If you're old enough to remember the day when Alan
Dershowitz popped in front of the television cameras and told the world about
his philosophy of life, you will not be surprised to see what he is saying now.
That day was the day when Dershowitz proudly cogitated
something to the effect that “you cannot blame Israel for doing what others
have done,” which was understood to mean that Israel had the right to do to the
Palestinians what anyone had done to someone anywhere in the world, at any time
since the beginning of time. And ever since that time, people everywhere have
amused themselves trying to decipher what you might call the Dershowellian
language of the modern era.
But what is he saying now that is so funky? Well, look it up
yourself. It is in the article he wrote under the title: “Obama's Mid-East
Legacy Is Tragic Failure,” published on January 13, 2017 on the Algemeiner
website. Here is the most hair-raising passage in that infamous text: “These
actions have disincentivized the Palestinian leadership from accepting the
Netanyahu offer.” The invented word here, that is key to understanding the
Orwellian principle underlying the Dershowitz philosophy, is “disincentivize.”
Okay, so we have a new word: disincentivize. But what does it mean in this
context or any context?
Well, here is an explanation that should be exhaustive
enough to clarify the point: To give someone an incentive for accepting an
offer is to “sweeten the pot” so to speak. That is, an incentive is a positive
addition to what is already on the table. It is meant to respond to the needs
and/or concerns of the party with whom you're negotiating ... expecting that
he'll respond in kind and do the same for you. It may only be a partial
response and not a full one, but that is how compromises are made, and how
final deals that both sides can live with, are ultimately forged. It all boils
down to what we call a win-win situation.
If now you turn that principle on its head and say that
sweetening the pot means removing the incentive which forces the other party to
negotiate on your terms, you automatically admit that what's on the table is
not a pot to be sweetened or not be sweetened. Rather, it is a situation that
is meant to force the other party to capitulate even before the negotiations
begin. That is, the setting you're describing is not one of commercial
negotiation or any kind of freely adopted negotiations; it is at best a
coercive setting if not one of criminal blackmail and the threat of military
assault.
In fact, that situation looks and feels like the setting
that's created by terrorists holding your children hostage in your house and
asking for a ransom to release them. If and when the police manage to free the
children, the terrorists complain that you have been disincentivized from
negotiating. That's because from the position of helplessness in which the
terrorists put you, the police made it possible for you to rise to a position
of rough equality with them. This being the case, you now find yourself able to
negotiate the modality of the terrorists vacating the house, perhaps in return
for a getaway car or another incentive that may appeal to them.
Look at it this way, my friend: When thugs create a hostage
situation, we call this condition hostage-taking or call it an act of
terrorism. When an entity that wants to be thought of as a nation engages in
this kind of behavior, we call the behavior state terrorism. When the entity
does it to an entire people and not just an individual or a handful of them, we
call this situation a holocaust.
That is what Israel
has been inflicting on the Palestinians for decades. It pretended to negotiate
peace while killing Palestinian children, and committing regular armed
robberies on Palestinian properties. The intent from the start has been to
ethnic cleanse what is left of Palestine
so as to annex it and make it Jewish property.
What Alan Dershowitz has done therefore, is justify in his
own mind, the idea behind the holocaust that Israel continues to inflict on the
Palestinians. But in so doing, he also legitimized the Holocaust that the Nazis
have inflicted on the Jews decades ago. And while setting this precedent – if
only on paper – he legitimized every holocaust that future madmen will want to
unleash on those who cannot defend themselves.