The 9/11 attacks left many marks on American life arising from the combination of fear, paranoia, anger, and confusion they inspired. A byproduct of this miasma of emotion would be a significant narrowing of what was considered to be responsible political opinion. And given the ethnic and religious makeup of the hijackers and their champions abroad, no issue would turn out to be as sensitive to this trend as the debate over the US role in the Middle East. In the halls of Congress and in much of the mainstream media, any questioning of America’s essential goodness, its moral purpose in the world, and the necessity of standing up for its allies in the region was considered the equivalent of disloyalty. Perhaps our behavior in the world had not been perfect, and yes, some Middle East inhabitants might have genuine grievances against us, but to say so aloud, much less to enumerate reasons why, was, in the parlance of the time, “to let the terrorists win.” And it should come as no surprise that nowhere was the post-9/11 debate policed more energetically than in the case of America’s support for Israel.
Beyond the borders of congressional and cable news and op-ed-page debates, liberals and leftists had been marching steadily in a pro-Palestinian direction for decades. Evidence of this transformation could be seen in the pages of small-circulation left-wing opinion magazines such as The Nation and Mother Jones or alternative Village Voice–like newspapers. Aside from these, and the occasional outburst from a Hollywood celebrity (often rapidly withdrawn), the one place where the Palestinians were consistently seen to wear the white hats, and Israelis the black ones, was on the campuses of America’s elite universities.
Under most circumstances, it matters little what students and professors think about politics. College protesters made themselves matter during the Vietnam era because they were willing to throw themselves into marches, demonstrations, and eventually riots that upset the balance of society beyond the confines of their campuses. (And it is far from clear, based on a reading of public opinion data, that they did not do far more harm to the antiwar cause than good.) Anti-Israel sentiment on campuses was unlikely to affect US public opinion, much less its foreign policy. But there were two reasons why the issue did rise to the level of a genuine national controversy. First was a concern among elites generally that future generations of America’s leaders were being raised by their professors to overturn decades of US foreign policy consensus and that this portended dramatic changes ahead both for Israel and for America’s role in the world (and, to be fair, this was exactly what their professors intended). Second was the fact that almost all upper-middle-class American Jewish high school students go on to college. Most do so, however, having been educated about Israel in a Leon Uris–type of ideological bubble. In college, they enter an alternative universe in which Israel is understood to be the oppressor and the Palestinians their victims. This caused cognitive dissonance, and the result was often panic. Their parents, meanwhile, were also often panicked to learn that the hundreds of thousands of dollars of tuition they were paying were resulting in their children coming home with arguments they believed to be not merely wrong, but personally (and painfully) offensive. This was especially true given what had become the central role that support for Israel now played in defining secular American Jews’ identity.
The leftist turn against Israel had many causes. But “the most obvious one,” as Haaretz’s veteran political columnist Chemi Shalev would write in his valedictory column, “especially for the younger generation,” was “the unbearable discrepancy between the idyllic Israel they were sold and their realization of reality on the ground.” Israel had become a conservative cause, whereas academia had moved steadily leftward. Indeed, on many campuses, liberals were now the conservatives and conservatives were entirely nonexistent.1
On campus, the humanities had undergone a considerable epistemological transformation since the parents of twenty-first-century students had closed their last textbook. As the revolutionary movements of the 1960s collapsed in violence and recrimination, many of the most sophisticated thinkers of the era, along with their idealistic followers, sought refuge inside the academy. Many of the former set out to determine what had gone wrong and to train the next generation of student activists to do a better job. While each discipline brought its own approach to contemporary politics, most humanities faculty members in America’s top universities shared a similar set of Marxist-tinged assumptions. Like the ideologies of the 1960s, they implied a rapaciousness on the part of the United States and other Western nations vis-à-vis the downtrodden of the world. Professors—and their students—accused their elders of helping to justify injustices and inequalities that previous scholarship barely acknowledged to exist. They tied the pursuit of “knowledge” directly to the creation of these oppressive structures, and hence wanted to see it dismantled and rebuilt to reflect a new, anti-racist, anti-colonialist pedagogical agenda. In this universe, Israel functioned as a mini America, spreading misery, doing the bidding of an imperialist power in the service of “settler colonialism,” and being rewarded with billions in aid and endless propaganda published by a compliant corporate media. Soon enough, as the scholar of Jewish campus life, Rachel Fish, pointed out from the vantage point of 2022, “the state of Israel [became] an obsession of today’s university, a linchpin around which an extraordinary volume of discourse, pedagogy, and politics revolves.”2
