The Case Against Israel’s Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace, by Alan Dershowitz, published by Wiley.

The Jewish community is fortunate that Alan Dershowitz, renowned professor at Harvard Law School and one of America’s foremost appellate lawyers, is a strong, courageous, and passionate defender of the State of Israel. He is always cogent, lucid, knowledgeable and outspoken.

In his new book, The Case Against Israel’s Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace, he gets quickly to the heart of the matter with the following anecdote that concerns a talk he gave to a large audience at the University of California at Irvine. “I asked audience members how many of them would count themselves as generally pro-Israel. About a hundred or so students raised their hands. I then asked these pro-Israel students how many of them would favour a Palestinian state existing in peace alongside Israel. Every single one of them raised a hand.

“I next asked how many audience members counted themselves as supportive of the Palestinian side. A similar number raised their hands. I asked the pro-Palestine students how many of them would support a peaceful, non-expansionist Israel located beside a Palestinian state. Not a single person raised a hand.”

He challenges open-minded individuals to dispute the following propositions.

• If Israel’s military enemies – Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and other terrorist groups and nations – were to lay down their arms, stop firing rockets, stop sending suicide bombers and stop threatening to wipe Israel off the map, there would be peace.

• If Israel were to lay down arms, there would be genocide.

This is the sad reality that Israel’s enemies forget or ignore when they blame Israel for the current situation in the Middle East.

In disputing the arguments former U.S. president Jimmy Carter makes in his book Peace Not Apartheid, the author presents 20 pages of detailed refutation of Carter’s ideas. Sadly, he concludes that Carter is an enemy of a compromised peace, an inciter of Palestinian extremism and an apologist for those who would continue to employ terror in an effort to destroy the Jewish state.

This book includes chapters against the anti-Israel hard left and hard right, against Israel’s suicidal enemies as well as against Iran’s genocidal nuclear war program.

Dershowitz warns that armed with nuclear weapons and ruled by religious fanatics, Iran will become – if it is not already – the most dangerous nation in the world.  In addition to a suicidal nuclear exchange with Israel, there is a greater likelihood that it could hand over nuclear material to one of its terrorist surrogates or that some rogue elements could steal nuclear material.

Turning ironic, Dershowitz points out that Israel is the only country in the world that is accused by its enemies of practising apartheid without racism; of perpetrating a Holocaust without gas chambers, of engaging in genocide without mass murder; of committing war crimes without targeting civilians; and of being the worst human rights violator in the world while having one of the most responsive legal systems in the world.

Writes the author, “This is accusation by metaphor, prosecution by propaganda, trial by bigotry, guilt by hyperbole.

The author reminds us that the 1947-48 war, started by the Palestinians and the Arab nations, was a war of extermination conducted in part by Nazi war criminals intent on completing Hitler’s Final Solution. It resulted in an exchange of populations – 700,000 Palestinians left Israel under pressures of the war, and approximately the same number of Jews were forced to leave Arab countries and areas of Israel that were captured by the Arabs.

The Jewish state quickly settled the Jewish refugees, while the Arab states refused to settle the Palestinian refugees.

Verdict: buy this book and give copies to your friends and neighbours.