Author: Martin Kramer

Ian Lustick says so

On By Martin Kramer

Professors of Middle Eastern studies say the damnest things, and I’m collecting their wackiest assessments of Hamas’ rise to power. Most of the so-called experts are at pains to suggest that the commitment of Hamas to its professed ideology is just show, and that the movement is really an improved strain of Palestinian nationalism, devoted to clean, accountable government.

But Ian Lustick, the Bess W. Heyman Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, goes even further in an interview with the Voice of America. Here is the key quote:

If you go back to the beginning, the Palestinians and Zionists had completely contradictory ideas. The Zionists had the idea that all of Palestine would be a Jewish state and the Palestinian Arabs had the idea that there would be no Jewish presence at all. Now, the center of gravity inside the Israeli political system is that there will be a Palestinian state. And Hamas is mainly popular because one of the things it is trusted to do is probably be ready to live with Israel, even if not officially, for a very long time.

Do you get that? Hamas isn’t just going to adjust to Israel by force of circumstance, as many analysts argue. According to Lustick, Palestinians elected Hamas precisely because it’s ready to live with Israel! It represents, on the Palestinian side, a parallel to the Israeli acceptance of a Palestinian state.

For Lustick, it’s just a matter of time before Hamas reveals itself to the rest of us. Hamas, he says, doesn’t want negotiations–for now. “But they do want a period of calm and they are manifestly able to enforce that calm. So there is a logical deal in which Israel and a Hamas Palestinian Authority wait, a year or two, before any serious negotiations and each of them moves slowly toward it.” Of course, how logical! Isn’t it obvious? In a couple of years, we’ll have “serious negotiations.” The “peace process” is alive! If the United States and Israel fail to seize the opportunity–well, we’ll all know where to lay the blame.

But gee, I’m really confused. Here I’ve got this piece by Steven Erlanger, New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem, who almost persuaded me that “the ‘peace process’ is effectively dead…. A long, hostile quiet may be possible. Israelis and Palestinians may pursue parallel unilateralisms. But serious negotiations on a peace settlement? Very unlikely.” Whom do I believe? Logical Lustick? Or ear-to-the-ground Erlanger?

Ian, I so want to believe your message of hope! It’s just that the last time I noticed you, you were on a rant about the neo-con “cabal” foisting the Iraq war on America. Then you were signing a bizarre petition against Ariel Sharon’s supposed secret plan to expel the Palestinians under the cover of an Iraq war. I’m confused, too, by all these contradictory statements coming from Hamas leaders. So I await your fuller, deeper, theoretically sophisticated, empirically-based analysis.

Ian Lustick will speak on “Israel and Hamas: Ways Forward” tonite, Monday, March 27, 6:00 pm, at the University of Pennsylvania, Jon M. Huntsman Hall, Room F95, 38th and Walnut Streets. Refreshments will be served.

Hey, where’s my footnote?

On By Martin Kramer

I’m disappointed with the short shrift I got in “The Israel Lobby” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. I’m mentioned, but in error:

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, for example, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neoconservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged studies to report comments or behavior that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars prompted a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites studies to report alleged anti-Israel behavior at U.S. colleges.

As Pipes has pointed out in a correction, “Martin Kramer had no role in founding Campus Watch.” I also clarified that fact when Pipes launched his site, since some people openly assumed I had to be behind it. (I did endorse Campus Watch, and still think all the whining about it is just so much… whining.) I guess Mearsheimer and Walt didn’t do their homework, or relied on sloppy grad students to do their “research.” (It’s a Harvard tradition.)

But surely I deserve condemnation for my book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America? The Washington Institute for Near East Policy published it a year before Campus Watch. “The Israel Lobby” is loaded with fat footnotes, many of them referencing journalistic junk, so it would have raised the overall level to have cited my book. Well, I take some comfort in the fact that it’s just a working paper, so maybe they’ll fix the mistake and rectify the omission. I’ll have the publisher send them copies with this entry.

P.S. to John and Steve: I am a sorry excuse for a neoconservative.

Addendum: The Campus Watch error is repeated in an otherwise sensible article by French analyst Justin Vaïsse in Libération. Sloppy.

Update: Justin Vaïsse has had the error noted and corrected in the online article. I am grateful to him.

John Mearsheimer: the man who knew too little

On By Martin Kramer

Yesterday, another blogger turned up a telling tidbit about University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer, the co-author (with Stephen Walt) of “The Israel Lobby.” A couple of years back, he signed the most ludicrous anti-Israel petition of them all.

In late 2002 and early 2003, a group of far-out professors of Middle Eastern studies peddled a petition warning that Israel might ethnically cleanse Palestinians under the cover of an Iraq war. “We urge our government to communicate clearly to the government of Israel that the expulsion of people according to race, religion or nationality would constitute crimes against humanity and will not be tolerated.” This is what I wrote at the time (December 2002):

The claim that Israel is plotting the mass explusion of Palestinians is one more lunatic-fringe conspiracy theory, hatched by Palestinian propagandists who want “international protection” as the wage for their two disastrous years of insurrection. Unfortunately for them, Israel has done nothing that constitutes a “crime against humanity,” and so Palestinians have had to fabricate one that never happened (Jenin) and cry wolf over another one that won’t happen (forced “transfer”). Let me not put too fine a point on it: anyone signing this letter, effectively condemning Israel in advance for something it has no intention of doing, is either an ignoramus or a propagandist.

About a thousand academics did sign the letter, including Noam Chomsky and Edward Said. The expulsion obviously never took place, and I revisited the petition after the war. I wrote that the signatories “are now collectively in the moral position of owing apologies to the Israeli people and the Israeli government–of Ariel Sharon.”

Not only did Mearsheimer sign the petition; he defended it to the Chicago Maroon, the campus newspaper. “The precedent is there [to expel Palestinians], and it behooves us to make sure it does not happen again,” he said. “Expulsion of the Palestinians is often discussed [in Israel] as a solution to this conflict between democracy and demography.” Only someone entirely ignorant of contemporary Israeli politics and the U.S.-Israeli relationship could have uttered these words. Indeed, to believe them, you would have had to have slept through the Kuwait war, when Israel scrupulously sat on its hands in deference to the United States. Anyone who thought Israel would or could have done otherwise in 2003, is someone who’ll believe anything about Israel.

In “The Israel Lobby,” the authors do believe anything. But it’s interesting that the new essay entirely omits the expulsion of Palestinians as one of Israel’s reasons for supporting the Iraq war. I don’t expect the likes of Mearsheimer to make apologies, but it would have been a great opportunity to explain why he got it completely wrong, since it’s not a fine point for someone who purports to be a rigorous thinker. Alas, Mearsheimer seems to have conveniently forgotten it, along with all the other evidence that doesn’t conform to his (and Walt’s) thesis.

In an interview that knows no rival for sheer egosim, Mearsheimer has said this: “I think what my parents taught me was to be very honest, to be what they used to call a ‘truth-teller.'” And this, again: “West Point taught me to tell the truth. It placed a very high emphasis on saying things that might go against the conventional wisdom, that people might not want to hear, just because it was the truth.” But to tell the truth, one must first discern it. When it comes to Israel, Professor John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and high priest of the “realist” cult, just doesn’t know enough to tell the truth. He might have suspected that from his earlier mistake. Now he’s learning the lesson–the hard way.