Tag: John Mearsheimer

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.

The Israel Conspiracy…uh, Lobby

On By Martin Kramer

There is much ado today about “The Israel Lobby,” a long essay written by Stephen Walt of Harvard University and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and published in the London Review of Books. The bottom line is simple and familiar: the Israel lobby has taken over Washington. Within the academy, it’s the sort of thing that Juan Cole and Rashid Khalidi have been claiming all along, without getting any traction. And it’s what Walt himself argued in a few pages of his book, Taming American Power, which appeared last fall, and which also got very little traction.

This newest article, obviously the work of Walt more than Mearsheimer, cobbles together a lot of half-truths and untruths that have been out there on the far fringe, and gives them “academic respectability” (which, as I have shown time and again, is usually a contradiction in terms when it comes to the Middle East). In particular, the authors have put together an “unedited version,” in which the notes are as long as the text, and which carries the title of a Kennedy School of Government “Faculty Research Working Paper.” This is presumably intended to make the study appear even more “academic.” But it’s really a piece of journalistic sensationalism, reminiscent of the 1987 book The Lobby by Edward Tivnan. The Washington correspondent of Haaretz called the new article “academic garbage” in his blog this morning, and offered it as an example of “the decline of academic values and the misuse of academic titles by contemporary American pseudo-scholars.” That it is, but it’s got plenty of competition.

Back in the fall, a donor to Harvard asked me to counter Walt’s argument that Israel is a liability. So I wrote a short rebuttal, sent it off, and filed it away. I have no idea whether it went any further, or whether it reached Walt himself. But now seems a perfect moment to resurrect it, so here it is, just as I wrote it in October. It doesn’t address all the arguments made in the new essay, because Walt didn’t make all those arguments in his book. But it will do for now. It’s over at Sandstorm: click here.