The anti-Israel tilt in academia manifested itself in any number of ways. A group calling itself Students for Justice in Palestine supported demonstrations and teach-ins featuring lectures, film presentations, and theatrical “Israel Apartheid” performances, together with often obnoxious disruptions of Israel-related lectures and rallies. A growing number of Jewish students joined these groups, especially the organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which claimed to be the fastest-growing Jewish organization on campus. Even at Brandeis, America’s most Jewish (secular) university, students formed a JVP chapter and applied to become a constituent member of the school’s Hillel organization. Although they were rejected, they still collected a thousand student signatures for a petition that demanded their admittance.3
The foundational text for the epistemological transformation in the humanities within the academy was Edward Said’s Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, published in 1978. (Ironically, Said decided to write the book only after his friend Noam Chomsky declined his suggestion that the two coauthor one on media misperceptions of the Middle East.) Ranging across an astonishing number of sources in different disciplines and at least a half dozen languages, Said explained that the term “Orientalism” was intended to explain, culturally and ideologically, how “a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarships, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles” supported imperialist modes of thought and action. It was a form of what the French philosopher Michel Foucault termed “power-knowledge,” by which Western nations shaped not only the beliefs of their own citizens, but also those of the nations they conquered and controlled via mechanisms originally described by the Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. In leading the West “to take up a position of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own,” Said deduced, Orientalism—a handmaiden to imperialism—excused, and even celebrated, all manner of brutality under the banner of “progress.” Flawed as Said’s analysis may have been in the eyes of many specialists in the myriad fields into which its polymathic author ventured, his critique proved a powerful tool to interrogate the ideas put forth by established academics who cultivated cozy relationships with government agencies, global corporations, and other sources of political power.4
Translated into thirty-six languages (including Hebrew) and published all over the world, the book’s popularity on America’s elite college campuses drove its conservative critics to distraction. According to one calculation, Orientalism appeared on the syllabi of 868 courses in American colleges and universities, and this count included only syllabi available online in 2013. Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, the American-born Michael Oren, sporting two degrees from Columbia University, reported in his 2015 memoir that he believed it had become the “single most influential book in the humanities.” And while he based his assessment on a nine-year-old, statistically sketchy survey of Harvard students, he was likely not wrong. In March 2002, Martin Kramer, of the aggressively “pro-Israel” watchdog organization Campus Watch, specifically blamed what he called the “empire” Said had built for having laid the intellectual groundwork for the worldview that left Americans “unprepared for the events of 9/11.” Kramer wrote an entire book on the topic and argued in multiple forums that congressional control of the field’s federal research funds was necessary. Middle Eastern studies programs and research centers had to be “held accountable for how they serve the needs of the American public or the United States government.” The famously Islamophobic Daniel Pipes, who headed up Middle East Forum, Campus Watch’s parent organization, made a similar argument, insisting that university-based scholars were “financed by the public and are thus accountable in some way to the public.” Together, the two were instrumental in promoting legislation in 2003 that would have demanded government control over the content of what was taught about US foreign policy on college campuses. It passed the House of Representatives but never made it into law.5
Having failed in Congress, however, the battle was joined in academia itself. One result was the rapid expansion of “Israel studies” programs, centers, and endowed chairs in universities across America. The Taub Foundation’s Fred Lafter donated $3.5 million to get New York University’s program off the ground, saying it was in order to fill the “void” he identified within Middle Eastern studies departments, where he believed the issues were “cast in an Arabic point of view.” (The program’s “advisory board” included not scholars in the field but right-wing Jewish funders, such as the [now disgraced] billionaire Michael Steinhardt and the former CEO of CBS Laurence Tisch.) Recent numbers are hard to come by, but by the 2011–2012 school year, fully 316 schools included in one study offered 625 courses that focused specifically on Israel, as well as 752 other Israel-related courses. These courses no doubt enjoyed considerable overlap with others offered in the nation’s more than 250 Jewish studies departments and programs, which also saw significant growth in guest lectures and funding during the same period.6
