Author: Martin Kramer

For experts only

On By Martin Kramer

Stephen Peter Rosen and I are the co-conveners of a website and group weblog, Middle East Strategy at Harvard. We have posted the following announcement on that site. If you qualify, apply.

From the inception of this public website, we imagined that it would have a companion forum for the exchange of ideas among persons with a professional interest in U.S. strategy and foreign policy. We call that companion MESHNet. MESHNet is a members-only message board, ideal for hosting open and structured discussions. We plan to develop MESHNet as a place where established and budding experts can express views among their peers, and where we can quickly congregate to enlighten and update one another during the crises that inevitably punctuate the affairs of the Middle East.

MESHNet will be launched next Tuesday, April 1. If you think you might qualify for membership, we urge you to apply. Read more about MESHNet here, and apply here.

Esposito’s predictions, right and wrong

On By Martin Kramer

At Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH), John L. Esposito has revisited a prediction he made over five years ago, in the lead-up to the Iraq war. “Five years after a U.S. war with Iraq,” he wrote in November 2002, “it is likely that the Arab world will be less democratic than more and that anti-Americanism will be stronger rather than weaker.” (Read his 2002 prediction here, and his new MESH post here.) Below I reproduce a comment I offered on his post:

John Esposito was prescient to predict that the Iraq war would damage America’s standing in the eyes of Muslims. There are different measures of the damage, and the Gallup World Poll is just one of them. But it’s indisputably the case that the Iraq war represented a blow to U.S. prestige in Muslim public opinion.

Contrast this with the ideological view of Jimmy Carter: “Even among the populations of our former close friends in the region, Egypt and Jordan, less than 5 percent look favorably on the United States today. That’s not because we invaded Iraq; they hated Saddam. It is because we don’t do anything about the Palestinian plight.” Perhaps Esposito should send a copy of his new book to the sage from Plains, Georgia, inured though he may be to all evidence. Even the leading Palestinian intellectual in America, Rashid Khalidi, would concede Esposito’s point. “Iraq has changed everything,” he has written. “In Washington, a city obsessed with the present, it was easy to forget that as recently as a few years ago, the United States was not particularly disliked in the Middle East and that al-Qaeda was a tiny underground organization with almost no popular support.” In other words, the Iraq invasion did much more damage to U.S. standing than decades of U.S. support for Israel and its occupation of Palestinian territories. It’s an important point to remember, as people search for ways to restore U.S. prestige.

But on Esposito’s other key prediction, he missed the mark. It isn’t so that the Arab world is “less democratic” than it was on the eve of the Iraq war. According to Freedom House, one Arab country, Lebanon, made a full-category upward move in this period, from “not free” to “partly free.” There were significant improvements in the scores of Iraq (and, looking next door to the Arabs, Turkey), and mild improvements in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Yemen. Egypt, bucking the trend, went down a notch in civil liberties. Overall, the Arab Middle East looks more democratic today than it was before the Iraq war—to some extent, because of it.

Esposito was at least partly wrong on another score. In 2002, he wrote that the United States “will want compliant allies and governments in the Arab world—and will fear open elections that might bring Islamist enemies to power. As a result, the United States will be forced, at the end of the day, to support strong, authoritarian governments that will rely on their security forces, political repression, and American aid.” In fact, in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, the United States promoted elections that empowered Islamist parties. True, the Bush administration has pulled back after witnessing the main consequence of its folly: the electoral legitimation of Hamas. But on balance, this administration has done more to empower Islamists than any of its predecessors.

Esposito deserves some credit there. As I once noted in a speech at Georgetown, many of the ideas that he championed in the 1990s made their way into administration thinking. These include the diversity of Islamism and its openness to moderation through inclusion in the political process. Both of these notions, I believe, are flawed, and my own criticism of Bush administration policy has focused precisely on their adoption as core policy assumptions. But John has had more of an influence on this administration than I have, so he really should give himself a pat on the back. He contributed his small share to the emergence of the string of Islamist principalities that now dot the Middle East—and that bedevil U.S. policy.

Confusion at Columbia

On By Martin Kramer

On Friday, the Columbia Spectator ran an article by its “news staff” under the headline: “Yiddish Prof Named Acting Director of Israel Institute After False Media Speculation.” The Yiddish professor is Jeremy Dauber, and the institute is the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Mazel tof to Professor Dauber.

The article adds the following:

Last week, the New York Sun reported that sociology professor Yinon Cohen was appointed permanent director of the institute. The article quoted several professors upset by Columbia’s decision to appoint Cohen, who signed a letter condemning Israel’s policies concerning 2002 military operations in Gaza. The Sun also wrote that it found the information about Cohen on a blog named Sandbox, written by academic Martin Kramer who obtained his master’s degree in history from Columbia in 1976.

[Columbia Vice President for Arts and Sciences Nicholas] Dirks said the Sun’s article was completely false. “I don’t know what the basis for the attack on Professor Cohen is,” he said.

