In this week’s issue, The Observer talked to Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor and maybe the staunchest defender of Israel on the planet, about a proposal for a boycott of Israeli goods at the Park Slope Food Co-op. In his typically brazen style, Mr. Dershowitz compared pro-boycott co-op members to bear-baiting-hating Puritans and vowed to shut the BroBo institution down if a boycott went through. “You have to fight fire with fire,” he said. Soy veyzmeir, but these were some of his tamer declarations.
To begin with, there is hypocrisy in the ranks of the co-op.
Any group that considers itself committed to human rights should be going after Syria, Zimbabwe, Iran, Cuba. It shows a perverse bigotry that more closely resembles apartheid than anything Israel has ever committed. So the people who are behind this boycott ought to understand they are on the wrong side of morality, the wrong side of history, and they’re on the wrong side of economics, because I assure them they will be out of business if they pull off this boycott.
They hate Israel. It’s not that they love Palestinians. You never see them advocating on the part of Kurds, you never see them campaigning on behalf of Armenians, on behalf of Chechnians. They don’t care about people who are oppressed, they only care about the alleged oppressors.
Should a boycott come to pass, who knows what disasters could beset the humble borough.
The next thing they’ll be doing is calling for an end to circumcision. And the first thing you have to do is have all these guys who are circumcized demand it back, go to the hospital, and have it sewn back on. That’ll make them complete pricks, instead of the pricks that they are, O.K.?
What pains Mr. Dershowitz as much as anything is, being a native son, this is happening in his own hometown, and he will not stand for it.
I have a particular interest in Brooklyn, because that’s where I’m from, and I will be there to make sure that the people who start this will pay a heavy price. We can’t allow good and decent people to think this is the right thing. This is the wrong thing.
And let’s be clear. It’s not happening in Brooklyn. It’s happening in what’s the neighborhood again? [The Observer: Park Slope] It’s happening in Park Slope, and Park Slope is not Brooklyn. That’s like San Francisco.
And The Observer thought Portland was bad.