One should not draw any nefarious conclusions about any of the individual scholars teaching in these programs and departments—indeed, this book is deeply indebted to their work. But in academia, perhaps only slightly less frequently than in business or politics, he who pays the piper often gets to call the tune. There are no Israel studies programs supporting explicitly anti-Zionist scholars. It would be no easy task locating one that was willing to risk even hosting a debate about Israel and Palestine with such a scholar, lest it anger an important funder. Many such programs are actually run by Israeli professors themselves, and all walk a fine line between scholarship and boosterism, with a necessary sensitivity to every potential political pitfall. When, in 2022, the University of Washington returned a gift to a Jewish funder who had been contacted by the right-wing organization “Stand With Us,” after a professor’s name had appeared on a petition of Jewish scholars who were critical of Israel’s behavior during its May 2021 bombing of Gaza, this was, ironically, the second time a funder had demanded money back from an Israel studies program over the politics of a professor in the state of Washington. (The first had taken place in 2017, at Western Washington University.) Following an outcry among faculty at the university and from scholars in related fields, the University of Washington managed to save the program (albeit at a reduced level of funding) and find a replacement chair for the scholar in question, Professor Liora Halperin. But the threat—and the university’s initial willingness to contravene its own rules regarding a donor’s power over gifts already given—no doubt caused a chill among many other scholars who might have to rely on such funding the future.7
Save for Jewish parents and grandparents, most of the general public would have had little familiarity with how the debate over Israel and Palestine was being presented on college campuses, or much reason to care. But pundits and politicians who paid more than casual attention to the issue did have reason to care. Especially in New York and other places where Jews—and, hardly coincidentally, many of the nation’s most influential media institutions—were concentrated, college curricula soon became a crucial political battleground. It grew in significance each year as word of the unsympathetic views of Israel being taught at top universities seeped into family discussions at Thanksgiving and other holidays. Not surprisingly, the most heated controversy over the teaching of the Israel/Palestine conflict on campus occurred not long after 9/11 at New York City’s only Ivy League school, Columbia University. The problem began when a Palestinian American assistant professor, Joseph Massad—a former mentee of Said’s—taught a class called “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies.” Massad apparently used a number of unflattering terms in class to describe Israel, including calling it a “racist, settler-colonial state,” and the class became its own sort of mini war zone on campus. According to one student, “Professor Massad was unable to speak more than five sentences without being interrupted during his lecture,” and he “listened calmly and responded kindly to every interruption.” But another student claimed to have been told in class, during a discussion of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, “If you’re going to deny the atrocities being committed against the Palestinian people, then you can get out of my classroom.”8
According The Nation’s Scott Sherman, Massad said that “unregistered individuals and auditors” appeared in his class, and Massad believed they were “there to heckle him and monitor his teaching.” In any case, a few individuals secretly filmed his class. “The David Project,” a Boston-based organization devoted, in its own words, to rooting out “dishonest discussion and discourse about the Mideast on college campuses,” showed up to jump-start a student petition for Columbia to fire Massad and sanction some of his colleagues who appeared to share his views. The project was part of a multimillion-dollar effort begun in March 2002 by a network of national Jewish organizations to “‘take back the campus’ by influencing public opinion through lectures, the Internet and coalitions,” according to Sherman. It had “ties” to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), though its funding and structure always remained rather murky.9
The project recruited Jewish students to speak about their feelings and experiences on camera. It eventually created six versions of the video, titled Columbia Unbecoming, made up of student complaints about their professors, with each one being shown to different preselected audiences. Many of the students—quite a few of whom had their faces purposely distorted for the video, the way mobsters do when they testify against their bosses—expressed unhappiness with comments and statements that professors either wrote in newspapers and scholarly articles, or were heard to utter at rallies, rather than in academic settings. The film’s foundational argument, that Jews were “under attack at Columbia or that the faculty is anti-Semitic,” was a “crazy, crazy exaggeration,” according to Robert Pollack, the Jewish former dean of the university’s Columbia College, who had helped to raise millions for Columbia’s Israel and Jewish programs. Indeed, Columbia was the first Ivy League school to promote a Jew, Lionel Trilling, to a tenured position in its English Department. It has since garnered the highest percentage of Jewish students in its student body of any Ivy League school, more than 30 percent higher than its nearest competitor. Its sister school, Barnard, has the second-highest single population of Jewish students at any major school in the country, missing out on a tie with Brandeis by a single percentage point. Columbia has an Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies with enormously robust programs; a well-funded, well-attended, and well-staffed Hillel chapter; and some of the most distinguished Jewish faculty members of any university in the world.10
