Harvard Takes On the Israel Lobby

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted April 4, 2006.

A few weeks ago two scholars published a study that might have languished in the obscurity of academia.

But the paper was about the impact that the "Israel Lobby" -- which the authors characterized as a loose confederation of like-minded individuals and groups -- has on U.S. policy in the Middle East. So, predictably, it set off a nice little firestorm with accusations of anti-Semitism flying around our most hallowed Ivy League colleges and members of Congress discussing how to respond to the study's "charges."

"The Israel Lobby," by political scientists Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, offered nothing new to the debate about U.S. policy toward the Middle East. The authors established no groundbreaking facts and unearthed no shocking original documents that could change the course of historical understanding.

As Walt and Mearsheimer noted, only their conclusion -- that the Israel Lobby's unprecedented success has shifted U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East away from a narrow focus on America's national interests -- is controversial, and then only by a matter of degree. The data from which they drew that conclusion came largely from Israeli academics and journalists and, as the authors point out, "are not in serious dispute among scholars."

What was interesting about the paper was its authorship and the reaction it elicited from Israel's many U.S. supporters. Those supporters inadvertently proved Walt and Mearsheimer correct on at least one point: the Israel Lobby doesn't tolerate debate about the relationship between the United States and its favorite client state, and it's quick to accuse dissenters of having the vilest of intent.

The New York Sun -- known as a mouthpiece for neoconservatism -- ran six articles about the paper the week it was released. Two were on the front page, above the fold. The first was headlined "David Duke Claims to Be Vindicated by a Harvard Dean" (Walt is the academic dean at the Kennedy School). According to the Sun, "Duke, a former Louisiana state legislator and one-time Ku Klux Klan leader, called the paper 'a great step forward.'" Later in the article -- below the fold -- Duke admits that he hadn't actually read the study.

The guilt-by-association didn't end with Duke -- although he made appearances in a number of other articles about the study, including one in the Washington Post. Terrorists, apparently, also endorsed it: "The Palestine Liberation Organization mission to Washington is distributing the paper, which also is being hailed by a senior member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization," according to the Sun.

The Sun's second hit piece quoted two Harvard professors who are "publicly supportive of Israel" and Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., who conceded that the "'dishonest so-called intellectuals' who wrote the paper are 'entitled to their stupidity'" but insisted that it was a matter of common decency "to expose them for being the anti-Semites they are."

That statement alone illustrates one of Walt and Mearsheimer's main points beautifully: "No discussion of how the Lobby operates," they wrote, "would be complete without examining one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-Semitism In fact, anyone who says that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism, even though the Israeli media themselves refer to America's 'Jewish Lobby.'"

Alan Dershowitz, who fought to get the University of California Press to kill an academic critique of his book "The Case for Israel" (in which he's accused of shoddy research and plagiarism), said the paper was "simply a compilation of hateful paragraphs lifted from other sources and given academic imprimatur." His evidence? Apparently Walt and Mearsheimer used a quote -- from former Time editor Max Frankel's memoir -- that also appeared on some white supremacist website. Dershowitz, without evidence, dismissed the idea that the scholars could have gotten the quote from anywhere but the white power hate sites, bloviating: "[Walt] quotes Max Frankel, as if he read the whole 500 pages of Max Frankel? I promise you they did not read Max Frankel's whole book."

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.