Alan Dershowitz outlines Gaza redevelopment proposal at Palm Beach antisemitism event

Prominent attorney Alan Dershowitz praised President Donald Trump's efforts to develop a plan for rebuilding Gaza during an appearance in Palm Beach Wednesday, but he stopped short of endorsing Trump's proposal to transform the territory into a resort destination and relocate its 2.1 million residents.

Speaking to 300 guests as part of the fourth annual Palm Beach Summit on Countering Antisemitism at the Four Seasons Resort, Dershowitz said he was thankful that Trump was willing to look "outside the box" in trying to find a rebuilding strategy for Gaza, though he hoped the president would consider other approaches.

"I applaud the president for coming up with new ideas," said Dershowitz, one of nearly two dozen community leaders, scholars and elected officials who spoke during Wednesday's summit, organized by Palm Beach Synagogue. "I hope he remains open-minded to variations of those ideas."

Dershowitz, who lives in Miami, has pitched his own Gaza rebuilding plan to members of the Trump administration, he told guests at the summit.

His plan, which he hopes would achieve "real peace" in the war-torn region, would relocate all Gaza residents to either the southern or northern half of the territory for approximately two years while the unoccupied portion is rebuilt.

During that time, Dershowitz said, crews would "completely clean out every single military base. You put concrete on the ground, you put electrodes all over, you make it impossible ever to rebuild the tunnel structure."

Once that work is complete, residents who "are not in any way associated with Hamas" would be readmitted to the restored part of Gaza while the remaining areas were being rebuilt.

The whole process would take about four years, Dershowitz said, though he's not "wedded" to the plan, or any rebuilding plan.

Ultimately, he said, peace is more significant than geography, noting the numerous times that Jews have been displaced throughout their history.

"I have a very strong view that place is not as important as peace," he said. "The place, the location, is not as important as life."

Dershowitz, a constitutional scholar, author and former Harvard Law School professor, touched on a variety of subjects during his 40-minute panel, titled "The New Antisemitism And What it Tells Us About The Future." Among them:

"Antisemitism is as old as recorded history, and maybe older than that. But antisemitism is brilliant, like viruses. It mutates. It figures out what the environment is, and then it goes after those elements of the environment that can most contribute to the hatred of antisemitism. So if you go back to, for example, the period of the beginning of Christianity, Jews killed Jesus. That was the beginning of antisemitism. Then Jews poisoned the wells because there was sickness in Europe. Then Jews were communists. Then Jews were fascists. Then Jews were this, Jews were that.

"Today, of course, there's a whole new vocabulary, and we've heard talk about that. And Jews are now guilty of the worst sins of the second quarter of the 21st century. The crimes, the sins of genocide, of apartheid, of being privileged, of violating the rules of intersectionality. There's a whole new vocabulary that has emerged, but it's the same, same, same. It just uses current language, which makes it very popular among young, impressionable college and university students."

"What is being taught today on college campuses as part of mainstream courses is the essence of antisemitism. Students are learning antisemitism in virtually every course, and in every lecture."

"Jews have survived. They have endured, as Mark Twain said in the last third of the 19th century. Every other civilization that was contemporaneous with Jewish civilization has disappeared off the face of the Earth. Jews have survived, and they've survived against all odds. They have used limited resources to achieve great results. There's an enormous amount of jealousy, but it has been a constant throughout history."

"First of all, don't criticize people who are, or who have been put in, impossible positions by Hamas terrorists. There's no good answer. Do you stop fighting Hamas and let them take over Gaza again, which would maybe have brought back some hostages earlier? No. But do you continue to fight Hamas, get as many hostages as possible? I refuse to criticize. People have to make these decisions."

Jodie Wagner is a journalist at the Palm Beach Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach her at jwagner@pbdailynews.com.