Personal account of anti‑Zionist protest targeting Alan Dershowitz at Faneuil Hall

4.2.12 WC: 191694 Moreover, the fervor in the hatred of Israel could not be explained in rational, policy terms. Israel, the “Jew Among Nations,” was being treated by many on the hard left and on the Islamic right, in the way the Jewish people had been treated for millennia. This change took me by surprise. In the conclusion to my 1991 book, Chutzpah, I predicted the end of mainstream, top-down anti- Semitism in America, and its replacement by anti-Zionism. I also predicted “a sharp decline in support for Israel among college and university students,” who will be “tomorrow’s leaders.” I should have, but did not anticipate that the new anti-Zionism would morph into anti-Semitism, at least for some. I should have because the hatred of Israel by the hard left and the Islamic right was So irrational, so off the charts, so extreme, that it could be explained only by a hatred for Israel’s Jewishness. A confrontation I experienced in 2004 was all too typical: It took place in front of Faneuil Hall, the birthplace of American independence and liberty. I was receiving a justice award and delivering a talk from the podium of that historic hall on civil liberties in the age of terrorism. When I left, award in hand, I was accosted by a group of screaming, angry young men and women carrying virulently anti-Israel signs. The sign carriers were shouting epithets at me that crossed the line from civility to bigotry. “Dershowitz and Hitler, just the same, the only difference is the name.” The sin that, in the opinion of the screamers, watranted this comparison between me and the man who murdered dozens of my family members was my support for Israel. It was irrelevant to these chanters that I also support a Palestinian state, the end of the Israeli occupation, and the dismantling of most of the settlements. The protestors also shouted, “Dershowitz and Gibbels [sic], just the same, the only difference is the name”—not even knowing how to pronounce the name of the anti-Semitic Nazi butcher. One sign carrier shouted that Jews who support Israel are worse than Nazis. Another demanded that I be tortured and killed. It was not only their words; it was the hatred in their eyes. If a dozen Boston police had not been protecting me, I have little doubt I would have been physically attacked. The protestors’ eyes were ablaze with fanatical zeal. The feminist writer Phyllis Chesler aptly describes the hatred some young people often direct against Israel and supporters of the Jewish state as “eroticized.” That is what I saw: passionate hatred, ecstatic hatred, orgasmic hatred. It was beyond mere differences of opinion. When I looked into their faces, I could imagine young Nazis in the 1930s in Hitler’s Germany. They had no doubt that they were right and that I was pure evil for my support of the Jewish state, despite my public disagreement with some of Israel’s policies and despite my support for Palestinian statehood. There was no place for nuance here. It was black and white, good versus evil, and any Jew who supported Israel was pure evil, deserving of torture, violence, and whatever fate Hitler and Goebbels deserved. To be sure, these protestors’ verbal attack on me was constitutionally protected speech, just as the Nazi march through Skokie was constitutionally protected speech. But the shouting was plainly calculated to intimidate. An aura of violence was in the air, and had the police not been there, I would not have been able to express any views counter to theirs. 353 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017440