an armed Egyptian attack having been
    neither actual nor imminent. The Security Council and General Assembly
    were both divided on how to adjudicate responsibility for the war. This
    would seem to suggest that far from being an inherently hostile forum,
    the U.N. has in fact granted Israel special dispensations. More
    generally, as former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami observes,
    it was Israel's policy of creeping annexation that shifted world opinion
    against it:

    Neither in 1948 nor in 1967 was Israel subjected to irresistible
    international pressure to relinquish her territorial gains because her
    victory was perceived as the result of a legitimate war of self-defense.
    But the international acquiescence created by Israel's victory in 1967
    was to be extremely short-lived. When the war of salvation and survival
    turned into a war of conquest and settlement, the international
    community recoiled and Israel went on the defensive. She has remained
    there ever since.

    Insofar as the professed goal of Dershowitz's book is not descriptive
    but normative  i.e., to devise ideal laws and institutional
    arrangements for combating terrorism  it is curious that he doesn't
    propose reconfiguring the Security Council to mitigate its alleged bias.
    In this regard another of his claims merits attention: "The UN report
    fails to address the situation confronting a democracy with a just claim
    that is unable to secure protection from the Security Council and that
    reasonably concludes that failing to act unilaterally will pose
    existential dangers to its citizens." Yet, the High-level panel report
    explicitly addresses this concern and devotes one of its four parts
    specifically to proposals for reforming the Security Council as well as
    other U.N. institutions, noting preliminarily that:

    One of the reasons why States may want to bypass the Security Council is
    a lack of confidence in the quality and objectivity of its
    decision-making.But the solution is not to reduce the Council to
    impotence and irrelevance: it is to work from within to reform itnot to
    find alternatives to the Security Council as a source of authority but
    to make the Council work better than it has.

    The reason Dershowitz prefers to shunt aside the Security Council rather
    than reform it is not hard to find: it is difficult to conceive any
    configuration of the Security Council that would sanction Israel's
    periodic depredations of neighboring Arab countries. Finally, Dershowitz
    justifies ignoring the Security Council's strictures on the use of
    preventive force because its "anachronistic, mid-twentieth century view
    of international law" doesn't take into account the threat posed by
    "nuclear annihilation." It seems he forgot about the Cold War.

    Apart from the alleged biases of the U.N., Dershowitz defends Israel's
    unilateral right to prevent its neighbors from acquiring nuclear weapons
    apparently on the ground that conventional nuclear deterrence strategy
    is anchored in the mutually implied threat of inflicting massive
    civilian casualties. However Israel's neighbors know, according to him,
    that it would never indiscriminately target civilian population centers.
    Lest there be any doubt on this score he quotes former Prime Minister
    Begin, "That is our morality." As Lebanese civilians witnessed for
    themselves in 1982, and have witnessed again in 2006 from the "most
    moral army in the world" (Prime Minister Olmert).

    The indefeasible right of Israel to wage war as it pleases would seem to
    grant it very broad license: if there's just "five percent likelihood"
    that Israel might face a compelling threat in "ten years," according to
    Dershowitz, it has the right to attack now, and apparently regardless of
    whether this potential threat emanates from a currently friendly state.
    This would seem to mean that no place in the world is safe from an
    Israeli attack at any moment. In Dershowitz's mind, this is the essence
    of a realistic and moral jurisprudence on war.

    ***

    Since the outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon in July
    2006, Dershowitz has used the war on terrorism to target yet another
    branch of international law, the protection of civilians during armed
    conflict. Before analyzing his allegations, it is necessary to look
    first at the factual picture.

    In early August Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a comprehensive report
    devoted mainly to Israel's violations of the laws of war during the
    first two weeks of the conflict. Its main findings were these: over 500
    Lebanese had been killed, overwhelmingly civilians, and up to 5,000
    homes damaged or destroyed; "in dozens of attacks, Israeli forces struck
    an area with no apparent military target"; Israel attacked "both
    individual vehicles and entire convoys of civilians who heeded the
    Israeli warnings to abandon their villages" as well as "humanitarian
    convoys and ambulances" that were "clearly marked," while none "of the
    attacks on vehiclesresulted in Hezbollah casualties or the destruction
    of weapons"; "in some casesIsraeli forces deliberately targeted
    civilians"; "no cases [were found] in which Hezbollah deliberately used
    civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack"; "on
    some limited occasions, Hezbollah fighters have attempted to store
    weapons near civilian homes and have fired rockets from areas where
    civilians live." The "pattern of attacks during the Israeli offensive,"
    HRW concluded, "indicate[s] the commission of war crimes."

