[Peace-discuss] Dershowitz to UC Press: I will own your company

[David Green]

Subject: U. of California Press to Publish Book That
Alan Dershowitz 
Has Criticized as Anti-Semitic

U. of California Press to Publish Book That Alan
Dershowitz Has
Criticized as Anti-Semitic

By Jennifer Howard

Chronicle of Higher Education
July 11, 2005


The University of California Press will proceed with
the
publication of a controversial book that attacks
supporters of
Israel despite efforts by its chief target, the
Harvard law
professor Alan M. Dershowitz, to block the book's
release. The
press's intentions were announced on Friday by its
director, Lynne
Withey.

The book, Norman G. Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah: On
the Misuse
of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, examines
the evidence
of human-rights groups, such as Amnesty International,
and the
writings of pro-Israel commentators to expose what the
introduction terms "the vast proliferation of sheer
fraud
masquerading as serious scholarship" on Israel and its
treatment
of Palestinians.

Mr. Finkelstein, an assistant professor of political
science at
DePaul University, describes Mr. Dershowitz's 2003
book, The Case
for Israel (John Wiley & Sons), as "among the most
spectacular
academic frauds ever published on the Israel-Palestine
conflict."

Beyond Chutzpah was poised to go to press late last
month when
lawyers for the University of California system halted
publication
to review again Mr. Finkelstein's allegations, which
include the
charge that Mr. Dershowitz lifted large portions of
The Case for
Israel from Joan Peters's 1984 From Time Immemorial:
The Origins
of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine (Harper &
Row). Mr.
Finkelstein debunked Ms. Peters's work in a previous
book, The
Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of
Jewish
Suffering (Verso, 2000).

After 10 days of what Mr. Finkelstein described as
"nonstop,
round-the-clock negotiations with lawyers," he agreed
to several
wording changes designed to forestall legal action by
Mr.
Dershowitz, a noted proponent of the First Amendment
as well as
one of Israel's most prominent American supporters.

Ms. Withey said that the press hoped to meet the
original
publication date of August 28. Final changes will go
to the
printer today, and the presses should begin rolling in
a couple of
weeks. "We're aiming to have bound books by the end of
July," she
said.

The 11th-hour delay is far from the first hurdle that
Beyond
Chutzpah has had to clear on its road to publication.
Under
pressure from Mr. Dershowitz and his lawyers, the New
York firm of
Cravath, Swaine & Moore, Mr. Finkelstein's original
publisher, the
New Press, delayed publication in order to review the
plagiarism
accusations.

Mr. Finkelstein then took the project to the
University of
California Press and its history editor, Niels Hooper,
whom he had
worked with on The Holocaust Industry when Mr. Hooper
was an
editor at Verso. Mr. Dershowitz sent letters to the
University of
California and others, including Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger of
California, who is an ex officio member of the
university's Board
of Regents, protesting the press's decision to publish
Mr.
Finkelstein's book.

The depth of Mr. Dershowitz's feeling can be gauged by
a July 5
column he wrote for the online journal
FrontPageMag.com that
carried the headline "Why Is the University of
California Press
Publishing Bigotry?" In the column, he invokes hate
speech and The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion and attacks "this
bigoted book by
this anti-Semite" and Mr. Finkelstein's "penchant for
making up
facts about people with whom he disagrees."

Mr. Dershowitz has denied that he has sought to block
the book's
publication, but in comments published in The Boston
Globe on
Saturday, he said, "I don't think a university press
should be
publishing this kind of garbage." He added that he had
told the
California press that "if you say I didn't write the
book or
plagiarized it, I will own your company."

Even before the latest delay, Beyond Chutzpah had been
through
several rounds of legal vetting. The University of
California
retained several outside lawyers, including American
and British
legal experts, to examine the manuscript along with
its in-house
counsel. Mr. Finkelstein said that the book had been
through some
15 drafts in the past eight months.

The final changes to Beyond Chutzpah center on
specific phrases
concerning plagiarism and its definition. "There was a
question
about how to raise the issue of plagiarism without
incurring very
costly litigation," Mr. Finkelstein said. "What they
asked me to
do, and what I agreed to do, was provide the Harvard
definition of
plagiarism and reiterate my own findings in the
appendix and let
readers judge for themselves."

In the body of the book, the word "plagiarizes" has
been replaced
with such phrases as "lifts from" or "appropriates
from without
attribution," according to Mr. Finkelstein. An
appendix now refers
readers to the definition of plagiarism laid out in
Harvard
University's Writing With Sources: A Guide for
Students. "We
juxtapose the definition with the evidence and leave
it to the
reader to decide," Mr. Finkelstein said.

The online edition of Harvard University's student
handbook notes
that "students should always take great care to
distinguish their
own ideas and knowledge from information derived from
sources."

"The term 'sources,'" the handbook says, "includes not
only
primary published and secondary material, but also
information and
opinions gained directly from other people."

In a telephone interview, Mr. Finkelstein read a
reporter a
paragraph inserted in the appendix during the final
round of
talks. The new wording asserts that Mr. Dershowitz
"directly
appropriates" a key idea from Ms. Peters without
attribution and
that he "repeatedly copied information" from her book,
and invites
the reader to judge based on the evidence submitted in
Beyond
Chutzpah.

http://chronicle.com/redirect/c/2005/07/2005071105n.htm




		
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