Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who spoke to UJA major donors Oct. 19 in Toronto, proudly wears the badge as “Israel’s single most visible defender.” He also bills himself as “the Jewish state’s lead attorney in the court of public opinion.” A prolific author and frequent commentator on legal and political issues, he recently released a new book designed to make Israel’s case in the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge. Called Terror Tunnels: The Case for Israel’s Just War Against Hamas, the book has been released as an e-book and will be available in print soon.

In your new book, you make the case for Israel in its war against Hamas. Why is there a need to write a book now defending Israel?

When I wrote my first book for Israel [in 2003], The Case for Israel, I asked myself the same question. Nobody has to make the case for Sweden, France or Canada. Why should somebody have to make the case for Israel back then? Why should anybody have to make the case for Israel’s just actions in Gaza now? And the reason is that Israel has been convicted of war crimes in the court of public opinion, in many European countries, on many university campuses in Canada and the United States and throughout Europe, and in the hearts and minds of many ignorant people around the world who don’t understand that what Israel did in Gaza is exactly what they would do and what their country would do if they faced comparable threats.

The nation-state of the Jewish People has always been judged by a harsher standard. The best example of that is when my own president, who is a friend of mine and whom I supported, criticized Israel for “not doing the job to avoid civilian casualties” during the Gaza war, and then when our country went to war against ISIS, he rescinded his policy of avoiding air strikes unless there was near certainty of no civilian casualties.

President Barack Obama was mugged by reality when he saw that you can’t fight terrorists who embed themselves among civilians, without inflicting some civilian casualties.

I wrote the book for two reasons: one, to inform open-minded people about why they should support Israel’s actions in Gaza, and second, to give ammunition to pro-Israel students on campus, faculty members, ordinary citizens, so that they can win the fight for the hearts and minds of people in the court of public opinion.

During Operation Protective Edge, there were lots of stories about Hamas using human shields and placing its rockets in population centres, and Hamas rejected numerous ceasefire proposals. Yet Israel still gets criticized for those civilian casualties. You mentioned a double standard. Is anti-Semitism at play when it comes to the criticism of Israel?

The double standard grows out of the fact that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People. If this were Sweden being attacked by Denmark, nobody would apply a double standard. It’s because Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People that the double standard is applied to it.

And the idea that Israel would be blamed for the deaths of Hamas human shields is both illogical and immoral. It also violates all principles of law. In my book, Terror Tunnels, I give the obvious example of a bank robber who robs a bank and then takes a child as a hostage and holds the child in front of him and begins to fire at the customers, hitting some, missing others. A policeman comes in and in an effort to stop the shooter, he takes careful aim at the shooter’s head hoping to avoid hitting the child, but at the last minute, the shooter raises the child and the bullet hits the child and kills him. Who’s responsible, legally, morally and in every other way? Of course, the bank robber who took the hostage is responsible, not the policeman who took all precautions to avoid killing the hostage.

The same thing is true in Gaza. Every single death of a human shield, every single death of every Palestinian who was in the area where Hamas was either building tunnels or firing rockets, every single one of those deaths is attributable legally and morally to Hamas.

This fits in to what I call in my book Hamas’ dead baby strategy. It’s a cruel term, but it’s absolutely accurate.

How can Hamas get away with it within their own population base? Do they feel that’s the proper way to attack Israel?

There are clearly some Palestinian mothers who love their children as much as Israeli mothers love their children, and they are not happy to see their children die, although they, too, blame it on Israel.

But there are some who are prepared to martyr their children. I’ve quoted them in material I’ve written. Mothers who say I have nine children and I want them each to be martyred. Mothers who say to suicide bombers, “Don’t come back to me alive. You’ll be disgrace to the family. I want you to die.” There is a culture of death among some Islamic extremists, and some do live within Gaza.

You call Hamas’ strategy of using human shields a winning strategy. But what have they actually won? How have they improved their position vis-a-vis Israel with this strategy?

Well, they have improved their situation by hurting Israel’s situation, by making it costly to Israel. Israel will be condemned by the United Nations Human Rights Council. There will be a Goldstone report putting the blame on Israel, as there was last time. There will be efforts to bring Israeli leaders and soldiers and commanders in front of the International Criminal Court, which will be painful.

They do win by having Israel lose. I don’t think they gain anything for their own people. Their people have their homes destroyed, many of them their lives destroyed. They have an option. They can vote Hamas out of office. Yet polls show that Hamas has increased its popularity, in both Gaza and the West Bank, as a result of losing the war on the ground, but perhaps winning the propaganda war.

In the United States, is there any evidence that support for Israel has been eroded because of Hamas’ strategy and tactics, and did it affect the Obama administration?