    Contrariwise, Dershowitz has repeatedly alleged in numerous op-ed pieces
    that Israel typically takes "extraordinary steps to minimize civilian
    casualties," while Hezbollah's typical tactics were to "live among
    civilians, hide their missiles in the homes of civilians, fire them at
    civilian targets from densely populated areas, and then use civilians as
    human shields against counterattacks." He adduces no evidence to
    substantiate these claims, all of which are flatly contradicted by HRW's
    findings. In addition, Dershowitz juxtaposes the "indisputable reality"
    that "Israel uses pinpoint intelligence and smart bombs in an effortto
    target the terrorists" against Hezbollah which "targets Israeli
    population centers with anti-personnel bombs that spray thousands of
    pellets of shrapnel in an effort to maximize casualties." Yet, HRW has
    documented Israel's use in populated areas of artillery-fired cluster
    munitions with a "wide dispersal pattern" that "makes it very difficult
    to avoid civilian casualties" and a "high failure rate" such that they
    "injure and kill civilians even after the attack is over." Finally,
    Dershowitz deplores not only the actions of Hezbollah but also of "the
    U.N. peacekeepers on the Lebanese border [who] have turned out to be
    collaborators with Hezbollah." Shouldn't he get some credit for a job
    well done after Israel killed four of these "collaborators" in a
    deliberate attack on a U.N. compound?

    The "new kind of warfare" in the "age of terrorism," according to
    Dershowitz, underscores the "absurdity and counterproductive nature of
    current international law." He claims, for example, that this body of
    law "fails" to address contingencies such as the firing of missiles
    "from civilian population centers." International law "must be changed,"
    he intones, and "it must become a war crime to fire rockets from
    civilian population centers and then hide among civilians," while those
    using human shields should incur full and exclusive responsibility for
    "foreseeable" deaths in the event of an attack. Yet, such a scenario is
    hardly new and the law has hardly been silent on it: use of civilians as
    a shield from attack is a war crime, but it is also a war crime to
    disregard totally the presence of civilians even if they are being used
    as a shield. Dershowitz further declares that "it should, of course,
    already be a war crime for terrorists to target civilians from
    anywhere." It of course already is a war crime. He alleges, however,
    that "you wouldn't know it by listening to statements from some U.N.
    leaders and 'human rights' groups." Isn't his real beef, however, that
    they don't only denounce the targeting of civilians by "terrorists" but
    the targeting of civilians by states as well?

    International law, Dershowitz alleges, is based on "old rules  written
    when uniformed armies fought other uniformed armies on a battlefield far
    away from cities"  whereas nowadays "well-armed terrorist armies" like
    Hezbollah "don't belong to regular armies and easily blend into civilian
    populations" that "recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate their
    terrorism." But these conditions are scarcely novel. In his writings
    Dershowitz often cites Michael Walzer's 1977 study Just and Unjust Wars.
    He surely knows, then, that Walzer devotes the chapter on guerrilla war
    to these issues. Consider this passage:

    If you want to fight against us, the guerrillas say, you are going to
    have to fight civilians for you are not at war with an army, but with a
    nation.In fact, the guerrillas mobilize only a small part of the
    nation.They depend upon the counter-attacks of their enemies to mobilize
    the rest. Their strategy is framed in terms of the war convention: they
    seek to place the onus of indiscriminate warfare on the opposing
    army.Now, every army depends upon the civilian population of its home
    country for supplies, recruits, and political support. But this
    dependence is usually indirect, mediated by the bureaucratic apparatus
    of the state or the exchange system of the economy....But in guerrilla
    war, the dependence is immediate: the farmer hands the food to the
    guerrilla.Similarly, an ordinary citizen may vote for a political party
    that in turn supports the war effort and whose leaders are called in for
    military briefings. But in guerrilla war, the support a civilian
    provides is far more direct. He doesn't need to be briefed; he already
    knows the most important secret: he knows who the guerrillas are.The
    people, or some of them, are complicitous in guerrilla war, and the war
    would be impossible without their complicity.[G]uerrilla war makes for
    enforced intimacies, and the people are drawn into it in a new way even
    though the services they provide are nothing more than functional
    equivalents of the services civilians have always provided for soldiers.

