Of all the emotions I thought Alan Dershowitz’s The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies would generate, the last I expected was sympathy for Donald Trump. Not once have I pitied the two-time president. But after reading Dershowitz’s convoluted and self-contradictory defense of Zionist Israel, I understood what it felt like to stand on the debate stage across from the senile Joe Biden. Here I was, eager to dispute Dershowitz’s apologia, only to find my opponent was a dotard, unable to muster a coherent argument, whose best days are behind him.

It feels unfair to ridicule an eighty-six-year-old. But the Zionist project has no reservations about propping up the ghost of Dershowitz, so why should I have qualms about tearing him down?

Every chapter of The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies centers on an “accusation” against Israel, which Dershowitz refutes with a “reality” that has more qualifiers than the Olympics. (“Israel has done more to protect the civilians than any nation that has fought terrorists who use their civilians as human shields to protect their combatants.”) Dershowitz put his effort into a few select arguments and phoned in the rest, with the most attention given to arguing that Israel is “the opposite of a colonist imperialist state.”

A standard Zionist defense, Dershowitz claims Israel is not settler colonialism because Jewish Israelis are indigenous to the area. He writes, “Those who claim Jewish refugees who immigrated to Palestine in the 19th century were ‘tools’ of European imperialism must answer, ‘For [which country] were they working?’”

This was answered by Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. In his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat, Herzl wrote:

We [Zionists] should form a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should, as a neutral State, remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence. The sanctuaries of Christendom would be safeguarded by assigning them an extra-territorial status well-known to the law of nations. We should form a guard of honor about these sanctuaries, answering for the fulfillment of this duty with our existence.

Unfortunately for modern Zionists, Herzl went further than explaining how Israel would “safeguard” Christendom. He explicitly sold Zionism to the British Empire as a colonial project, writing, “The idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea, should be easily and quickly understood in England.”

This imperial pact was codified with the Balfour Declaration, in which the British pledged support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” In the mid-twentieth century, the United States replaced Britain as Zionism’s parent state. In a 2017 speech — aboard the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush, lest anyone not make the linkage based on his words alone — Netanyahu reinforced that modern Israel is a tool of American imperialism, stating: “We are here on a mighty aircraft carrier of the United States. A few miles from here, there is another mighty aircraft carrier of our common civilization — it’s called the State of Israel.”

In the Zionists’ own words, Israel began as and remains a tool of Western imperialism.

On the question of Palestinian statehood, Dershowitz echoes Bill Clinton, arguing the Palestinians are at fault for “rejecting” offers from Israel. He cites the partition of Palestine (1947), the Oslo Accords (1993), the Taba Summit (2001), and the Annapolis Conference (2007). What Zionists frequently omit from this claim is that these were not offers of Palestinian statehood but codifications of second-class status.

It’s absurd to blame Palestinians for the failed 1947 UN Partition Plan, as Zionist militias were cleansing them from modern Israel before the state was even formed. The 1993 Oslo Accords went out of its way to deny a Palestinian state, offering only a “Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority.” Mentioning Taba (2001) is proof of Dershowitz’s bad faith, as the summit “ran out of time” before the Israeli elections.

After Likud candidate Ariel Sharon won the prime ministership, he ceased negotiations. The Annapolis Conference is considered a joke by all sides, as all three participating leaders (George W. Bush, Mahmoud Abbas, and Ehud Olmert) were vastly unpopular and looking to salvage their reputations, not make a genuine attempt at peace.

But even if Dershowitz’s claim that the Palestinians of yesteryear had turned down a fair offer of statehood was true, it is irrelevant. Like many of Dershowitz’s arguments (“Refugees are the fault of Arab nations,” “the Occupation of the West Bank is Jordan’s fault”), he uses distant examples to excuse modern war crimes. Even if twentieth-century Palestinian leaders rejected statehood, that doesn’t give Israel the right to bomb a hospital in 2025. He handwaves away the right of return and excuses modern apartheid by blaming “the Arabs” for the modern conflict, as if a starving Palestinian and a Saudi monarch share interests.

Like its author, the book withers in substance the further it continues. Dershowitz claims Israel isn’t starving Palestinians, as “there have been no reported deaths of starvation,” which, as Tim Barker put it, is like saying the Nazis didn’t use gas chambers because Anne Frank died of typhus, not Zyklon B. The chapter on West Bank occupation is less than two pages long, has no citations, and claims “the laws of war” allow for occupation. This is the exact opposite of what international law says, as the United Nations has repeatedly reaffirmed Palestinians’ right to armed struggle against Israeli occupiers.

Ironically, Dershowitz concludes by stating that Israel is not stopping a “two-state solution.” Much like Dershowitz, the two-state solution is a shell of itself, an ancient relic appealing to past fallacies propped up by those with nothing of substance to offer in the modern moment. Objectively, the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is a single state controlled by Israel, with residents’ rights determined by their race, religion, and place of birth. I, a person with no ancestral claim to the land, could convert to Judaism and be fast-tracked for Israeli citizenship, while Palestinians born in occupied East Jerusalem are having their residency revoked and are being stripped of citizenry.

This is the reality of Israel, which apartheid apologists like Dershowitz try to obscure with distractions. While I poke fun at Dershowitz’s advanced age, the truth is, as I read, I realized a pamphlet from a younger, wittier Zionist would have been equally childish. That’s because the scatterbrained, racist arguments in The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies are not unique to Dershowitz. They are the nature of hasbara, Israel’s unique propaganda. Coined by Zionist activist Nahum Sokolow, hasbara “seeks to explain Israel’s actions, whether or not they are justified.”

That is the true intent of The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies. It’s not a good-faith attempt to argue that Israel is just, but an attempt to “explain away” Israel’s unspeakable acts. It muddies the discourse with self-contradictory, racist platitudes that kick up so much dust that we can’t find the latest mass grave. When we finally uncover it, Dershowitz and company will “explain” it away, repeating the cycle until the last Palestinian has been cleansed from their home. To pull off this kind of obfuscation, Dershowitz doesn’t need to be at his sharpest — just his most shameless.