Cohen came to Columbia in fall 2007 as a visiting professor from Tel Aviv University. While Cohen was never appointed director of any institute at Columbia, he recently received the endowed position of Yosef Haim Yerushalmi professor of Israel and Jewish studies—a name similar to that of the institute, which may have been the source of confusion.

The report leaves the vague impression that I contributed to that confusion.

In fact, my blog post made no mention of the Institute. I accurately related that Yinon Cohen had been appointed to the chair of Israel studies first announced in 2005—an endowed chair whose incumbent was recruited by a search committee that included Palestinian activist professors Rashid Khalidi and Lila Abu-Lughod. I’ve followed the fortunes of the chair since 2005, because of the perverse composition of its search committee.

In the academy, endowed professorships are commonly called chairs (the relevant example is here); these should never be confused with administrative chairs of departments or institutes. In the academy, there are people who hold chairs and do no administrative work, and people who are chairs and have time for little else.

The New York Sun subsequently and erroneously reported that Cohen had been appointed to the vacant directorship of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Its reporter apparently thought that if Cohen had been appointed to a chair, as I wrote, then he must be chairing an administrative unit, and it must be the Institute. The Sun runs another story this morning, by a different reporter, banishing the confusion.

That out of the way, the directorship of the Institute would seem to be a story worth following in its own right. On the Institute’s own website, there’s a page that hasn’t been updated, reporting this: “The institute is administered by a director and an associate director, currently professors Yosef H. Yerushalmi and Michael F. Stanislawski, respectively. Upon Professor Yerushalmi’s retirement, it is anticipated that Professor Stanislawski will become the director, and a new associate director will be appointed.” Yerushalmi retired, Stanislawski briefly took over, and then quit, leaving the Institute without a director. I wonder why.

Stanislawski, a professor of Jewish history, took to the stage of Columbia’s comic opera in 2005, when he appeared in the supporting role of fix-it man for the university’s president, Lee Bollinger. Stanislawski headed the search committee for the Israel studies chair, which put him in the ludicrous position of vouching for the Palestinian agitprofs. (Example: “Both Professor Khalidi and Professor Lughod will act totally professionally, whatever their political statements outside the classroom.”) He also wrote a letter to Commentary praising Bollinger as “a true and devoted friend of the state of Israel… and an avid and enthusiastic supporter of the expansion of Israel studies at Columbia.”

But a year later, following the first (failed) attempt by a Columbia dean to bring Iran’s President Ahmadinejad to campus, Stanislawski wrote an anguished private letter to Bollinger, asking this:

What possible enhancement of our collective or individual academic knowledge or understanding of the world’s situation would have been augmented by his speaking on campus? Anyone at Columbia who reads the newspapers or watches television already knows Ahmadinejad’s repugnant views all too well; this is not a question of free speech or stifled speech…. The question here, I would propose, is one of the deliberate invitation to campus not simply of a controversial figure, or even one with repugnant and absurd views, but of a purveyor of hate speech.

Of course, this plea had no long-term effect, because the following autumn Bollinger did allow Ahmadinejad to pollute the Columbia campus. In the ensuing fracas, New Republic editor Martin Peretz likened Stanislawski to a court Jew. All of this may or may not be relevant to why Stanislawski left a void at the top of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies—I have no way of knowing. Certainly the Institute’s tribulations seem like a worthy story for the Columbia Spectator or the New York Sun to unravel.

In the meantime, another egregious protest letter signed by Yinon Cohen has come to light. (Extract: “Academic faculty in the occupied territories! We wish to cooperate with you in opposing the brutal policy of siege, closure and curfew of the IDF.”) “We were happy and lucky to recruit professor Cohen,” Nicholas Dirks is quoted as saying in Friday’s Columbia Spectator. “He’s a terrific demographer.” Well, “terrific” is less than what was promised to the big-name donors of his chair. Originally, the Columbia Record reported that Columbia would “appoint a world-renowned scholar recognized by his or her peers as a preeminent figure in the field of modern Israel studies.” Whether Cohen is a “preeminent figure” is indeed a matter best left to his peers. But if the donors expected that Columbia would land anyone as “world-renowned” as, say, Benny Morris or Michael Oren—or, for that matter, Rashid Khalidi—then they have been thoroughly cheated.

Update, March 13: The Forward, doubtless inspired by this post, set out to discover why Stanislawski quit, and came up empty-handed. Here is the report, by Marissa Brostoff:

Professors at Columbia University have been mum over the abrupt resignation last month of Michael Stanislawski as director of the school’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, an umbrella for scholars anchored in other departments. Stanislawski declined to comment on his change in status at the institute…. Other professors at the institute, as well as the Columbia administration, declined to comment or said only that Stanislawski had resigned for personal reasons.

So the plot thickens.