    If the questions Dershowitz poses are not original, it must be said that
    his answers are, at any rate coming from someone who claims to be a
    liberal. He writes, for instance, that "the Israeli army has given
    well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern
    Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily
    remain behind have become complicit." In fact, Walzer ponders precisely
    this scenario in the context of the Vietnam war where, according to the
    rules of engagement, "civilians were to be given warning in advance of
    the destruction of their villages, so that they could break with the
    guerrillas, expel them, or leave themselves.Any village known to be
    hostile could be bombed or shelled if its inhabitants were warned in
    advance, either by the dropping of leaflets or by helicopter
    loudspeaker." In Walzer's judgment such rules "could hardly be defended"
    in view of the massive devastation wrought. In the event that
    "civilians, duly warned, not only refuse to expel the guerrillas but
    also refuse to leave themselves," Walzer goes on to stress,

    so long as they give only political support, they are not legitimate
    targets, either as a group or as distinguishable individuals.So far as
    combat goes, these people cannot be shot on sight, when no firefight is
    in progress; nor can their villages be attacked merely because they
    might be used as firebases or because it is expected that they will be
    used; nor can they be randomly bombed and shelled, even after warning
    has been given.

    To be sure, Walzer wrote this in the context of Vietnam. Like
    Dershowitz, he became a born-again Zionist after the June 1967 war and
    accordingly has applied an altogether different standard to Israel.
    Whereas Dershowitz plays the tough Jew, Walzer's assigned role has been
    to stamp as kosher every war Israel wages, but only after anxious sighs.
    Thus, while HRW was deploring Israel's war crimes, Walzer opined on cue
    that "from a moral perspective, Israel has mostly been fighting
    legitimately," and that if Israeli commanders ever faced an
    international tribunal, "the defense lawyers will have a good case,"
    mainly because Hezbollah has used civilians as human shields  even if
    in the real world they haven't.

    Dershowitz purports to make the case that the laws of war need to be
    revised in the "new" age of terrorism. In fact, his real concern is an
    old one. A standard tactic of Israel in its armed hostilities with Arab
    neighbors has been to inflict massive, indiscriminate civilian
    casualties, and Dershowitz's standard defense has been to deny it. But
    the credibility of human rights organizations that have documented these
    war crimes is rather higher than that of this notorious serial
    prevaricator, which is why he so loathes them. Dershowitz now uses the
    war on terror as a pretext to strip civilians of any protections in time
    of war, dragging the law down to put it on level with Israel's criminal
    practices.

    The main target of his "reassessment of the laws of war" has been the
    fundamental distinction between civilians and combatants. Ridiculing
    what he deems the "increasingly meaningless word 'civilian'" and
    asserting that, in the case of terrorist organizations like Hezbollah,
    "'civilianality' is often a matter of degree, rather than a bright
    line," Dershowitz proposes to replace the civilian-combatant dichotomy
    with a "continuum of civilianality":

    Near the most civilian end of this continuum are the pure innocents
    babies, hostages and others completely uninvolved; at the more combatant
    end are civilians who willingly harbor terrorists, provide material
    resources and serve as human shields; in the middle are those who
    support the terrorists politically, or spiritually.

    He imagines that this revision wouldn't apply to Israel because "the
    line between Israeli soldiers and civilians is relatively clear." But is
    this true? Israel has a civilian army, which means a mere call-up slip
    or phone call separates each adult Israeli male from a combatant.
    Israeli civilians willingly provide material resources to the army. To
    judge by its targeting of Lebanese power grids, factories, roads,
    bridges, trucks, vans, ambulances, airports, and seaports, Israel must
    reckon all civilian infrastructure legitimate military targets, in which
    case all Israelis residing in the vicinity of such Israeli
    infrastructure constitute human shields. Israel's recent brutal assault
    on Lebanon, like its past wars during which massive war crimes were
    committed, has enjoyed overwhelming political and spiritual support from
    the population. "If the media were to adopt the 'continuum''' he has
    proposed, Dershowitz reflects, "it would be informative to learn how
    many of the 'civilian casualties' fall closer to the line of complicity
    and how many fall closer to the line of innocence." It would seem,
    however, that on his spectrum nearly every Israeli would be
    complicitous.

