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Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is one of the country's foremostappellate lawyers and a distinguished defender of individual liberties. He appears frequently on television and has contributed articles to the "New York Times" and other newspapers and magazines. His many books include the New York Times bestsellers "The Case for Israel and Chutzpah as well as Blasphemy," "The Case for Peace," "Preemption," "Finding Jefferson," and I"s There a Right to Remain Silent?: Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment after 9/11."

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"As always when Israel needs to be defended.... Alan Dershowitz speaks with great passion and personal courage."
-- Elie Wiesel

"This is a compelling book that unmasks the dangerous revisionism that distorts the real Israel. Dershowitz debunks former President Jimmy Carter's apartheid analogy, Walt and Mearsheimer's canard of dual loyalty, the immorality of the British boycott of Israeli academics, and the bigotry of the anti-Israel hard left and right. He also assesses the existential threats against Israel and the options available to the Jewish state. A must-read for all who care about international justice and Israel's survival in a world of biased enemies."
--The Honorable Irwin CotlerMember of Parliament and former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada; Professor of Law (on leave from McGill University)

Praise for Alan Dershowitz:

"Dershowitz . . . knows how to construct an argument. . . . Especially effective at pointing to the hypocrisy of many of Israel's critics."
--"New York Times Book Review"

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Jimmy Carter declares that Israel is guilty of apartheid; Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer proclaim that the "Israel lobby" is a huge, monolithic organization whose only purpose is to manipulate American foreign policy in Israel's favor; Noam Chomsky and Richard Falk compare Israeli policies and actions to those of Nazi Germany. Are these well-known and respected figures honest critics working toward peace and justice for Palestinians and Israelis alike? Or are they peddling lies, half-truths, and false accusations in the guise of serious diplomacy and scholarship? Israel has never suffered from a shortageof enemies, but these men and others provide a patina of respectability to even the most radical and unfounded accusations against the Jewish state.

In this book, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz confronts these foes head-on. Writing with passion and power, he challenges the claims and actions of those he views to be Israel's most dangerous enemies in the West, including Carter, Walt, Mearsheimer, Chomsky, and Pat Buchanan, as well as British academic unions that are seeking to boycott Israeli scholars and researchers, and the Presbyterian Church, which has launched a divestiture campaign against Israel.

With the precision of a first-class scholar and the disciplined approach of an experienced attorney, Dershowitz presents his adversaries' statements in their own words and fully in context. He analyzes each charge and the facts that are presented to support it, along with contradictory facts that are conveniently left out of each accusation. He points out that Carter, for example, ignores the fact that 1.3 million Israeli citizens are Arabs who enjoy the rights and freedoms of other Israelis, and far more than they would have in any Arab country.

Dershowitz also takes on Israel's military enemies, including suicide bombers and those who incite them; Hamas, Hezbollah, and others who launch rockets against Israeli civilians while hiding behind their own civilians; and Iran with its nuclear weapons program. He points out that Israel poses no threat to any of these groups; if they were to lay down their weapons tomorrow, peace would ensue. Then he invites any fair-minded person to imagine what would happen if Israel were to do the same.

Filled with brilliant analysis, telling anecdotes, and startling revelations of the motives that drive many of Israel's most virulent detractors, The Case Against Israel's Enemies is compelling reading for anyone interested in current events or international affairs and a must-have for friends of Israel concerned about the future of the Jewish state.

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The Case Against Israel's Enemies

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

I've known Jimmy Carter since February 12, 1976. That was the day the then obscure presidential candidate sent me a handwritten note from "Plains, Georgia," telling me that he had been "impressed with [my] ideas on crime and punishment," which I had expressed in a recent New York Times Magazine article. He asked for my help with "other ideas" that would be "very valuable to [him]" in his campaign. A "cc" on the bottom of the page to "Stu" indicated that he had sent a copy to Stuart Eisenstadt, his chief domestic assistant and a former student of mine. Stuart, who was a committed Zionist and an active member of the Atlanta Jewish community, had served as an important adviser to Carter when he was governor of Georgia. Stuart was then a leading figure in the former peanut farmer's unlikely run for president.

When I received the letter, I barely knew who Carter was, but I had always liked Stuart, who in addition to being a brilliant student was a great basketball player. So when Stuart called and told me that Carter was coming to speak at Harvard and wanted to meet me, I agreed. We met in one of Harvard's undergraduate houses, where he repeated his request for my assistance on criminal justice matters.

