SPME Faculty Forum
03-26-06

Headlines

SPME NEWS: Adelman and Divine to Head SPME Group Studying Havard Papers
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NEWS: Harvard Distancing Itself From Paper Blaming Jews For US Woes
Imams, rabbis deplore calls to eliminate Israel
Constitutional Questions Show in AIPAC Case
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SPME VOICES: Gerald M. Steinberg: Abusing medicine for propaganda
Gerald M. Steinberg: An Israel transformed

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CONFERENCES AND LECTURES: Prof. Habib Malik at Brandeis University
Rutgers: "Can Arabs be Pro-Israel?"- A Talk with Nonie Darwish
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VIEWS: Judea Pearl: Anti-Zionism As Racism

COMMENTARIES ON HARVARD PAPERS:
Mitchell  G. Bard: Pseudo-Scholarship on Israel From Harvard
In Dark Times, Blame the Jews
Dore Gold: The Basis of the U.S.-Israel Alliance
The Graves of Academe
Dershowitz: "Study Is Ignorant Propaganda"
The U.S.-Israel Special Relationship

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SPME Chat: Harvard and Stephen Wal

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SPME NEWS

Adelman and Divine to Head SPME Group Studying Havard Papers and Prepare for Others: Seek Interested Colleagues and Collecting Academic Responses to Study

Jonathan Adelman, Professor of International Relations at University of Denver Graduate School and Donna Robinson Divine, Morningstar Family Professor of Government at Smith College are among a number of SPME Board members critically studying the The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011 for the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Political scientists and scholars in related disciplines interested in working with Professors Adelman and Robinson Divine should contact Professor Adelman at jadelman@du.edu and Professor Divine at drdivine@smith.edu

In addition, SPME is collecting and will publish in the Faculty Forum, pieces written by its members in response to these papers or other papers that may be being produced as we hope to improve the accuracy of the narrative on campus. Please send those papers with a URL reference (and not as attachments, please) to ScholarsforPeace@aol.com

Although the publication no longer bears the Harvard logo, it is SPME's understanding that this set of working papers can and will be integrated into the curriculum and may only be the first in what will be a number of similar publications to be released within the next few months. SPME is seeking to develop significant academic responses to this and other publications that may arise.

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NEWS

Harvard Distancing Itself From Paper Blaming Jews For US Woes

Saturday, March 25, 2006 

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/print.php3?what=news&id=100745

Harvard is distancing itself from a paper by a dean of its school of government which blames a network of powerful Jews for the war in Iraq and other policies contrary to American interests.

The study by professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer runs through a list of recent and not-so-recent events, explaining how the US was influenced by powerful Jews to act on behalf of Israel, at its own expense.

The paper begins with the caveat, “Some readers will find this analysis disturbing, but the facts recounted here are not in serious dispute among scholars.” It goes on to outline the “perfidy” of what it calls the “Israel Lobby,” which consists of Jewish organizations, major newspapers, politicians on both sides of the political divide, think tanks, academics, Jewish congressional aids, AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and most American Jews. The authors insist, though, that they are not suggesting "the sort of conspiracy depicted in anti-Semitic tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Read the entire article online

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Imams, rabbis deplore calls to eliminate Israel

WALTER RUBY, THE JERUSALEM POST
Mar. 23, 2006

 

In a stunningly positive denouement after days of unremitting hostility by Palestinian participants, the 2nd World Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace being held here issued a concluding statement deploring "any incitement against a faith or people, let alone a call for their elimination," a statement Jewish and Israeli representatives took to be a rebuke of Hamas calls for the elimination of Israel.

In an apparent behind-the-scenes deal to win approval of Palestinian imams and scholars attending the gathering of the concluding statement, Israeli representatives, including Haifa Chief Rabbi She'ar Yashuv Hacohen, agreed to language calling upon governments to show respect for "holy sites, houses of worship and cemeteries." Read the entire article

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Constitutional Questions Show in AIPAC Case

By MATTHEW BARAKAT
Associated Press Writer
Mar 24, 6:25 PM EST

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - A federal judge on Friday questioned the constitutionality of a law under which two former lobbyists with a pro-Israel group have been charged with receiving and disclosing national defense information.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III said the law, enacted by Congress during World War I, may be unconstitutionally broad and vague, especially given its potential impact on First Amendment rights. Read the entire article online

