DERSHOWITZ

To the Editors of The Crimson:

The Crimson account of my speech at MIT on the Middle East completely distorts the entire thrust of my argument. Fortunately, I spoke from a text, a perusal of which will convince any fair-minded reader that The Crimson account bears little relationship to my remarks. Firstly, I most emphatically deny that I accused Daniel Ellsberg of advocating violence. Your reporter obviously confused Daniel Ellsberg with Daniel Berrigan, who I did soundly criticize. Secondly, I did not say--nor do I believe--that "The Palestinians were wrongly expelled [from Israel]". What I said was as follows:

Let us assume (what is clearly not the case) that all the Palestinians were expelled--unlawfully, immorally, without justification. Where does forced expulsion from one's native village or town fit on a moral ranking of injustices? Before answering that question, let us be careful not to confuse expulsion with denial of self-determination, with placement in refugee camps, with denial of political freedom or nationhood. Because we must again recall what is not disputed. There was supposed to be a Palestinian state in the mandate. It was not Israel who--in 1948--destroyed that dream; it was Jordan who annexed the Palestinian state and made it part of the Hashamite kingdom. It was Jordan who denied the Palestinians the right to self-determination; political freedom, and nationhood. Israel bears no part of the blame for that. Israel can be held responsible--at the very most--for expelling Arabs from the Jewish state into what was supposed to be a Palestinian state. Though the evidence that is, at best, ambiguous, I am willing--for purposes of this argument--to assume that Israel expelled the Arabs. And now back to the central moral question: where does expulsion fit on a moral scale of injustices? By asking this question I do not mean to deny the self-evident proposition that expulsion from one's birthplace is a serious infringement, but I mean to ask you to place that infringement in a comparative perspective. Surely, forced expulsion is not nearly as bad as forced imprisonment, denial of political liberties, denial of life itself, or forced retention in a country against one's will. The right to leave an oppressive or repressive society has always been regarded--and rightly so--as a more fundamental human liberty than the right to return to one's homeland. Every document of liberty that I know of protects the right to leave--to be free from oppression; some also protect the right to remain or return, but none rank it as highly. After all, denial of the right to live in a particular place--even a symbolically important place--does not preclude living freely in many other places--as numerous Palestinians have done, and as all would have been allowed to do but for the Jordanian annexation of the inchoate Palestinian state...

Expulsion--though serious--ranks fairly low on the scale of moral wrongs. And the expulsion at issue here--complicated as it is by the fact that it was caused, in substantial part, by the Arab invasion and demand for Palestinian evacuation--ranks at the very bottom of an already low category of wrongs. Put most directly, never in recent history has so slight a moral wrong been seen by so many otherwise sensitive people as justifying so great an amount of violence.

Surely, this is rather different than the way your reporter characterized it.

Your headline quotes me as saying that "Israel should give up Arab land." This too is a distortion of what I said, which is as follows:

What then do I believe Israel should do in the cause of peace. My proposal is as follows: Israel should declare, in principle, its willingness to give up the captured territories in return for a firm assurance of lasting peace. By doing so, it would make clear what I think the vast majority of Israelis believe: it has no interest in retaining the territories for any reason other than protection from attack. That part of my proposal is simple. The burden would then shift to the Arabs and the world community to show that there can be a firm assurance of lasting peace--not merely paper guarantees. That Israel really would be safe if it gave up the territories. Israel's actual withdrawal should be phased and slow, each step dependent on concrete manifestations of good will from the other side. This approach is consistent with the values I stressed at the beginning of my talk. It would demonstrate a willingness to exchange land for peace--provided that the peace is as firm as the land.

Finally your quotation from my speech that Israel is "a flawed Socialist state" was made in the following context: ...despite its lack of perfection, Israel shines by comparison with every other Arab state and all but a handful of states throughout the world in civil liberties, political freedom, feminism, and distribution of income. It is a flawed socialist-democracy, but even with its flaws, it is not--as Daniel Berrigan recently called it--a "criminal Jewish community" that employs a "racist ideology" comparable to that used by the Nazis. When viewed from the perspective of the values that we share, it is beyond doubt, near--though not at--the top of any list of nations, and clearly at the top of the nations in the Middle East. Alan Dershowitz   Professor of Law