    In light of the revisions Dershowitz enters in international law, his
    reasoning begins to verge on the bizarre. He asserts that inasmuch as
    the Lebanese population overwhelmingly "supports Hezbollah," there are
    no real civilians or civilian casualties in Lebanon: "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." If this be the case, however, it is
    hard to make out the meaning of Dershowitz's praise of Israel for only
    targeting Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon. Didn't he just say that all
    of the Lebanese are Hezbollah? Similarly he condemns Hezbollah for
    targeting Israeli civilians. But Israelis are no less supportive of the
    IDF than Lebanese are of Hezbollah. Doesn't this mean that Hezbollah
    can't be targeting civilians in Israel because there aren't any? These
    are of course quibbles next to the fact that Dershowitz has now
    sanctioned mass murder of the Lebanese people.

    It remains to consider Dershowitz's own location on the continuum of
    civilianality. Israel could not have waged any of its wars of aggression
    or committed any of its war crimes without the blanket political and
    military support of the United States. Using his academic pedigree
    Dershowitz has played a conspicuous, crucial and entirely voluntary
    public role in rallying such support. He has for decades grossly
    falsified Israel's human rights record. He has urged the use of
    collective punishment such as the "automatic destruction" of a
    Palestinian village after each Palestinian attack. He has covered up
    Israel's use of torture on Palestinian detainees, and himself advocated
    the application of "excruciating" torture on suspected terrorists such
    as a "needle being shoved under the fingernails." He has aligned himself
    with the Israeli government against courageous Israeli pilots refusing
    the immorality of targeted assassinations. He has denounced nonviolent
    resisters to the Israeli occupation as "supporters of Palestinian
    terrorism." He has dismissed ethnic cleansing as a "fifth-rate issue"
    akin to "massive urban renewal." He has advised Israel's senior
    government officials that Israel is not bound by international law. He
    has now sanctioned the extermination of the Lebanese people.

    Finally, in Preemption he boasts of having vicariously participated in a
    targeted assassination while visiting Israel:

    I watched as a high-intensity television camera, mounted on a drone,
    zeroed in on the apartment of a terrorist ... I watched as the camera
    focused on the house and the nearly empty streets.

    It seems, however, that this moral pervert missed the climactic scene of
    his little peep show, although it isn't reported whether he got his
    quarter back: "I was permitted to watch for only a few minutes, and no
    action was taken while I was watching because the target remained in the
    house." One wonders whether Dershowitz carefully inserted these weasel
    words because, as he well knows, targeted assassinations constitute war
    crimes, and he might otherwise be charged as an accessory to one.

    In Preemption Dershowitz observes that "there can be no question that
    some kinds of expression contribute significantly to some kinds of
    evil." In this context he recalls that the International Criminal
    Tribunal for Rwanda handed down life sentences to Hutu radio
    broadcasters for inciting listeners to "hatred and murders." He also
    recalls the highly pertinent case of Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher,
    who was described by writer Rebecca West as "a dirty old man of the sort
    that gives trouble in parks," and by Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor
    as "neither attractive nor bright." Although Hitler had stripped this
    self-styled Zionist and expert on Jews of all his political power by
    1940, and his pornographic newspaper Der Stuermer had a circulation of
    only some 15,000 during the war, the International Tribunal at Nuremberg
    nonetheless sentenced Streicher to death for his murderous incitement.

    On his continuum of civilianality Dershowitz appears to fall in the
    proximity of the Hutu radio broadcasters and Streicher  less direct in
    his appeal, more influential in his reach. It is highly unlikely,
    however, that he will ever be brought before a tribunal for his criminal
    incitement. But there is yet another possibility for achieving justice.
    Dershowitz is a strong advocate of targeted assassinations when
    "reasonable alternatives" such as arrest and capture aren't available.
    The conclusion seems clear -- if , and only if, -- one uses his standard
    and his reasoning. Of course, the preponderance of humanity, this writer
    [and CounterPunch, Eds.,] included, does not think this way. After all
    the hard-won gains of civilization, who would want to live in a world
    that once again legally sanctioned torture, collective punishment,
    assassinations and mass murder? As Dershowitz descends into barbarism,
    it remains a hopeful sign that few seem inclined to join him.

