WATCH: How Alan Dershowitz Beat BDS at the Oxford Union

Earlier this month at the famed Oxford Union debating society, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz prevailed in a showdown with U.K. human rights activist Peter Tatchell over the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. The official motion was “Is the BDS movement against Israel wrong?” and after over an hour of debate, Dershowitz emerged victorious by a vote of 137-101. It was a surprising outcome given the general hostility towards the Jewish state on European university campuses. Just last July, Britain’s own National Union of Students voted to boycott Israel. But Dershowitz’s victory becomes more explicable when one examines the arguments put forward by him and his interlocutor.

At the outset, the law professor did not offer a defense of particular Israeli policies, and noted that he opposed some of them, including settlements. Rather, Dershowitz argued that the BDS movement’s opposition to the Jewish state’s existence and the two-state solution put it beyond the pale.

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