On March 4, 2019, Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, the former head of the Reform movement in the United States and now a perennial critic of Israel, published a highly personal attack on me for raising legal concerns about the attorney general's decision to indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He characterized my legal views as "ludicrous, pitiful, conspiratorial" and "a joke." Yoffie is not a lawyer and his arguments reflect an abysmal lack of knowledge about the law and civil liberties. But I am writing this op-ed not to defend my nuanced legal analysis against his criticisms. I invite readers to judge for themselves by comparing my article to his. I write to expose Yoffie's hidden biases and bigotry. I write in this venue because Haaretz, which published Yoffie's attack, refused to allow me to respond unless I cut the heart out of my response, which I refused to do.
Yoffie's ad hominen screed against me for criticizing the proposed Netanyahu indictment was part of a long history about which Yoffie was deliberately deceptive. Yoffie distorted reality when he claimed that I used to be a "hero" to him. He has been leveling ad hominen criticism against me for nearly a quarter of a century. In a McCarthyite attack in the mid-1990s, he accused me of being "un-Jewish" for even representing O.J. Simpson. I had to remind this rabbi of Abraham's defense of the sinners of Sodom and of John Adam's defense of the British soldiers accused of the Boston Massacre. When I was invited to give a lecture at Hebrew Union College about Jewish law and the defense of the guilty, he refused to attend. He also refused to meet with me at the invitation of a prominent rabbi to discuss our differences. I have been attacking him as well for the hypercritical and hypocritical double standard he has long applied to Israel. It is fair to say that we have been ideological and personal enemies for many years. Yet he deliberately hid his bias against me by claiming I was a hero to him.
Continuing his ad hominen, he invoked an anti-Semitic trope against me, namely that my criticism of the indictment against Netanyahu must be motivated by Sheldon Adelson's money. If Congresswoman Ilhan Omar had made such a statement, there would be hell to pay. I can assure you that although I have represented [Adelson's] Sands Hotel in several litigation matters, I have never discussed the Netanyahu indictment with Adelson, nor would I ever compromise my principles for money. Shame on Yoffie for suggesting that "there is no precise way to measure Adelson's influence on Dershowitz."
Yoffie then accused me of "jumping into the political cesspool that Bibi created for himself." I am a liberal Democrat who votes for liberals in the United States. I am also a liberal when it comes to Israel, supporting the two-state solution and opposing Israel's settlement policies. I do not take positions on Israeli elections. I do support the rule of law and an expansive view of free speech and media rights. In another McCarthyite attack, Yoffie said I couldn't possibly be a liberal because I sometimes appear on Fox News. (I also appear on MSNBC, ABC, NBC and other networks.) I always present my liberal views and am not caught up in what he calls "the pernicious culture of Fox News."
When Yoffie finally got beyond his personal attacks on me and touched on the merits of my legal positions, he distorted them beyond recognition, substituting insults – ludicrous, pitiful, conspiratorial, joke – for logic and facts. If readers want to know what I have actually argued about the law, I urge them to go back and read the numerous articles I have written over the years about the Netanyahu investigations and indictment. Even Yoffie admitted that I made "reasonable points about the dangers that the proposed indictment poses to freedom of the press." But then he ignored these points and proceeded to level yet another ad hominen attack, this time at Adelson for creating a newspaper that competes with paid newspapers by distributing it free. He falsely claimed that Adelson had "done more than anyone to undermine freedom of the press in Israel." He never explained this absurd and counterfactual ad hominen.
Finally, he falsely claimed that I had accused the attorney general and others of being part of a "deep state" conspiracy to "topple the elected leader for their own purposes." I have never made such a claim. To the contrary, I have praised the attorney general, who I have known for years and admire. I simply think he is making a well-intentioned mistake by alleging, for the first time in the history of Western democracies, that a politician, by seeking to increase good coverage or decrease bad coverage, has committed an element of the crime of bribery. The dangers of such a view should be apparent to all objective democracy-loving people.
Shame on Yoffie for getting into the gutter and for hiding his long-term biases against me. I am not hiding my bias: I have never liked Yoffie from the time he was the head of the Reform movement until now. I wish he had been as honest in disclosing his bias.
The Adelson family owns the company that is the primary shareholder in Israel Hayom.