    Norman Finkelstein's most recent book is Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse
    of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history (University of California
    Press). His web site is www.NormanFinkelstein.com.

    ----------------------------------------
    By ANNE PLUMMER FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writer

    Thu Jul 20, 2:42 PM ET

    WASHINGTON - The House, displaying a foreign affairs solidarity lacking
    on issues like Iraq, voted overwhelmingly Thursday to support Israel in
    its confrontation with Hezbollah guerrillas.

    The resolution, which was passed on a 410-8 vote, also condemns enemies
    of the Jewish state.

    House Republican leader John Boehner cited Israel's "unique
    relationship" with the United States as a reason for his colleagues to
    swiftly go on record supporting Israel in the latest flare-up of
    violence in the Mideast.

    Little of the political divisiveness in Congress on other national
    security issues was evident as lawmakers embraced the Bush
    administration's position.

    So strong was the momentum for the resolution that it was steamrolling
    efforts by a small group of House members who argued that Congress's
    pro-Israel stance goes too far.

    The nonbinding resolution is similar to one the Senate passed Tuesday.
    It harshly condemns Israel's enemies and says Syria and Iran should be
    held accountable for providing Hezbollah with money and missile
    technology used to attack Israel.

    Yet as Republican and Democratic leaders rally behind the measure in
    rare bipartisan fashion, a handful of lawmakers have quietly expressed
    reservations that the resolution was too much the result of a powerful
    lobbying force and attempts to court Jewish voters.

    "I'm just sick in the stomach, to put it mildly," said Rep. Nick J.
    Rahall (news, bio, voting record) II, D-W.Va., who is of Lebanese
    descent.

    Rahall joined other Arab-American lawmakers in drafting an alternative
    resolution that would have omitted language holding Lebanon responsible
    for Hezbollah's actions and called for restraint from all sides. Rahall
    said that proposal was "politely swept under the rug," a political
    reality he and others say reflects the influence Israel has in Congress.

    "There's a lot (of lawmakers) that don't feel it's right ... but vote
    yes, and get it the heck out of here," Rahall said.

    Rep. Darrell Issa (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif., who co-sponsored
    the alternative resolution and also is of Lebanese descent, agreed. The
    American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby "throws in language that
    AIPAC wants. That isn't always the best thing for this body to endorse,"
    Issa said.

    Nevertheless, Rahall and Issa said they were considering voting in favor
    of the resolution. "I want to show support for Israel's right to defend
    itself," Issa said.

    Another lawmaker with Lebanese roots, Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., R-La.,
    said he too planned to vote in favor of the resolution despite holding
    deep reservations on its language regarding Lebanon. "I think it's a
    good resolution. But I think it's incomplete," he said.

    The lack of momentum for alternative proposals frustrated pro-Arab
    groups.

    "This is the usual problem with any resolution that talks about Israel —
    there are a lot of closet naysayers up there (in Congress), but they
    don't want to be a target of the lobby" of Israel, said Eugene H. Bird,
    president of the Council for the National Interest, a group that harshly
    condemns Israel's military campaign.

    "These guys aren't legislating. They're politicking," said James Zogby,
    president of the Arab American Institute.

    An AIPAC spokeswoman said Congress's overwhelming support for Israel
    reflects the support of U.S. voters and not any pressure applied by
    lobbyists. "The American people overwhelming support Israel's war on
    terrorism and understand that we must stand by our closest ally in this
    time of crisis," said Jennifer Cannata.

    Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice planned to discuss diplomatic
    efforts to end the violence, and the possibility of international troops
    to police a peace, over dinner Thursday in New York with United Nations
    Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

    On Friday, Rice will receive a report from fact-finders Annan sent to
    the region.

    Rice, herself, is expected to go there. "She intends to travel to the
    region as early as next week," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack
    said.

    Approximately 2,600 U.S. citizens have been evacuated from Lebanon by
    the United States since Sunday.

    ----------------------------------------