Who’s the Underdog?

Back in November the Forward’s Naomi Zeveloff wrote a profile of Richard Falk the 80-year-old United Nations special rapporteur to the Palestinian territories and former Princeton University professor of international law. Written in the sympathetic faintly admiring tone that the paper reserves for those on the left it amounted to a whitewash of a prominent denizen of the political fringe. Understand that this is a fellow who has published a book critiquing the New York Times’ coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict — from the left — as well as an essay comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza with “the criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity.”

The piece opens with the controversy Falk sparked by posting a cartoon on his website that depicts a dog wearing a shirt labeled USA and a yarmulke with a Star of David and chewing on a pile of human bones while lifting his leg to relieve himself on Lady Justice. Falk later claimed he thought the yarmulke was a helmet. Writes Zeveloff:

[His 2008 appointment to his UN position] has heightened Falk‘s profile as a Jew who is highly critical of Israel and one … whose criticism carries the imprimatur of a UN legal fact-finding body. Falk is not as widely known as Richard Goldstone … [b]ut he is characterized in the same broad stroke by his online detractors many of whom refer to him as a “self-hating Jew.”

To call Falk a “self-hating Jew” however would imply that Falk harbors a deep discomfort with his Jewish identity and that this anguish manifests itself as anti-Semitism in his personal life and academic work. In reality Falk told the Forward his criticism of Israel is less a reflection of his Jewish identity than his posture as an American leftist perennially dedicated to history’s underdogs — in his eyes the Palestinians.…