Alan Dershowitz Image by Getty Images

By Josh Nathan-Kazis April 3, 2019

Alan Dershowitz told the Daily Beast Tuesday that he had consulted with top Trump Administration officials, including Jared Kushner and President Trump himself, about relations with Israel, and relations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

He said that he had argued to administration officials that the U.S. should recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, as the administration did last week. “I compared the Golan Heights to a captured battleship,” Dershowitz told the Daily Beast. “I said, ‘You don’t give back a battleship you’ve captured in a defensive war.”

Dershowitz said that administration officials regularly seek his advice on the administration’s Israeli-Palestinian peace proposal, which is not yet public. “I’m not privy to the specifics, the current specifics, but mostly it’s been one-way conversations—that is, they ask for my advice,” Dershowitz said. “They don’t tell me their secrets. They just ask me for my advice, and I give it to them.”

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The Forward reported in December 2017 that Trump’s decision to commute the prison sentence of Orthodox Jewish meatpacking executive Shalom Rubashkin came after Dershowitz brought up the case at the end of a meeting about the Middle East peace process.

Dershowitz, a Harvard Law professor emeritus, has emerged in recent years as a regular defender of Trump on cable news. He is the author of “The Case for Israel,” and a prominent pro-Israel voice in the U.S.

Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected] or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis

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