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Lobby? What Lobby?

by Alan Dershowitz
Winter 2007 , Page 58

Tim Bower

In March 2006, the John F. Kennedy School of Government’s website published an inflammatory article about Israel cowritten by Stephen Walt, then the school’s academic dean, and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. The paper, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” claimed that the Israel lobby—a cabal whose core is American Jews—has a stranglehold on mainstream American media, think tanks, academia, and the government. The authors claimed this lobby is led by the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), characterizing it as a “de facto agent of a foreign government” that places the interests of that government ahead of the interests of the United States. As they portrayed it, Jewish political contributors use money to coerce government officials, while the lobby “polices” academia and “Jewish philanthropists” pump money into their own academic programs. Jewish congressional staffers exploit their roles by “look[ing] at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness,” rather than in terms of their Americanism.

The principal object of the paper seemed to be to cast suspicion on Jewish Americans who devote their careers to public service. It was, as I later wrote, a contemporary variation on old themes such as those promulgated in the notorious czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in the Nazi and America First literature of the 1930s and early ’40s, and in the propaganda pamphlets of the Soviet Union.

Harvard University and the Kennedy School responded to the paper in an appropriate manner: Consistent with principles of academic freedom, they allowed the paper to remain on the website, but they stripped the Kennedy School seal from the paper and invited faculty members to publish rebuttal papers to be posted alongside the original. (I gladly took advantage of the offer, and my response, along with the original, may be found here.) But Harvard Magazine decided to break with the University’s policy of neutrality on this contentious issue. In its July/August 2006 edition, the magazine published an anonymous article about the controversy that was supportive of the substance of the Walt-Mearsheimer paper, though short on quality reporting and sourcing.

The magazine described the paper’s thesis as follows: “The paper explained a policy based on ‘unwavering support for Israel’ that has ‘inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion’ and ‘jeopardized’ United States security.” It said I had expressed my opposition “heatedly” and contrasted it to reactions by proponents of the article, whose support it credited with “substantive weight.” The article concluded by invoking writer Michael Massing, who, the anonymous author wrote:

. . . proceeded, by detailed reporting, to suggest how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and related entities work and what the news coverage of the controversy reveals. He concluded that the central Mearsheimer-Walt argument was “entirely correct,” and that its flaws notwithstanding, their essay usefully opened for debate “a subject that has for too long remained taboo.”

I spoke to several faculty members and alumni who were shocked to find out that, after the “Israel Lobby” paper had been criticized by most reputable publications, Harvard Magazine had suddenly decided to support this polemical tract and its authors. One major donor told me that, based on the magazine’s publishing the article, he would never again give to Harvard. I’m sure that the Harvard president’s office received the same reaction and worse. And no doubt its response was that it has no say over the content or positions of Harvard Magazine, that the magazine is completely independent of the University, and that the magazine does not speak for the school.

But that’s not entirely true. The University sponsors Harvard Magazine. It provides funding and access. It has granted the magazine an exclusive monopoly of access to its alumni. Therefore, it is disingenuous to say that on the one hand, the University supports the magazine (financially and logistically), but on the other it doesn’t (content-wise). In the same vein, the magazine itself is trying to have it both ways: insider information and funding, but independent editorializing. No wonder Harvard graduates were confused. Why, they wonder, would the University pay for a magazine with which it disagrees? Granted, the University often pays for things with which it disagrees—professors, library books, and so forth. But Harvard Magazine is different. It purports to be closer to Harvard, because it is the official magazine for Harvard alumni. The magazine should have to choose: does it want to be a part of, or separate from, Harvard? Because as Harvard Magazine stands now—situated somewhere in between—it can be a real liability to the University.

Alan Dershowitz is an author, lawyer, and professor of law at Harvard. He has written more than 20 books; his most recent is Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways (Norton, 2006).