The Belfer Declaration
I wish I could take credit for my clever headline. I can't, the highly-influential New York Sun came up with it, last spring, a week after the Walt-Mearsheimer paper on the Israel lobby was printed by the London Review of Books. The Sun was calling Belfer out, because he's a big philanthropist to Jewish causes and also funds the Belfer center at Harvard's Kennedy School; Stephen M. Walt, one of the authors of the Israel lobby paper, holds the Robert and Renee Belfer chair in international relations there.
The Sun reported that Belfer was not pleased by Walt's scholarship, and had made a call about it. At the time I believe Belfer had no public comment. But the Sun and others were pressing Belfer to renounce Walt, take back his money, make Walt sit on a cold metal folding chair instead of a Belfer, etc. There was also talk that Walt was being asked not to use Belfer's name in public statements on the Israel lobby. Indeed, when Walt and Mearsheimer's National Press Club event was organized by the Islamic group CAIR in late August, CAIR's press release identified them simply as professors.
Big deal. Walt still holds the Belfer chair at Harvard. It does not appear that Robert Belfer has forced him to revoke anything, or has taken his money back. I imagine there's been a lot of pressure on Steve Walt, professional and social, at Harvard, and I hope we will read that story one day in his and Mearsheimer's book for FSG. But Belfer, too, has been pressured; and I'm going to take things at face value and say, People have behaved in a sophisticated and mature way here, even members of the Loose Coalition of Affinity for Israel (formerly known as the Israel lobby). Props to Robert Belfer.
Harvard took their seal off the published paper, slapped on an oversized consumer warning that they don't necessarily agree with it, and allowed Alan Dershowitz to put up a hastily written attack piece. They have only taken these steps with one of the papers published by the Kennedy School of Government.
Robert Belfer demanded that Walt not use his official title in any publicity for the study. And although it may be unrelated, Walt lost his position as the academic dean of the Kennedy School ended shortly after the paper was published.
Are these the signs of a healthy academic environment? What was Phil Weiss expecting, that Walt would be shipped off to the gulag?
Here is the official Phil Weiss ( I hate the fact that I was born Jewish and won't rest until Israel is exterminated ) over under beting line. At least 9 out of every 10 columns will have some variation on the evil nefarious Jewish Lobby, the apartheid Zionist entity, or the general vulgarity of world Jewry. Not to mention the nobility and general peacefullness of the Palestinians specifically or the Arabs in general. And if they are violent in any way the Jews/Israeli nazis drove them to it. A maximum of one out of every ten columns will be on another topic. Even Julius Streicher took a break every now and then.
Well I for one don't find American society suffering from TOO MUCH discussion of the lobby. So I say bravo to Phil Weiss and all those brave enough to talk about it.
By the way, you seem to find the subject pretty interesting. ;)
Ingrid, Brave, you have got to be kiding. He gets plaudits for this in the circles he runs in. The evils of the LOBBY, that gets you free dinners in his milieu. You want brave, write about the Moslems. That takes courage because if they don't like what you write they'll come and burn down your house and kill your kids.
BP, you are a peddler of hate and fear.
The idea of people like you in a position to influence our country frightens me. It can't turn out well.
little phillie weiss keeps banging away at this, but the Walt/Mearsheimer paper has already been addressed intelligently;
fighting words: A wartime lexicon.
Overstating Jewish Power
Mearsheimer and Walt give too much credit to the Israeli lobby.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, March 27, 2006, at 1:47 PM ET
It's slightly hard to understand the fuss generated by the article on the Israeli lobby produced by the joint labors of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that was published in the London Review of Books. My guess is that the Harvard logo has something to do with it, but then I don't understand why the doings of that campus get so much media attention, either.
The essay itself, mostly a very average "realist" and centrist critique of the influence of Israel, contains much that is true and a little that is original. But what is original is not true and what is true is not original.
Everybody knows that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other Jewish organizations exert a vast influence over Middle East policy, especially on Capitol Hill. The influence is not as total, perhaps, as that exerted by Cuban exiles over Cuba policy, but it is an impressive demonstration of strength by an ethnic minority. Almost everybody also concedes that the Israeli occupation has been a moral and political catastrophe and has implicated the United States in a sordid and costly morass. I would have gone further than Mearsheimer and Walt and pointed up the role of Israel in supporting apartheid in South Africa, in providing arms and training for dictators in Congo and Guatemala, and helping reactionary circles in America do their dirty work?most notably during the Iran-Contra assault on the Constitution and in the emergence of the alliance between Likud and the Christian right. Counterarguments concerning Israel's help in the Cold War and in the region do not really outweigh these points.
However, Mearsheimer and Walt present the situation as one where the Jewish tail wags the American dog, and where the United States has gone to war in Iraq to gratify Ariel Sharon, and where the alliance between the two countries has brought down on us the wrath of Osama Bin Laden. This is partly misleading and partly creepy. If the Jewish stranglehold on policy has been so absolute since the days of Harry Truman, then what was Gen. Eisenhower thinking when, on the eve of an election 50 years ago, he peremptorily ordered Ben Gurion out of Sinai and Gaza on pain of canceling the sale of Israeli bonds? On the next occasion when Israel went to war with its neighbors, 11 years later, President Lyndon Johnson was much more lenient, but a strong motive of his policy (undetermined by Israel) was to win Jewish support for the war the "realists" were then waging in Vietnam. (He didn't get the support, except from Rabbi Meir Kahane.)
