The 'Israel Lobby' And Academic Malpractice,Rick Richman

Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," posted on the Harvard School of Government website and abridged in the London Review of Books, has generated assertions that it is anti-Semitic - in effect if not intent. But it is the sheer shoddiness of the paper that is most stunning.

Walt and Mearsheimer asserted the facts in their paper were "not in serious dispute among scholars." To get a sense of how utterly false that statement is, let's review - as a case study of their methodology - the following statement in their paper:

"[N]o Israeli government has been willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state of their own.Even Prime Minister Ehud Barak's purportedly generous offer at Camp David in July 2000 would only have given the Palestinians a disarmed and dismembered set of "Bantustans" under de facto Israeli control.⁴⁰"[Emphasis added]

That assertion was supposedly supported by Footnote 40, with its impressive-looking string of citations:

"40. Charles Enderlein, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995-2002, trans. Susan Fairfield (NY: Other Press, 2003), pp. 201, 207-208; Jeremy Pressman, "Visions in Collision: What Happened at Camp David and Taba? International Security, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2003, p. 17; Deborah Sontag, "Quest for Mideast Peace: How and Why it Failed," New York Times, July 26, 2001; Clayton E. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David: The Untold Story about the Collapse of the Peace Process (NY: Nation Books, 2004), pp. 284, 318, 325. Barak himself said after Camp David that "the Palestinians were promised a continuous piece of sovereign territory except for a razor-thin Israeli wedge running from Jerusalem through from Maale Adumim to the Jordan River," which effectively would have been under Israel's control. Benny Morris, "Camp David and After: An Exchange (1. An Interview with Ehud Barak)", New York Review of Books, Vol. 49, No. 10 (June 13, 2002), p. 44. Also see the map Israeli negotiators presented to the Palestinians at Camp David, a copy of which can be found in Roane Carey, ed., The New Intifada: Resisting Israel's Apartheid (London: Verso, 2001), p. 36.

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You do not need an advanced degree from Harvard to realize there is a serious problem with that footnote:

First, the citations are to secondary sources, not primary ones, with the exception of (a) the Barak interview (quoted in more revealing length below), and (b) a misleading "map" (found by the "scholars" in a book subtitled "Resisting Israel's Apartheid").

Second, there are well-known primary sources not considered in the footnote, including the day-by-day accounts of Camp David in Dennis Ross's The Missing Peace (2004) and Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami's nine-thousand word interview in Haaretz in 2002.

Let's look at what Barak actually said in the interview cited by Walt/Mearsheimer, then at what was actually shown on the map they cite, and then at the readily-available primary sources they ignored:

1. The Interview with Ehud Barak (June 13, 2002):

In the interview, Barak recounted the call he received from Bill Clinton hours after publication of The New York Times article by Deborah Sontag(one of the secondary sources cited in Footnote 40). Barak quoted Clinton as saying:

What the hell is this? Why is she turning the mistakes we [i.e., the US and Israel] made into the essence? The true story of Camp David was that for the first time in the history of the conflict the American president put on the table a proposal, based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, very close to the Palestinian demands, and Arafat refused even to accept it as a basis for negotiations, walked out of the room, and deliberately turned to terrorism. That's the real story - all the rest is gossip. [Emphasis added]

Barak recounted how Clinton had "slowly" - to avoid misunderstanding - read Arafat a document, endorsed in advance by Barak, outlining a settlement: a demilitarized Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem on 92 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of Gaza, with territorial compensation from pre-1967 Israeli territory; the dismantling of most settlements, custodianship over the Temple Mount; return of refugees to the Palestinian state, and a massive international aid program for them.

Barak was then asked about the charge that Israel offered the Palestinians not a continuous state but a collection of "Bantustans" or "cantons."

"This is one of the most embarrassing lies to have emerged from Camp David," says Barak.

I ask myself why is he [Arafat] lying. To put it simply, any proposal that offers 92 percent of the West Bank cannot, almost by definition, break up the territory into noncontiguous cantons. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are separate, but that cannot be helped [in a peace agreement, they would be joined by a bridge].

But in the West Bank, Barak says, the Palestinians were promised a continuous piece of sovereign territory except for a razor-thin Israeli wedge running from Jerusalem through from Maale Adumim to the Jordan River. Here, Palestinian territorial continuity would have been assured by a tunnel or bridge . . . [Emphasis added]

So what Barak actually said in the interview cited in Footnote 40 was that the "Bantustans" allegation was "one of the most embarrassing lies" Arafat promulgated about Camp David, and that continuity would have been assured by a tunnel or bridge over the "razor-thin Israeli wedge" necessary for Israeli security.

Now read Walt/Mearsheimer's footnote again and see if it either (a) fairly reflects the primary source it cites, or (b) supports the proposition that "no Israeli government has been willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state of their own."

2. The "map Israeli negotiators presented to the Palestinians at Camp David:"

What exactly did that map show? Walt/Mearsheimer don't say, but a reader of their footnote would mistakenly think they cited a primary source showing "no Israeli government has been willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state of their own."

Dennis Ross's book published the map "Palestinians now cite . . . as the final offer they turned down at Camp David." Ross noted it was not an actual map, but rather "reflects" a map "proposed by the Israelis early at Camp David, but it inaccurately depicts Israeli security zones" (emphasis added), misstated the percentage of land offered, erroneously "includes Israeli settlements in the proposed Palestinian state" and was not in fact the final offer.

Next to the extraordinarily misleading Palestinian "map," Ross published a "Map Reflecting Actual Proposal at Camp David" that "illustrates the parameters of what President Clinton proposed and Arafat rejected: 91% of the West Bank in contiguous territory . . ." [emphasis added].

Ross also published a "Map Reflecting Clinton Ideas" to illustrate the Clinton Parameters offered to both sides in December 2000, formally accepted by Israel, and then rejected by Arafat in a face-to-face meeting with Clinton in the Oval Office: 95% of the West Bank and 100% of Gaza, with an additional 1 to 3% territorial swap from within Israel, for a total of 96-98%. There is not a Bantustan or canton on that map.

And if Walt/Mearsheimer had consulted the extensive interview with Ben-Ami (the most dovish foreign minister in Israeli history), they would have found this statement:

"[W]hen the ridiculous contention was voiced that what we were proposing to the Palestinians was cantons and that they would not have territorial contiguity, I went to [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak and showed him a map. As I recall, it was still the 8-percent map, a map of 8-92. Mubarak perused it with interest and asked aloud why the Palestinians were claiming they didn't have contiguity." [Emphasis added]

Thus if one reads the entire Barak interview, or reviews the purported "map," or looks at primary sources Walt/Mearsheimer ignored, the assertion in the text is not only unsupported but demonstrably wrong. It is simply Arafat's lie, refuted long ago by the president of the United States, the prime minister of Israel, the foreign minister of Israel, and the chief peace negotiator for the U.S.

Walt/Mearsheimer's paper, complete with footnotes that misstate primary sources and ignore others, is worse than embarrassing. It is academic malpractice. No one contests their right to their opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts - nor to pass them off as the conclusions of "scholars."

Rick Richman is the editor of Jewish Current Issues at jpundit.typepad.com.

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The 'Israel Lobby' And Academic Malpractice , Rick Richman