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SPME VOICES

http://www.cjnews.com/viewarticle.asp?id=8796

Abusing medicine for propaganda

Gerald M. Steinberg
March 23 2006

Professor Steinberg is Editor of www.NGO-Monitor.org and Director, Program on Conflict Management and Negotiation, Political Studies, Bar Ilan University. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East www.spme.net

If there is one area where the benefits of peace between Arabs and Israelis should be obvious, it is in the area of health care. Indeed, many Palestinians, Jordanians, Saudis and others come to Israeli hospitals for treatments that are not available in their countries. Even when the terrorist attacks were at their most violent and other forms of co-operation between Israelis and Palestinians ended, the health links remained. Medical professionals understand that viruses and diseases such as bird flu are impervious to politics.

For this reason, the intrusion of coarse politics and ugly propaganda via Bridges: An Israeli-Palestinian Public Health Magazine is particularly damaging. This publication is undermining precisely the co-operation that its sponsors claim to be promoting.

Bridges is published by the World Health Organization, an international body based in Geneva that works closely with the United Nations and suffers from many of the same maladies, such as promoting anti-Israel propaganda in every possible realm by exploiting universal norms such as human rights.

Most issues of Bridges, now in its second year, mix soft health care pieces with anti-Israel propaganda written by Palestinians, as well as some fringe Israelis who believe that the key to peace is to accept responsibility for terror and incitement. Substantive non-political articles on health issues do not offset the blatantly political and ideological pieces that are carefully placed between the others.

The political articles follow the standard propaganda line: Palestinians are always portrayed as victims, while Israeli checkpoints, occupation, and other measures are blamed for their suffering. There is no mention of PLO corruption, or the history of Arab rejectionism that led to wars and “occupation” and there are few references to the context and cause of the checkpoints: Palestinian terror.

NGOs that exploit human rights and humanitarian claims in order to demonize Israel, such as Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Palestinian Human Rights Committee, are regularly given space to promote their ideology in Bridges. The February-March 2005 edition included an article authored by a French-based anti-Israel NGO known as Médecins du Monde. Headlined “The Separation Barrier to Health Care,” it was a blatantly political piece on “the wall.” The only references to medical issues were in unverified allegations about “the deterioration of the Palestinian health care system due to the ongoing construction of the wall.” The relation between the separation barrier and terror was surgically removed, and readers are asked to support “healthandwall.org.”

The next article was about an Israeli victim of terror, an artificial attempt to provide false political balance in a health care publication. It was followed in turn by a portrait of a Palestinian who had been crippled after having been allegedly shot by an Israeli soldier.

Medical professionals on both sides live this conflict daily, and superficial political articles are counterproductive. Indeed, a surprisingly honest evaluation published in the December 2005/January 2006 edition reported that readers view the publication as “too politically biased or not well balanced” and ineffective in promoting co-operative projects. Predictably, the evaluation noted that “Palestinian authors openly talked about the conflict and the occupation, whereas Israelis did not.” It said that in the first six issues, of the articles in the magazine’s “Happening in Health” section, “nine addressed the occupation. Yet no news item mentioned terrorism.”

But the editors ignored this evaluation in the next issue (February-March 2006), where, between professional articles on challenges in nursing, the politics and propaganda increased. Moving further away from health, the editors devoted central pages to Hanan Ashrawi - a member of the PLO leadership and keynote speaker at the infamous 2001 World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa - as well as to MK Tamar Gozansky of the Israeli Communist fringe. Ashwari repeated the cliches of Palestinian victimization and Israeli occupation, while Gozansky accused Israel of “the dehumanization of Palestinians.” For medical professionals seeking to go beyond the conflict, these articles mark a dead end.

Since the editors seem committed to this destructive path, if this publication is to continue, its editorial board must be revamped and the political content dropped. Otherwise, funders should pull the plug to prevent greater damage in the name of peace, and put their money into expanding the co-operation in the daily contacts between Israelis and Arabs in hospitals and clinics, and via exchanges of public health information.

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An Israel transformed
By Gerald M. Steinberg
Jerusalem Post
March 26 2006

Israelis are about to go the polls for the 6th time in less than 14 years - an unenviable record among the world's democracies. The high frequency of national elections is surely one of the main reasons for apathy and the number of undecided voters in the pre-election surveys. Other factors include the lack of charismatic candidates in the post-Sharon era, and Kadima's apparently insurmountable lead.

