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On Being Called an Anti-Semite in Montana
Academe, Sep/Oct 2007 by Drake, Richard
Is booking a critic of the Israel lobby to speak on your campus anti-Semitic?
As the coordinator of a university lecture series, I am always on the lookout for good speakers. I thought that I had found one in Stephen Walt, a political scientist at Harvard University and the academic dean of its Kennedy School of Government. His name had been given to me by John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist, who in April 2005 had spoken in the series. Mearsheimer mentioned to me during his visit that he and Walt were working on an article about the influence of the pro-Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. The article appeared in March 2006 in the London Review of Books to intense controversy.
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The excitement over the article stemmed both from what Mearsheimer and Walt wrote about the Israel lobby and from what they were perceived to be saying about an always-touchy issue: the power and influence of Jews. They indicted the lobby for manipulating America's Middle East policy in ways that jeopardize the international standing and physical safety of the United States. In particular, they pressed hard on the most sensitive issue in American politics, the war in Iraq. Just as most Americans were coming to view the war as a terrible mistake, Mearsheimer and Walt declared, "There is little doubt that Israel and the [l]obby were key factors in the decision to go to war. It's a decision the [United States] would have been far less likely to take without their efforts." Furthermore, the authors identified neoconservatives, "many with ties to Likud," the main right-wing Israeli political party, as the driving force within the Bush administration for war. Mearsheimer and Walt pronounced the policies associated with the long-standing special relationship between Israel and the United States dysfunctional and dangerous for both countries.
Had the article been written by run-of-the-mill left-wing critics of America's Middle East policies, the reaction to it would probably have been within the usual range of excitability and irritability for discussions of this kind. Mearsheimer and Walt, however, were mainstream political scientists at two of the most distinguished universities in the country. It was news for scholars of their reputation to denounce Washington's most universally agreed-upon foreign policy position, unwavering support for Israel, as a leading cause of the rising threat of terrorism facing the American people.
Cold Climate
Soon after the publication of their article, I invited Walt to be the opening speaker in the 2006-07 President's Lecture Series. I reasoned that our audience would profit from hearing a distinguished scholar's arguments on a topic of moment. Not everyone in Montana thought the way I did. At the start of the school year, our publicity campaign for the series, announcing Walt's participation, immediately produced a vehement reaction. In the twenty years that I have coordinated the lecture series, I have invited more than two hundred speakers to the campus. Walt was the first one to be welcomed with a preemptive barrage of defamatory invective from faculty members.
On September 7, 2006, four days before Walt's scheduled arrival, three tenured full professors-two of them from my own department-denounced him in an open letter to the president of the university, George M. Dennison. The letter appeared in the student newspaper, the Montana Kaimin. Comparing his views to those expressed in the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders ofZion, they castigated Walt as the author of an ugly racist diatribe and demanded that the university invite Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz or some comparable defender of Israel to offer a rebuttal. Failure to do so would "leave a dark stain on the President's Lecture Series and the university itself."
One of my critics told me before startled witnesses that he would not rest until I had been stripped of my position of power, which manifestly had corrupted me. Someone as insensitive to Jewish issues as I was could no longer be entrusted to coordinate a university lecture series. He initiated a campaign to bring about my dismissal.
As the controversy over Walt's visit heated up in the campus newspaper during the next few days, a student and a retired professor publicly defended my decision to invite Walt. Many people expressed their private support for me, and some of them wrote letters to the president on my behalf. He also heard plenty from the other side, as we all did, about the loosing of anti-Semitism on the UM campus. In addition to charging Walt with being a vile anti-Semite, his detractors said that he lacked basic skills as a researcher and writer. The neoconservative media had attacked Walt for carelessness as a scholar, and lettere to the Montana Kaimin echoed those criticisms.
When Walt spoke on September 11, 2006, he miraculously recovered his intellectual powers before the 150 people present at his faculty-student seminar, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." He began by declaring his support for Israel and its right to exist in security. His criticisms had to do with policies, not a people, he said. After summarizing the main points of the notorious article, Walt asked why its argument had been so controversial. He said that he and Mearsheimer had merely stated what everyone knew to be true about the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the leading pro- Israel lobbying organization. President Bill Clinton had declared that AIPAC was "better than anyone else lobbying in this town." kForbes magazine survey had rated AIPAC number two in Washington's power rankings. Upon leaving office, Senator Ernest Hollings had declared, "You can't have an Israel policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here." It was no surprise when Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert called AIPAC "Israel's best friend in the whole world."
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