Dennis Prager sent a challenge to Alan Dershowitz yesterday about his politics, not because Dershowitz wrote something with which Prager disagrees, but because he understands the issue of Israel so well.  After excoriating Israel’s critics for “moral idiocy” for ignoring the genocidal intent of Hamas, and their insipid arguments of proportionality, Prager thinks Dershowitz should reconsider his entire political bent — or at least the company he chooses:

In his Monitor column, Dershowitz describes “three types of international response to the Israeli military actions against the Hamas rockets” — “Iran, Hamas, and other knee-jerk Israeli-bashers,” “the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, and others who, at least when it comes to Israel, see a moral and legal equivalence between terrorists who target civilians and a democracy that responds by targeting the terrorists,” and “the United States and a few other nations that place the blame squarely on Hamas.”

It is relevant to the question I will pose that he omits any mention of the world’s left, even when mentioning the European Union. Who exactly in the European Union is condemning Israel? Its conservatives? Who in America is condemning Israel? Conservatives? Who in Australia or Canada? Conservatives? Of course not. As regards Israel (and America and much else), the Western world’s moral idiots, to use the term in the title of the Dershowitz column, are virtually all on the left, including and especially many of his colleagues in academia.

So, I have a question for my friend Dershowitz. (I say ‘friend’ because we’ve known each other for years and debated and dialogued together.)

Given that Israel’s security is so important to you, given that you believe that the ability to morally distinguish between Israel and its enemies is tantamount to the ability to distinguish between good and evil, and given that those who condemn Israel for its “disproportionate” response to Hamas terror-rockets are almost all on the left in America and Europe, why do you continue to identify yourself as a man of the left?

Everyone who thinks sometimes differs with one’s ideological compatriots. But when one’s ideological compatriots are morally wrong on the greatest moral issue of the moment and perhaps the very clearest as well, don’t you at least suffer from cognitive dissonance?

Prager notes that Dershowitz seems to go far out of his way to avoid blaming the Left specifically.  Dershowitz doesn’t even mention that most of these critics come from the Left, and tries to put at least half of the blame on “the extreme Right”, helped no doubt by people like Ron Paul.  However, the Ron Paul isolationist absolutists (and Stormfront allies) only comprise a tiny percentage of the people holding rallies on campuses and in metropolitan areas.  Those arguments mainly come from groups like International ANSWER, World Can’t Wait, and other radical Left groups that combine animus for Israel with animus for the US.

However, Prager seems to fall into the same trap that Republicans did with Joe Lieberman, who took a similarly courageous stand against his political allies to support victory in Iraq.  I’d call Lieberman a hero for that effort, sacrificing his political standing and almost losing his seat rather than surrendering to his party’s insistence on exploiting potential defeat for political gain.  But I wouldn’t call Lieberman a conservative, or even a center-right politician, even when he got the one critical issue correct.  Lieberman is a solid and unapologetic liberal, unlike Zell Miller, for instance, whose basic center-right instincts got short shrift from Democrats.

Dershowitz has remained strong in his support for a war on Islamist terrorists and for Israel.  He hasn’t quite remained strong enough to name names properly when excoriating critics for their moral idiocy, which Prager rightly criticizes.  However, overall Dershowitz is a doctrinaire liberal, and unless his allies abandon him like Lieberman’s party did when Lieberman stuck to his principles, Dershowitz will unfortunately remain more comfortable with the Left than the Right … and vice versa.

I’d be reasonably happy if Dershowitz skipped embracing conservatives while continuing to dismantle the Left’s attacks on Israel and their support for genocidal tyranny with Hamas.