Even so, the videos did the trick, creating what the ancient Talmudic sage Rabbi Yossi ben Zimra called motzira: a combination of gossip and slander that led to a perception of chaos to those outside. The extreme right-wing Zionist Organization of America sponsored “The Middle East and Academic Integrity on the American Campus,” a day-long denunciation session on the Columbia campus. Campus Watch called for Massad to be fired in countless press releases and op-eds, including one published by the Wall Street Journal. The New York Sun, a small, neoconservative paper run by the right-wing Jewish editor and media entrepreneur Seth Lipsky, launched a lengthy barrage of attacks against Massad and his colleagues, with nearly hourly coverage of the students’ complaints. The New York Daily News published a lurid “special report” headlined “Poison Ivy: Climate of Hate Rocks Columbia University.” The article proclaimed that “dozens of academics are said to be promoting an I-hate-Israel agenda, embracing the ugliest of Arab propaganda, and teaching that Zionism is the root of all evil in the Mideast.” Massad’s photo appeared in an editorial under the headline “Columbia: Fire This Professor.” Given that New York City has the largest Jewish community in the world outside of Israel, its politicians naturally found the cause irresistible. Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY), who was planning a mayoral run, demanded that Columbia dismiss Massad for his “anti-Semitic rantings.” The city’s sitting mayor, Michael Bloomberg, asked Columbia to investigate the students’ complaints, as did the ADL’s Abe Foxman, though City Council Speaker Gifford Maxim warned of a potential “whitewash.” The ubiquitous Jewish attorney and television pundit Alan Dershowitz showed up on campus to denounce, perhaps not so surprisingly, Edward Said, who had died two years earlier.11
Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, tried to quiet the crisis by offloading the issue to an ad hoc committee of the faculty. When it finally issued its report, the committee found that the problem was less with Columbia itself than with those seeking to make a national issue of what was being taught in its classrooms. Yes, members of the Columbia faculty, including, especially, Massad, had made critical comments about Israel that were likely inappropriate in an academic setting. But the committee found “no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic.” What the investigation did turn up, however, was “a broader environment of incivility on campus, with pro-Israel students disrupting lectures on Middle Eastern studies and some faculty members feeling that they were being spied on.” Made-up charges were then repeated and manipulated by “pro-Israel” propagandists and then trumpeted by opportunistic politicians and careless and often disingenuous journalists and neoconservative pundits. The New York Civil Liberties Union said the committee had “properly identifie[d] the threats to academic freedom posed by the ‘involvement of outside organizations in the surveillance of professors,’” but criticized it for failing to “adequately… place the intrusion into the academy by outside organizations in a broader political context.” One student gave up his Middle East major regretfully, blaming what he called “outside instigation” that “wasn’t really about Columbia, or even Massad. It was about Edward Said. It was as if all those forces had been waiting until he was gone to make a case against him.”12
The row hardly ended with the committee report, however. Rashid Khalidi, the director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute in its School of International and Public Affairs, former president of the Middle East Studies Association, editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and, not least in importance, the son of Palestinian parents and the holder of the university’s Edward Said Chair in Modern Arab Studies, had previously cotaught a course on Israel and Palestine with Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg. He now found himself barred by the New York chancellor of education, Joel Klein, from participating in a public school education program for teachers. The disinvite came shortly after the Sun trumpeted his planned participation while reporting that the American Jewish Committee had attacked Khalidi’s “record of brazen, openly biased and distorted statements about Israel.”13
