The Legal Beat

Alan Dershowitz Ponders Nominating Donald Trump For The Nobel Peace Prize
Posted on Monday November 30, 2020

(Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

While you were enjoying Thanksgiving dinner, Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz was toying with nominating Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s a remarkably poor idea, but you’ve got to hand it to Professor Dershowitz for consistently coming up with provocative topics for his call-in show.

The Abraham Accords normalized relations between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain. Unlike the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt or the Israel-Jordan Treaty — both of which involved settling relations between countries that had actively gone to war with each other — the Abraham Accords settled Israel’s relations with a pair of countries that had mostly sat on the sidelines of past conflicts. Hitting singles is important, but they give Peace Prizes to people who bash dingers.

And that’s a more charitable review than Israeli newspaper Haaretz gave the agreement that is — incredibly — touted by the Trump administration as a signature accomplishment.

The end result was a bunch of statements in support of global peace of the type normally made by winners of the Miss Universe pageant – which was once presided over by the same man who presided over these peace initiatives, U.S. President Donald Trump.

Bizarrely, Trump has already been nominated for the Peace Prize based on the Abraham Accords. Far right-wing Norwegian politician Christian Tybring-Gjedde has nominated Trump twice, most recently on the back of this agreement, and the committee found the nomination as specious as one might suspect.

But just because a proposition is demonstrably ill-considered doesn’t mean it’s not a great topic for a show! On that note, what’s on tap for the next Dershow:

See what I mean?

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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