If it is Israel that decides on the deployment of American force, it seems odd that the first President Bush had to order them to stay out of the coalition to free Kuwait, and it is even more odd that the first order of neocon business has not been an attack on Iran, as Israeli hawks have been urging. Mearsheimer and Walt are especially weak on this point: They speak darkly about neocon and Israeli maneuvers in respect to Tehran today, but they entirely fail to explain why the main initiative against the mullahs has come from the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Authority, two organizations where the voice of the Jewish lobby is, to say the least, distinctly muted. Their theory does nothing to explain why it was French President Jacques Chirac who took the lead in isolating the death-squad regime of Assad's Syria (a government that Mearsheimer and Walt regard, for reasons of their own, as a force for stability).
As for the idea that Israel is the root cause of the emergence of al-Qaida: Where have these two gentlemen been? Bin Laden's gang emerged from a whole series of tough and reactionary battles in Central and Eastern Asia, from the war for a separate Muslim state in the Philippines to the fighting in Kashmir, the Uighur territories in China, and of course Afghanistan. There are hardly any Palestinians in its ranks, and its communiqué³ have been notable for how little they say about the Palestinian struggle. Bin Laden does not favor a Palestinian state; he simply regards the whole area of the former British Mandate as a part of the future caliphate. The right of the Palestinians to a state is a just demand in its own right, but anyone who imagines that its emergence would appease?or would have appeased?the forces of jihad is quite simply a fool. Is al-Qaida fomenting civil war in Nigeria or demanding the return of East Timor to Indonesia because its heart bleeds for the West Bank?
For purposes of contrast, let us look at two other regional allies of the United States. Both Turkey and Pakistan have been joined to the Pentagon hip since approximately the time of the emergence of the state of Israel, which coincided with the Truman Doctrine. Pakistan was, like Israel, cleaved from a former British territory. Since that time, both states have carried out appalling internal repression and even more appalling external aggression. Pakistan attempted a genocide in Bangladesh, with the support of Nixon and Kissinger, in 1971. It imposed the Taliban as its client in a quasi-occupation of Afghanistan. It continues to arm and train Bin Ladenists to infiltrate Indian-held Kashmir, and its promiscuity with nuclear materials exceeds anything Israel has tried with its stockpile at Dimona. Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and continues in illegal occupation of the northern third of the island, which has been forcibly cleansed of its Greek inhabitants. It continues to lie about its massacre of the Armenians. U.N. resolutions have had no impact on these instances of state terror and illegality in which the United States is also partially implicated.
But here's the thing: There is no Turkish or Pakistani ethnic "lobby" in America. And here's the other thing: There is no call for "disinvestment" in Turkey or Pakistan. We are not incessantly told that with these two friends we are partners in crime. Perhaps the Greek Cypriots and Indians are in error in refusing to fly civilian aircraft into skyscrapers. That might get the attention of the "realists." Or perhaps the affairs of two states, one secular Muslim and one created specifically in the name of Islam, do not possess the eternal fascination that attaches to the Jewish question.
There has been some disquiet expressed about Mearsheimer and Walt's over-fondness for Jewish name-dropping: their reiteration of the names Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, etc., as the neocon inner circle. Well, it would be stupid not to notice that a group of high-energy Jews has been playing a role in our foreign-policy debate for some time. The first occasion on which it had any significant influence (because, despite its tentacular influence, it lost the argument over removing Saddam Hussein in 1991) was in pressing the Clinton administration to intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo. These are the territories of Europe's oldest and largest Muslim minorities; they are oil-free and they do not in the least involve the state interest of Israel. Indeed, Sharon publicly opposed the intervention. One could not explain any of this from Mearsheimer and Walt's rhetoric about "the lobby."
Mearsheimer and Walt belong to that vapid school that essentially wishes that the war with jihadism had never started. Their wish is father to the thought that there must be some way, short of a fight, to get around this confrontation. Wishfulness has led them to seriously mischaracterize the origins of the problem and to produce an article that is redeemed from complete dullness and mediocrity only by being slightly but unmistakably smelly.
what denomination is "large"? where does this slang come from you poser, dipshit?
what difference does it make what someones father did for a living?
you are a sad, pussy, loser and make the Observer look like a BIG JOKE...
It's too bad the Observer doesn't have someone good covering the Middle East...
do thay realize the joke that they have on their hands???
It would be nice if we could call Chris Hitchens something sexy and adult sounding, like 'consigliere', but I'm afraid 'fifth wheel' is probably the more accurate term.
Ingrid, be intellectually honest. You take the opposite side of pro-Israel Jews in this country and your lauded for your "courage" your saluted in academia, and you probably get a book deal. All the while portraying yourself has a victim like you were called in front of HUAC in 1947.
