{"id":1970,"date":"2003-10-22T12:32:00","date_gmt":"2003-10-22T17:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sandbox.blog-city.com\/sandstorm_dershowitz_vs_finkelstein_my_proper_footnote.htm"},"modified":"2003-10-22T12:32:00","modified_gmt":"2003-10-22T17:32:00","slug":"dershowitz-vs-finkelstein-my-proper-footnote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/2003\/10\/dershowitz-vs-finkelstein-my-proper-footnote\/","title":{"rendered":"Dershowitz vs. Finkelstein: My (Proper) Footnote"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the last month, Alan Dershowitz and Norman Finkelstein have been going at one another over Finkelstein&#8217;s charge that Dershowitz plagiarized passages of his book, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/tg\/detail\/-\/047146502X\" target=\"_blank\">The Case for Israel<\/a>. I&#8217;ll spare my readers the details. Israelis and Palestinians lurch from crisis to crisis, while two professors debate the finer points of the <em>Chicago Manual of Style<\/em>. I find it difficult to take the whole business seriously, but if you do want to track the controversy, here is a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.normanfinkelstein.com\/id143.htm\" target=\"_blank\">link<\/a> that will take you to Finkelstein&#8217;s charges, subsequently amplified by Alexander Cockburn; Dershowitz&#8217;s rejoinder; Finkelstein again; Dershowitz again&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>So why even mention it here? The controversy provides me with a perfect opportunity to post my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geocities.com\/martinkramerorg\/Peters.htm\" target=\"_blank\">review<\/a> of the book that Dershowitz allegedly plagiarized: <em>From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine<\/em>, by Joan Peters. I wrote the review more than nineteen years ago, when I was young and obscure, and it appeared in a journal that isn&#8217;t exactly a must-read: <em>The New Leader<\/em>. I have no recollection of why I agreed to review the book, but I did, and in retrospect I managed to identify both its strong points and its weaknesses. Finkelstein, with his taste for hyperbole, has called the book a hoax, which it wasn&#8217;t. It raised an important question about Palestinian demography, but it did so in ways that left it vulnerable to attacks by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/5249\" target=\"_blank\">serious people<\/a>. Nevertheless, other <a href=\"http:\/\/www.meforum.org\/article\/522\" target=\"_blank\">serious people<\/a> have substantiated aspects of her argument, at least for certain periods.<\/p>\n<p>These days, the demographic argument is not so much about what was but what will be. Until <em>Sandstorm<\/em> approaches it, content yourself with my resurrected <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geocities.com\/martinkramerorg\/Peters.htm\" target=\"_blank\">review<\/a> of <em>From Time Immemorial<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the last month, Alan Dershowitz and Norman Finkelstein have been going at one another over Finkelstein&#8217;s charge that Dershowitz plagiarized passages of his book, The Case for Israel. I&#8217;ll spare my readers the details. Israelis and Palestinians lurch from &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/2003\/10\/dershowitz-vs-finkelstein-my-proper-footnote\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1970\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}