Walt and Mearsheimer in the Dock

Our good friends Walt and Mearsheimer have hit back in the London Review of Books, after a period of silence. As a public service for future fiskers, I will point out but some of the many flaws in their reasoning:

"At least two of the letters complain that we ‘catalogue Israel’s moral flaws’, while paying little attention to the shortcomings of other states. We focused on Israeli behaviour, not because we have any animus towards Israel, but because the United States gives it such high levels of material and diplomatic support. Our aim was to determine whether Israel merits this special treatment either because it is a unique strategic asset or because it behaves better than other countries do. We argued that neither argument is convincing: Israel’s strategic value has declined since the end of the Cold War and Israel does not behave significantly better than most other states." (emphases mine)

Benny Morris has already put paid to their one-sided study, which was mostly reliant on anti-Israel sources and quotes. People should immediately notice the logical flaw here - "we" focus on Israel's behaviour solely to see whether it was better than other states, then conclude that it doesn't, all without actually comparing Israel and other states in various categories (freedoms, laws etc.).

Dershowitz also claims that we quote David Ben-Gurion ‘out of context’ and thus misrepresented his views on the need to use force to build a Jewish state in all of Palestine. Dershowitz is wrong. As a number of Israeli historians have shown, Ben-Gurion made numerous statements about the need to use force (or the threat of overwhelming force) to create a Jewish state in all of Palestine. In October 1937, for example, he wrote to his son Amos that the future Jewish state would have an ‘outstanding army . . . so I am certain that we won’t be constrained from settling in the rest of the country, either by mutual agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbours, or by some other way’ (emphasis added). Furthermore, common sense says that there was no other way to achieve that goal, because the Palestinians were hardly likely to give up their homeland voluntarily. Ben-Gurion was a consummate strategist and he understood that it would be unwise for the Zionists to talk openly about the need for ‘brutal compulsion’. We quote a memorandum Ben-Gurion wrote prior to the Extraordinary Zionist Conference at the Biltmore Hotel in New York in May 1942. He wrote that ‘it is impossible to imagine general evacuation’ of the Arab population of Palestine ‘without compulsion, and brutal compulsion’. Dershowitz claims that Ben-Gurion’s subsequent statement – ‘we should in no way make it part of our programme’ – shows that he opposed the transfer of the Arab population and the ‘brutal compulsion’ it would entail. But Ben-Gurion was not rejecting this policy: he was simply noting that the Zionists should not openly proclaim it. Indeed, he said that they should not ‘discourage other people, British or American, who favour transfer from advocating this course, but we should in no way make it part of our programme’.

See Efraim Karsh and Joseph Heller for rebuttals to these charges. Check out Benny Morris also.

We provided a fully documented version of the paper so that readers could see for themselves that we used reputable sources.

I would hardly call The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, MERIP, Simha Flapan, Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein 'reputable sources'. The paper also relies excessively on journalistic material rather than academic (i.e. primary-source based) studies for many of its charges.

On a related point, Michael Szanto contrasts the US-Israeli relationship with the American military commitments to Western Europe, Japan and South Korea, to show that the United States has given substantial support to other states besides Israel (6 April). He does not mention, however, that these other relationships did not depend on strong domestic lobbies. The reason is simple: these countries did not need a lobby because close ties with each of them were in America’s strategic interest. By contrast, as Israel has become a strategic burden for the US, its American backers have had to work even harder to preserve the ‘special relationship’.

Perhaps it has occured to Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer that there are competing interests in the Middle East (as opposed to the above-mentioned cuntries where ther are no challenges to strategic interest), hence the need for a lobby for one of the sides? NOOO, it must be that we're a strategic burden....

Although we are not surprised by the hostility directed at us, we are still disappointed that more attention has not been paid to the substance of the piece.

Oh, plenty of attention has been directed at it, you just chose to ignore it.

Ladies and Gentelman, this is the level to which scholarship has sunk. You can swallow libels wholesale, invent consensuses where none exist, rely heavily on newspaper sources and non-academic diatribes, and contradict yourself repeatedly. All that is asked is that you attack Israel, and all will be forgiven. Propaganda may thus be paraded as scholarship, as long as it's for the right cause. It's official, the institution of the university has been destroyed, not by outside forces, but by its own hand. Pathetic.