But, piss off the Moslems and you risk a knife in the chest and you have to go into hiding after they issue a fatwa against you. Phil Weiss has issues with his own birth, you don't have to be a mental health professional to figure that one out. Last but not last. The new owner of this paper comes from a family that always supported Jewish causes. Yet the guy he has writing about this is a model of the anti semitic selh hating Jew. Although I would speculate that "Phil the Jew" is not married to a Jewish woman, does not have Jewish kids, is actually a secular atheist. And wouldn't know a minyan if he triped over one. So what exactly makes him a Jew besides an accident of birth is a mystery to me.
Good points Bill:
The so-called "intimidation" here seems to be a couple of people trying to disassociate themselves from an unscholarly piece of anti-Israel invective.
Now compare that with how Israel's critics enforce their point of view: We all remember Danny Pearl forced to declare himself a Jew before his head was cut off with a dull knife. And then there was Steve Centanni of Fox News - kidnapped in Gaza and forced at gunpoint to publicly convert to Islam. And lets not forget the bloody and violent Cartoon Jihad which forced CNN (among others) to run disclaimers about not offending Islam. And most recently the Pope - forced to apologize under threats of murder.
Now don't get me wrong. I don't think journalists or academics LIKE having their anti-semitic biases exposed, whether by the ADL or Dershowitz or some other insightful critic. But it doesn't leave them shaking in mortal fear. What does is the thought of winding up face down in the street with a knife in their chest like Theo Van Gogh, or having a Fatwah issued against them like Salmon Rushdie . And that is why media cowards (Weiss included) always take the Islamist point of view and castigate Israel. Its simply the easiest way out.
hey, wiseking, have you just recently discovered this Hitch piece? you're pasting it with abandon this week. very sweet of you for Hitch's sake, i'm sure, but it's still not as relevant as it is witty. can you find someone else who's written about W&M, maybe more recently? we might start to think this flack job is all you can find...
By the way, Council for the National Interest keeps a handy collection of links to the major responses to M&W, pro and con, at--
http://www.cnionline.org/learn/IsraelLobby/IsraelLobbycommentaries1.htm
Also, the video from the Cooper Union debate is now up at--
http://www.scribemedia.org/2006/10/11/israel-lobby/
(For a New York City audience, the crowd is remarkably sympathetic.)
Peace through justice, ( what does that mean exactly, that your more noble and better than evrybody else or that justice comes when the Jews die ) The people who go to the Cooper Union lectures are notorious in their reflexive leftist responses and knee jerk hostility to both Jews and Israel. Also the ostensibly pro-Israel members of the panel have made it a practice to protrate themselves in these things.
Lastly, the CNI has an agenda that is identical to the Institute for Historical review, David Duke, and the usual Hamas. Hezbollah, litany of web sites. If Israel didn't exist they would have to satisfy themselves wth memories of those great days in Nuremberg 1934
If Phil is Jewish and American,
he can be still OpenMinded.
And have Empathy for all kind people.
If somebody is an Ultra-Orthodox
Jew/Christian/Muslim,
I think, it helps to
soak up as much Enlightenment
as possible, to fit into
the modern world.
the "son of a liquor store owner" is how little philly weiss disparages.
is little philly weiss born of some sort of aristocracy and looks down with disgust at the meritocracy?
or, is he so filled with self-loathing that he has developed a malignant narcissistic personality disorder.
Dear Bill Pearlman,
This is supposed to a blog for intelligent discussion. If I want gratitous Muslim-bashing and and attacks on "anti semitic selh hating Jew", then I'd hang out at Little Green Footballs.
Peter H, my man, lets take the second part first. Phil ( the Jew ) Weiss writes just about all his columns about the evils of world Jewry, the LOBBY!!!!!!!!, and the supposed brutality of the israelis/nazis has they grind up the poor Palestinians in the greatest tragedy that has ever befallen anybody in the entire history of the world. Don't you think that there are deep seated psychological issue there. I don't think you have to Sigmund Freud to figure this one out. Secondly, I'm tired of these guys pretending that it's a profile in courage to come out against Israel. It's crap. If you want to talk about courage do something, anything, that upsets the Moslems. Then you take your life in your hands, and your wife, and your children, and everybody up to and including the family pet.
Like I said, I read this blog for intelligent discussion, and you ain't providing it.
Ouch, I'm wounded
As usual, a discussion of US foreign policy in the Middle East with special reference to Israel quickly leads to mention to Nazis and the Holocaust.
The substance of M&W's paper, that the Israel lobby has long blocked open and honest debate about what US interests in the Middle East really are, gets ignored.
Of course, just how the comments here unfold largely confirms M&W's claim. Suggest that US interests in the region are not identical to whatever policies the Israeli government is pursuing and you are immediately smeared as another Eichman. If you're Jewish, then you're a self-hating Jew with issues best explained by Dr. Freud.
Bill Pearlman: At least 9 out of every 10 columns will have some variation on the evil nefarious Jewish Lobby, the apartheid Zionist entity, or the general vulgarity of world Jewry
True, given the "at least" qualifier; it's more like 10 out of 10, with the 10th dealing with the relationship of Jews to money.
anyone who helps us become disengaged from colonial Israel should get 13.8 million dollars. it's worth it to prevent another 9/11