Nevertheless, these elections are very different than other Israeli elections, at least in the past 20 years. In the previous elections, the main issues were based on ideology - Left vs. Right; Orthodox vs. secular, and so on.

But in these elections pragmatic realism is the main theme, not only in Kadima, but spilling over into Labor and Likud.

Thus no one is talking about negotiations with Hamas or the anarchic Palestinian Authority, and even Yossi Beilin has dropped the illusion of a negotiated peace in the foreseeable future. Emphasizing the theme of Israel as a Jewish democratic state, Olmert and the Kadima leadership have cautiously discussed further disengagement, based on completing the security barrier and the level of Palestinian terror.  Read this article online

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CONFERENCES AND LECTURES

Update from Beirut:
Prof. Habib Malik
Lebanese American University, Beirut

Thursday, April 6, 2006, 4:15-6:00pm

International Lounge, Usdan Student Center
Brandeis University

The briefing will focus on the situation in Lebanon a year after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, months after the withdrawal of Syria’s military forces from Lebanon and after the parliamentary elections and the inclusion of Hizbollah in the Lebanese government.

Prof. Habib Malik is an Associate Professor of History and Cultural Studies at the Lebanese American University (Byblos Campus) and a close observer of the Lebanese scene. Trained in philosophy, he has written extensively on the situation in Lebanon. As a historian, he has researched and written on the role of his father, the eminent Lebanese Foreign Minister, Charles Malik. He was a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (1995 and 1996) and at the American Enterprise Institute (2003).  Prof. Malik holds an M.A. degree (1979) and a Ph.D. (1985) in modern European intellectual history from Harvard University.

Further questions please e-mail crowncenter@brandeis.edu or call Benjamin Rostoker 781-736-5320.

For directions and location please see: http://www.brandeis.edu/overview/directions.html

Parking is available without a permit in Lot U, Lot L, and in front of the Usdan Student Center. http://my.brandeis.edu/map/

 

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Rutgers-Newark Jewish Law Students Association, STANDWITHUS, Hasbara
Fellowships, and The David Project present...

"Can Arabs be Pro-Israel?"
A Talk with Nonie Darwish

WHEN: MONDAY, APRIL 3 - 4:15pm
WHERE: BAKER TRIAL COURTROOM
(Food will be served)
(Question and Answer Period will follow the talk)

Nonie Darwish's mission is to "promote reconciliation, acceptance and understanding" between Israelis and Arabs.  Darwish was born a Moslem in Cairo, and spent almost her entire childhood before college in Gaza.  A daughter of a "shahid" (martyr), she will talk about her experiences growing up in the region and her unique viewpoint towards politics in the Middle East.  She received a degree from the American University in Cairo, and is a former editor of the Middle East News Agency.  She is currently a freelance journalist, translator, and founder of the organization, "Arabs for Israel". More information can be found out about her at her two websites:

Nonie Darwish.com - http://www.noniedarwish.com/pages/745434/index.htm
Arabs for Israel - http://www.arabsforisrael.com/pages/1/index.htm

JLSA hopes students of all backgrounds and viewpoints will come to hear Nonie's message and contribute their diverse opinions during the Q&A.

Rutgers Jewish Law Students Association Executive Board

Matthew Fernandez Konigsberg
Rutgers School of Law - Newark
J.D. Candidate - Class of 2007

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VIEWS

Anti-Zionism As Racism
Judea Pearl
New York Jewish Week
May 27, 05

Judea Pearl is a professor of computer science at UCLA and  president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, named after his son.  He is co-editor of "I am Jewish: Personal Reflections
Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl (Jewish Lights, 2004), winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

In the past two months, I have visited four "troubled" campuses -Duke, York (Canada), Columbia and UC Irvine - where tensions between Jewish and anti-Zionist students and professors have attracted national media attention. In these visits, I have spoken to students, faculty and administrators, and I have obtained a fairly gloomy picture of the situation on those and other campuses.

First, Jewish students have been subjected in the past few years to an unprecedented assault on their identity as Jews. And we, the Jewish faculty on campus, have let those students down. We have failed to equip them with effective tools to fight back this assault.

I would like to propose a remedy.

Many condemn anti-Zionism for being a flimsy cover for anti-Semitism. I disagree. The order is wrong. I condemn anti-Semitism for being an instrument for a worse form of racism: anti-Zionism. In other words, I submit that anti-Zionism is a form of racism  more dangerous than classical anti-Semitism. Labeling and fighting anti-Zionism as racism is precisely the weapon that our students need for survival on campus.

