Dershowitz responds to M/W

I swear, if I see any more articles -- even alleged straight news pieces! -- that prominently feature the fact that David Duke "approves" of the Mearsheimer/Walt (M/W) paper, I'm going to scream. It is such a red herring!

But more importantly, framing the paper through the "Duke lens" is perhaps one of the more blatant examples of bias I've seen recently in the press. That it seems to be systemic is all the more telling.

Alas, I also see that Alan Dershowitz has written a 45 page rebuttal to M/W -- or, rather, had his research assistants cobble together a response, which he then arranged or edited in some way.

Please, if you have time, read it. If this is what passes as a legitimate response, no wonder people sympathetic to or aligned with the Israel lobby are a bit nervous.

Here's the abstract:

The working paper by Academic Dean and Professor Stephen Walt and Professor John Mearsheimer presents a conspiratorial view of history in which the Israel Lobby has a “stranglehold” on American foreign policy, the American media, think tanks and academia. In his response, Professor Alan Dershowitz demonstrates that the paper contains three types of major errors: quotations are wrenched out of context, important facts are misstated or omitted; and embarrassingly weak logic is employed. One of the authors of this paper has acknowledged that “none of the evidence represents original documentation or is derived from independent interviews.” In light of the paper’s errors, and its admitted lack of originality, Dershowitz asks why these professors would have chosen to publish a paper that does not meet their usual scholarly standards, especially given the risk – that should have been obvious to “realists” - that recycling these charges under their imprimatur of prominent authors would be featured, as they have been, on extremist websites. Dershowitz questions the authors claims that people who support Israel do not want “an open debate on issues involving Israel.” He renews his challenge to debate the issues.

I know it's a bit shaky to cite the abstract and pick at that, but it does provide you with a brief shorthand of what's wrong with Dershowitz's response. Do read the entire paper, though. It is long, but that's because a very significant percentage of it is fluff. The last third of it is the only part with any real meat.

Regarding Dershowitz's main claims:

"quotations are wrenched out of context"

Dear lord. Go ahead and read Dershowitz's own introduction, flipping back and forth between his quotes and the original M/W rendering. I'd suggest there's more distortion in the first three pages of Dershowitz than in the entire 80+ page M/W paper.

"important facts are misstated or omitted"

Generally speaking, this is bullshit criticism. It's the type of complaint that can go either way; it's just a nasty way of saying authors contextualize things differently.

To make things worse, Dershowitz expends quite a bit of effort making irrelevant points and he also misrepresents what M/W say a number of times, something that you might not pick up on unless you backcheck quotes or peruse the M/W footnotes.

"embarrassingly weak logic is employed"

I have nothing to say about this. That's for you, the reader, to discern.

I will say, however, that Dershowitz's citations on this point (particularly the anti-Semitism/French Catholics nitpicking on p. 15) are a bit bizarre.

"One of the authors of this paper has acknowledged that 'none of the evidence represents original documentation or is derived from independent interviews.' In light of the paper’s errors, and its admitted lack of originality, Dershowitz asks why these professors would have chosen to publish a paper that does not meet their usual scholarly standards, especially given the risk – that should have been obvious to 'realists' - that recycling these charges under their imprimatur of prominent authors would be featured, as they have been, on extremist websites."

hahahahahahaha. I'm sorry, I had to pick myself up off the floor after this one.

The M/W paper, admittedly, is a synthesis of secondary sources with a bit of primary sources from news clippings thrown in. Not an uncommon sight in academia, especially from more senior scholars. It boggles the mind that Dershowitz is implying there's something wrong with this sort of an essay. Is he at all familiar with scholastic norms?

Plus, the rather delicious subtext here is that Dershowitz is probably the last man on earth who should be complaining about the "originality" of someone's work or whether it's "derived" independently.

As you know, Finkelstein hung Dershowitz out to dry for channeling Joan Peters, some 20 years later. Dershowitz got away with that, though, which seems to say a lot about the way academia works, particularly at Harvard.

Lastly, the charge that M/W cite material that can be found on "extremist websites" is, yes, another red herring. You should judge the material on its own merits, like any honest scholar would implore you to do.

"Dershowitz questions the authors claims that people who support Israel do not want 'an open debate on issues involving Israel.' He renews his challenge to debate the issues."

Ah, yes. The call for open debate coming from a man who threatened publishing houses and lobbied the Governor of California to prevent the publication of a book that happened to expose his "scholarship" as crude propaganda. I'm sure he's sincere here, though.

In any case, Dershowitz always says he wants an open debate, but the tone of his response doesn't seem to provide much space for that. Indeed, a rather significant portion of his rebuttal is devoted to smearing M/W by association.

At first, I was relatively lukewarm about the M/W paper. I agreed with their general take on the Palestine-Israel conflict, but thought they attributed too much agency to the Israel Lobby simply by not adequately examining other factors motivating US policy or the sway of other lobbies and interest groups. On this point, Dershowitz and I even agree.

Still, I feel a need to stand up for M/W because they're getting unfairly attacked on a number of levels. Their paper is not a useless piece of trash, or some recycled anti-Semitic drivel, as its detractors would like you to believe. What it adds, potentially, to our dialogue about US-Israel-Palestine policy far outweighs any of its negative points or blind spots.

I bother mentioning Dershowitz's paper because it is, thus far, the most substantial piece to attempt to refute M/W. If you've been paying attention to the push back articles from fellow travelers of "The Lobby" (Camera, TNR, etc.), you'll notice that many of the same points they've raised are in Dershowitz's paper (what's that about originality, you say?).

The main issue here is that the people fighting back against M/W are largely doing so to squash debate on this topic, and force people to cower into submission and hope the M/W paper recedes into the night. Thus far, that's worked. Few people have stood up to defend M/W (including, one might say, themselves) and the normative flak you'd expect to see when a paper like this gets published is popping up faster than it can be beaten back, whack-a-mole style.