Dershowitz beats BDS at Oxford Union
THE OXFORD Union has backed prominent American lawyer Professor Alan Dershowitz in opposing the boycott of Israel.
The debate was entitled, “Is the BDS movement against Israel wrong?”, and the case against BDS was backed by 137 votes to 101 at the prestigious debating society on Sunday.
Prof Dershowitz, who spoke against human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, told the union: “I am pro-Palestine and pro-Israel. The BDS movement is against the two-state solution.” He added: “BDS is based on bigotry. If Israel was not the nation state of the Jewish people, then this debate wouldn’t be happening today.
“BDS will absolutely not bring peace. If the BDS movement is desirous of peace, then why will its leaders not debate with me?”
At a separate meeting in London this week, Prof Dershowitz explained that he had exposed “what the BDS is really all about”.
He said: “I didn’t win because of superior debating skills. I won because I was on the right side.”
In conversation with Baroness Deech at the Zionist Federation’s Balfour Lecture on Tuesday, Prof Dershowitz said that the true position of the BDS movement was that there was no place for a nation state for Jews in the Middle East.
BDS was a barrier to peace, he told the audience at the British Library, in central London. One of its effects was to “disincentivise” the Palestinians from coming to the bargaining table. It sent the false message that a Palestinian state could be achieved without the need for compromise and negotiation with the Israelis.
The professor said he could not imagine a better time for “Israel to take the initiative and make a generous peace offer to the Palestinian Authority”.
He said: “If Israel could manage to make a peace consistent with it security, imagine how much stronger its alliance with the Emirates, with Saudi Arabia, with the Gulf countries would be, because they have a common enemy in Iran.
“Israel’s strategic needs today push it towards a negotiated peace; it needs a partner to make peace with, but the dynamics aren’t in place.”