I immediately liked the gracious Southerner and agreed to work on his campaign. In June of that year, Newsweek ran a cover story on "Carter's game plan" that included a page on "the Carter brain trust." I was featured in that story, with my photograph (beard, long hair, and aviator glasses) and a report that I was a key part of the brain trust and a member of Carter's "task force on criminal justice." Following Carter's election and inauguration, my name was included on several lists of lawyers the president was considering for Supreme Court appointments if any vacancies were to occur. (None did.)

When Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky was arrested in the Soviet Union in March 1977 and charged with spying for the United States, I was asked by his wife and his mother to represent him. I went to the White House to urge Carter to formally deny that Sharansky had ever spied for us. Stuart advised me that it would be a difficult sell, since no president ever admits or denies that anyone was an American spy. But after considerable efforts on Stuart's part and mine, President Carter agreed to issue an unprecedented denial, saying he was "completely convinced" that Sharansky was innocent. Carter repeated his denial after Sharansky's conviction in July 1978, declaring that the charges were "patently false."

Several years later, I closely followed the Camp David meetings between Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat. My friend Aharon Barak was Israel's chief legal adviser at the talks, Stuart was an important adviser to Carter, and another former Harvard Law student, Osama El-Baz, was one of the leaders of the Egyptian negotiating team. Once peace was finally achieved, I was invited to the White House ceremony on March 26, 1979.

I campaigned for Carter during his losing reelection campaign in 1980, and I considered myself a friend and a supporter during his years of active retirement and good works. I was not then aware of some of Carter's lapses of judgment, such as his failed intervention on behalf of an ex-Nazi SS guard. In 1987, the former president forwarded a letter from the daughter of Waffen-SS guard Martin Bartesch to the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigation, which had deported Bartesch and taken away his citizenship. Bartesch had been a guard at the Mauthausen death camp whose involvement in the murder of prisoners had been documented by the Nazis themselves. After the war, he lied about his past to gain entry to the United States. His daughter's letter to the government claimed that Bartesch had "no control over his destiny" during World War II. Carter attached a note in his own hand: "I hope that, in cases like this, that special consideration can be given to affected families for humanitarian reasons. Jimmy Carter." It was the first of many humanitarian actions by Carter, siding with those who murdered Jews over those who protected Jews from being murdered.

Carter's "humanitarianism" seems to go in one direction only. His latest humanitarian intervention has taken the form of support for Hamas, which fires rockets at civilians in Sderot and other populated Israeli areas, rather than support for the victims of terrorism. On April 9, 2008, it was announced that Carter would visit Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, in Damascus. He was strongly advised against doing so by the U.S. State Department, but he said that he felt "quite at ease" meeting with the leaders of the terrorist group. Before his visit with Hamas, Carter had never visited Israeli victims of Hamas rockets, but he made a point of stopping briefly in Sderot to show support for victims before his meeting with Meshal. But his shallow show of support for the victims of Hamas terrorism did not stop him from calling on the European Union to break from the United States and recognize the legitimacy of Hamas, despite that group's continuing terrorism and refusal to accept Israel's existence.

The last time I saw Carter in person was in January 2006, when we were both invited to speak at the Herzliya Conference in Israel. Following his talk, I asked the first question from the audience. Although my question had a somewhat critical tone, Carter's response to me could not have been warmer or more personal. We met and talked after the session, and he told me he was going to observe the Palestinian parliamentary elections the following day, as I was also. Carter assured me that Hamas would be soundly defeated, because most Palestinians wanted peace. We parted amicably, with mutual regards to and from Stuart. Carter did not tell me that he was about to publish an explosive book titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Nor did he tell Stuart, his dear friend and adviser, or most of his other Jewish friends and supporters. I first learned of the title of the book from a journalist who called me for a comment. I said I didn't believe Carter would have written such a book. The journalist then e-mailed me a press release.

When I told Stuart about the forthcoming book and its incendiary title, he, too, expressed surprise and disbelief. Stuart said that he would call Carter and try to persuade him to change the title. Several other friends and colleagues did as well, to no avail. The book was published amid great fanfare and controversy, which assured its ascent on the best-seller lists. Carter announced that he had written the book and had deliberately included the explosive word apartheid in the title to "stimulate discussion [and] debate." It was only natural that Carter would be expected to participate in that debate.

So when some hard-left professors at Brandeis University invited Carter to discuss his book on campus, the president of Brandeis, Jehuda Reinharz, proposed a debate, at Stuart's suggestion. Stuart, a member of Brandeis's Board of Trustees, also put my name forward as the appropriate person to debate Carter. I had worked for Carter, admired him, and had written the first mainstream review of his book-a respectful review in which I wondered why Carter, "generally a careful...