LA Times Book Review - 'Just another rant about the Mideast'

[Englander]

# The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved;
Alan Dershowitz; John Wiley & Sons: 246 pp., $22.95

By Amy Wilentz, Special to The Times

ON the subject of Israel, Alan Dershowitz writes in a white heat, and what he's defending is not always so much Israel but himself. His latest book, "The Case for Peace," is a mishmash of quotes, screed and rant; it's topped by a Dostoevskyan assault on Dershowitz's detractors, a cabal — as he sees it — of entrenched anti-Semites. In his final obsessive pages of attack and vitriol — which, one suspects, are the real reasons Dershowitz put together this compilation of unoriginal ideas and arguments — he sounds like a mad Russian prophet who has been stalked beyond human patience by a rabble of doppelgängers who will not let him be.

Before reading this book, I had always had faith in a two-state solution: Israel and Palestine sharing the land, with an established border and real sovereignty for both. But reading Dershowitz defend it with intemperate, ill-considered rhetoric and poor argumentation made me begin to appreciate how others might have come to question it — even to reject it.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is one of the world's most intractable problems, one that at times has seemed to threaten the security not only of the people of the Middle East but also of the wider world. The struggle dates back to artificial borders drawn in the region by European leaders after World War I and the tragic displacement of European Jews after World War II. It's as if a little piece of those world crises has continued to fester long after much of the rest of the world has moved on.

In this book, Dershowitz provides many old, uninteresting answers to already asked questions. The way he looks at every problem is skewed by his fierce love of Israel — never quite stated but always in evidence — and his almost total adherence to Israeli government policy.



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