Yes. There is some reason to worry that erosion has occurred among young people and university students, largely as a result of misuse of the classroom as a propaganda vehicle by hard left and anti-Israel professors, who have imposed a cost upon their students, in terms of grades and recommendations, for any show of support for Israel.

There has also been some diminution among Democrats and on the hard left. I would say the same is true in Canada. There has been some diminution among people of the left and also some university students in support for Israel, even though the Canadian government strongly supports Israel and the Obama administration generally supports Israel’s security while strongly opposing its settlement policies.

Canadian professor William Schabas has been named to head a UN inquiry into the Gaza war. What do you make of his appointment and of the commission itself?

I think there is a good reason for it. Several years ago, they appointed Richard Goldstone. They thought they would get some credibility by having a Jew, and a Zionist and somebody who has connections to Israel. They made a mistake, because ultimately, even though he went along with the report, he renounced it in the Washington Post. He proved to be unreliable.

This time, I think they have decided to pick an entirely reliable person who they know will rule against Israel and who they know will persist in his anti-Israel bigotry that has infested him for many years now.

But this is not a court. This is not a fair process. Israel is put to the hard choice, of either co-operating with a tribunal it knows will come out against it, whose opinion has already been written, or not co-operating and then being blamed for not co-operating. It’s a difficult choice, and no country should ever be put to that choice. It’s unfair.

Do you think Israel does a good enough job making its case in the media when it’s confronting Hamas?

Israel does as good a job as possible under the circumstances. It’s a very daunting task. I know, because I experience it myself. I try to make the case on college campuses, in the media, and it’s very difficult when they skew the media against you.

When I go on some TV shows, it will often be three against one. I’m the only one expressing a pro-Israel point of view, and you’ll have three people expressing anti-Israel points of view.

Or you get “a balanced presentation,” where you get somebody who is anti-Israel and the person who is supposed to be pro-Israel is somebody like [American liberal Zionist] Peter Beinart. So you’re dealing with a stacked deck, and it’s very difficult, so I can’t always fault Israel. They’ve done a much better job in getting their information out in real time. The other difference between Israel and Hamas is that Israel has to tell the truth. Its credibility is always on the line and it’s a responsible government. Hamas can just put out lies.

Your book includes a very lengthy transcript of your debate with South African professor of international law John Dugard. What was your thinking in giving that much prominence to your conversation with him?

I think it was very important for readers to see how absurdly silly Dugard’s arguments were. He’s supposed to be Israel’s most distinguished critic and his arguments were total nonsense. I wanted them to speak for themselves.

Nobody can read that debate and come to the conclusion that Dugard put up a reasonably well-founded criticism of Israel. He just couldn’t answer points I was making. It turned out he knew very little about what was going on. And his view of international law is stilted and rigid, and clearly biased.

He repeatedly referred to Gaza as being under occupation. Is he using a different definition of occupation than the rest of us?

First of all, there is no conceivable argument that Gaza was under occupation from 2005 to 2007. Israel left. There were no troops, no settlements, no settlers, no police. They were totally free to become a Singapore on the Mediterranean. So they were totally unoccupied for two years and Dugard never responds to that point.

He says they’re occupied now. Well, first of all it’s perfectly appropriate to have a military occupation of a country you have defeated in war and that continues to battle against you. That’s the definition of an appropriate occupation.

Second, occupation is a matter of degree. There are no Israeli troops in Gaza. Yes, Israel controls the borders and that’s the right thing. Israel should control the borders, because Hamas uses the borders to bring in rockets and dig tunnels. So Israel is doing what any country would do when faced with comparable situations.

If people like Dugard and Beinart say that is a full-fledged occupation, what is the incentive for Israel for reducing the level of occupation and taking the vast majority of its soldiers out and all its settlers out [of the West Bank]? So they make the two-state solution even more difficult with that preposterous mis-definition of what is an occupation.

One more question about Dugard. He acknowledged that Hamas rockets were aimed indiscriminately at civilian targets, but he said the tunnels were used for military attacks only. What did you make of that?

He drinks the Kool-Aid. He buys the whole package. Anything that Hamas says, he agrees with. And Hamas has said that so far, they have only managed to capture soldiers. But the tunnel I was in, which was the stimulus for me writing the book, was just yards away from a kindergarten with 57 Israeli children and no significant military presence. Clearly the tunnel was designed to kill and kidnap as many Israelis as possible, civilian, military, whatever. But they’re still unlawful. It’s unlawful to kidnap a soldier and hold him the way Gilad Schalit was held, without access to the Red Cross, without prisoner of war status. They held him like the Mafia would hold a kidnap victim.

Dugard is wrong as a matter of fact and  he’s wrong as a matter of law.