Anti-Zionism earns its racist character from denying the Jewish people what it grants to other collectives (e.g. Spanish, Palestinians), namely, the right to nationhood and self determination.

Are Jews a nation? A collective is entitled to nationhood when its members identify with a common history and wish to share a common destiny. Palestinians have earned nationhood status by virtue of thinking like a nation, not by residing where their ancestors did (many of them are only three or four generations in Palestine). Jews, likewise, are bonded by nationhood (i.e., common history and destiny) more than they are bonded by religion.

The appeal to Jewish nationhood is necessary when we consider Israel's insistence on remaining a "Jewish State." By "Jewish state" Israelis mean of course "national-Jewish State," not "religious-Jewish state," since theocratic states (like Pakistan and Iran) are incompatible with modern standards of democracy and pluralism.Anti-Zionist racists use this anti-theocracy argument again and again to de-legitimize Israel, and I have found our students unable to defend their position with conventional ideology that views Jewishness as a religion.

Jewishness is more than just a religion. It is an intricate and intertwined mixture of ancestry, religion, history, country, culture, tradition, attitude, nationhood and ethnicity, and we need not apologize for not fitting neatly into the standard molds of textbook taxonomies - we did not choose our painful history.

As a form of racism, anti-Zionism is worse than anti-Semitism. It targets the most vulnerable part of the Jewish people, namely, the people of Israel, who rely on the sovereignty of Israel for physical safety, national identity and personal dignity. To put it more bluntly, Anti-Zionism condemns five million human beings, mostly refugees or children of refugees, to eternal statelessness,traumatized by historical images of persecution and genocide.

Anti-Zionism also attacks the pivotal component of our identity, the glue that bonds us together-our nationhood and the right for self determination. And while people of conscience reject anti-Semitism, anti-Zionist rhetoric has become a mark of academic sophistication and social acceptance in Europe and in some U.S. campuses.

Moreover, anti-Zionism disguises itself in the cloak of political debate, exempt from sensitivities and rules of civility that govern inter-religious discourse.  Religion is ferociously protected in our society-political views are not.  So, in the name of "open political debate" administrators would not think twice about inviting M.I.T. linguist Noam Chomsky to speak on campus, though his anti-Zionist utterances offend the fabric of my Jewish identity deeper than any of the ugly religious insults currently shocking the media. He should be labeled for what he is: a racist.

Strategically, while accusations of anti-Semitism are worn out and have lost their punch, charging someone with racism makes people think why anyone would deny people the right of self-determination in a sliver of land in the birth place of their history. It shifts the frame of discourse from debating Israel's policies to the root cause of the conflict - denying Israelis their basic rights.

Charges of "racism" highlight the inherent asymmetry between the Zionist and anti-Zionist positions. The former grants both Israelis and Palestinians the right for statehood, the latter denies that right to one, and only one side. This asymmetry is the most effective weapon our students should use in campus debates, for it puts them back on the high moral grounds of  "fair and balanced" and forces their opponents to defend an ideology of one-sidedness.

For example, I have found it effective, when confronting an anti-Zionist speaker, to ask: "Are you willing to go on record and state that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a conflict between two legitimate national movements?" Western audiences adore even-handedness and abhor bias. The question above forces the racist to defend his uneven treatment of the two sides.

America prides itself on academic freedom, and academic freedom entails freedom to teach hatred and racism - we graciously accept this fact of life. However, academic freedom also entails the freedom of students to expose racism, be it white-supremacy, women-inferiority, Islamophobia or Zionophobia whereever it is spotted. Not to censor, but to expose - racists stew in their own words.

In summary, I believe the formula "Anti-Zionism = Racism" should give Jewish students the courage to both defend their identity and expose those who abuse it.

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Fact Sheets

#44: Pseudo-Scholarship on Israel From Harvard*

(March 22, 2006)

Relations With Israel
Apologists for Terrorism
Questioning Israeli Values
Distorting the Peace Process
Rewriting History
It's The Lobby's Fault
Conspiracy Theories
Blaming Israel for Palestinian Failures
Anger Over Iraq
Defending Syria
Minimizing the Iranian Threat

Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government has published* a paper, “The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by Stephen Walt, the academic dean of the school, and John Mearsheimer a University of Chicago political scientist, that is one of the most flawed pieces of propaganda masquerading as scholarship to be produced in recent years.

