Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who is often criticised as being too right-wing in his support for Israeli policies, spoke at Stanford University last week. The focus of his lecture was the deterioration of dialogue on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly on college campuses, where he said “name-calling, dehumanization, [and] polemics” had replaced legitimate debate.

“That’s not at all conducive to peace. All I’m doing today is calling for nuance. I’m calling for an improvement in the debate.”

Through a 50-minute speech and 40-minute question-and-answer session, Dershowitz offered a measured criticism of Israeli policy while strongly arguing that the Jewish state was being unfairly singled out for criticism among its neighbors in the region.

In his lecture, Dershowitz was especially pointed in his disdain for campus divestment campaigns, including the recent failed proposal at Stanford. The professor argued that these campaigns were “filled with ignorance” and were merely venues for students to propagate misinformation about the situation in the Middle East.

“They serve no purpose at all but simplify the problem,” he said. “Stanford will not divest from Israel. It’s too smart. It knows it’s not in its economic self-interest. It’s also immoral, and Stanford is a moral institution.”

While Dershowitz spoke to a half-full auditorium, and offered criticism of the treatments by Arabs in Israel — “very unsatisfactory, improving considerably, but not nearly improving enough” — his visit nevertheless did draw protest.

His visit prompted a protest by eight students affiliated with Amnesty International, who claimed that Dershowitz supports legal exceptions for torture. The students were dressed in orange jump suits and had trash bags pulled over their heads. For about 30 minutes, they sat in a line on the stairs of Memorial Auditorium with their heads pointed toward the ground while three Amnesty volunteers handed out flyers.

In his speech Dershowitz said that he does not support torture, but he does believe that if torture is going to happen it must happen in a transparent and verifiable matter.

“In principle, killing one terrorist to save lots of lives is a tradeoff worth making,” he said. “Don’t confuse my descriptive statement that torture is occurring with a normative statement that torture should occur.”