This 41-page “working paper” has an astounding 40 additional pages of footnotes, many from post-Zionists and anti-Israel sources, in an apparent effort to give this diatribe against Israel and its supporters the veneer of respectability. The distortions and outright inaccuracies in the paper demonstrate, however, that documentation does not make a paper scholarly. To continue go to http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/talking/44_Harvard.html

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Editorial
In Dark Times, Blame the Jews
March 24, 2006

The Forward
http://www.forward.com/articles/7532

On the face of it, there's little that's new in the provocative research paper "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," published online last week by two leading political scientists, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Their underlying thesis, that Israel's advocates have pressured America into an unjustified and damaging alliance with Israel, has been around for decades, flogged with little success by generations of Israel's detractors. Their more immediate argument, that Israel and its allies manipulated America into war with Iraq, has been simmering at the edges of the debate since before the invasion. By now it's part of our national background noise.

What is new and startling is the document's provenance. Its authors are not fringe gadflies but two of America's most respected foreign-affairs theorists. One, Mearsheimer, is a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago. The other, Walt, is academic dean of the nation's most prestigious center of political studies, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Though it's tempting, they can't be dismissed as cranks outside the mainstream. They are the mainstream. Read more

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The Basis of the U.S.-Israel Alliance: An Israeli Response to the Mearsheimer-Walt Assault - Dore Gold (Institute for Contemporary Affairs/Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs)
Jerusalem Issue Brief
Vol. 5, No. 20     24 March 2006

·         On December 27, 1962, President John F. Kennedy told Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir: "The United States has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East really comparable only to what it has with Britain over a wide range of world affairs." In 1981, Israel destroyed the nuclear reactor of Iraq's Saddam Hussein. In October 1991, Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney thanked Israel for its "bold and dramatic action" a decade earlier.

·         In the 1980s, several memoranda of understanding between the U.S. and Israel on strategic cooperation were followed by regular joint military exercises, where U.S. forces were given access to Israel's combat techniques. The U.S. Marine Corps and special operations forces have particularly benefited from these ties, though much of the U.S.-Israel strategic relationship is classified.

·         Saudi Arabia has tried to tilt U.S. policy using a vast array of powerful PR firms, former diplomats, and well-connected officials, with the result being that America is still overly dependent on Middle Eastern oil. Given the ultimate destination of those petrodollars in recent years (the propagation of Islamic extremism and terrorism), a serious investigation of those lobbying efforts appears to be far more appropriate than focusing on relations between the U.S. and Israel.  Read the entire article

Read also The Graves of Academe - Melanie Phillips (melaniephillips.com)

See also Dershowitz: "Study Is Ignorant Propaganda" - Nathan Guttman
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz argues that "the challenge is to find a single idea in the piece that does not already appear in hate websites. There is no scholarship here whatsoever." (Jerusalem Post)

See alsoThe U.S.-Israel Special Relationship - Eli E. Hertz (Myths and Facts);

SPME Chat

Harvard and Stephen Wal

Stephen Walt, who co-authored the pseudo-scholarly paper on the "Israel lobby" with John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, is not only a professor at the Kennedy School of Government; he is Academic Dean of the School. This seems to me to bring up an issue of academic governance. The Head of my department is up for review at the moment, and one of the questions being discussed in connection with his qualifications for a second term is the quality of his scholarship. If this is a consideration in such cases, wouldn't it be appropriate for Harvard to consider whether someone who publishes propaganda disguised as scholarship is fit for the academic deanship of the Kennedy School? Or am I missing something?

The question is important for me, since Harvard keeps asking me, and several of my friends and relatives, for money. I have had problems with this for some time now. When the Harvard English department learned that the Irish poet Tom Paulin, whom they had invited to give a prestigious lecture, was on record as saying that "Brooklyn-born settlers" on the West Bank should be "shot on sight," they reiterated their invitation to him on the grounds of "freedom of speech." At that point I decided to stop giving Harvard anything until such time as their English faculty might master the substance of a junior high school civics class. It didn't help when Larry Summers was dismissed as President after a no-confidence vote that was partly the result of a speech in which he pointed out that calls for academic boycotts and divestment from Israel are "anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent." Is there any reason not to add Walt's retention of his deanship to my list of grievances?

Peter Shalen