Back at Barnard, meanwhile, another controversy arose when Nadia Abu El-Haj, an American anthropologist with a Palestinian father, came up for tenure. Her 2001 book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, had been chosen by the Middle East Studies Association of North America as one of the winners of its 2002 Albert Hourani Book Award. Three different tenure committees approved her. That’s when a group led by an American-born West Bank settler named Paula Stern, who owned a small technical writing business, started sending out Internet petitions calling on Columbia to reject El-Haj, insisting that her scholarship was substandard and corrupted by an alleged hatred of Israel. Questioned about these charges by enterprising reporters, Stern admitted that the information contained in her petition might not be “100 percent accurate.” Even so, she was joined in her effort by a former Columbia student, Bari Weiss, who had participated in the Columbia Unbecoming project. Weiss had published an op-ed in Israel’s Haaretz complaining that El-Haj did not deserve tenure at Barnard because her scholarship was nothing more than an anthropological manifestation of Said’s Orientialism. Weiss apparently misunderstood Said’s work as an argument that “there is no such thing as truth or fact. Instead, there is only identity.” The effort failed, and El-Haj received tenure in 2007; as of this writing, she codirects Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies.14
Having lost this battle, Weiss—who would go on to forge a successful (and lucrative) career, first as a New York Times pundit, and later as an independent writer who specialized in exposing “cancel culture” on campuses and in the mainstream media—then went after Massad yet again. When Massad was granted tenure in 2015, Weiss published an article in Mosaic Magazine, funded by the right-wing Jewish Tikvah Fund, titled “How to Fight Anti-Semitism on Campus.” There, she complained that Massad had been promoted “despite the sustained and strong opposition of student whistleblowers, concerned alumni, and others.” This opposition had apparently continued despite the fact that Massad had somehow turned “untold numbers of naïve students into unwitting tools of anti-Semitism.” Weiss went on to attack another of Massad’s colleagues, Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature, as a “bigot.” She suggested that his presence “at a university whose biggest donors include well-known and proud supporters of Israel [was] a wonder and a scandal.” The idea that the pro-Israel donors and alumni should somehow control, or even influence, the tenure process could hardly be more offensive to the fundamental tenet of academic freedom that a great university like Columbia attempts to uphold. But it was an idea that was becoming increasingly popular among pro-Israel partisans, who were growing ever more panicky about what was being taught on campus. In November 2021, with apparently unintended irony, Weiss’s website announced the formation of a new—albeit uncredited and still largely imaginary—university to one day be located in Texas. Its mission statement explained, “The reality is that many universities no longer have an incentive to create an environment where intellectual dissent is protected, and fashionable opinions are scrutinized.”15
The controversy at Columbia would turn out to be a mere curtain-raiser to a far larger collision between the vision of Israel now common in academia—as well as in most of the rest of the world beyond America’s borders—and its portrayal in mainstream US political discourse. It began in March 2006, when two highly regarded “Realist” international relations scholars gave voice to some of the harshest criticism of Israel—and the role it played in US foreign policy—heard in mainstream debate certainly since Patrick Buchanan’s 2003 American Conservative article (and perhaps going back to Yasser Arafat’s UN speech twenty-eight years earlier).
In their interrogation of the role of what they called “the Israel Lobby,” Stephen Walt and John J. Mearsheimer authored first a 34,000-plus-word Harvard working paper along with a 13,000-plus-word article in the London Review of Books, and later a 484-page book on the subject. They argued that thanks in significant measure to the efforts of “the Lobby,” the United States had become an “enabler” of Israeli expansion in the occupied territories. The United States was therefore “complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians” and had earned the enmity of Arabs and Muslims the world over. Most controversially, they insisted that the Lobby’s pressure was the critical element in the US decision to undertake its catastrophic invasion of Iraq.16
What made this effort so significant was the comprehensiveness of the authors’ indictment, together with the prestige they enjoyed and the prominence of their publications. Walt and Mearsheimer were not leftists, Arabs, Muslims, or members of a pro-Palestinian organization. They were not friends, much less students, of Edward Said or Noam Chomsky. Their work was usually published not in The Nation or The Village Voice, but in Foreign Affairs, the prestigious publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the peer-reviewed journal Security Studies. Walt was the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University and formerly the academic dean at its John F. Kennedy School of Government. He had previously taught at Princeton and the University of Chicago, along with visiting stints at the Brookings Institution and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mearsheimer was a US Air Force veteran and the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, the former chair of its Department of Political Science, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It would have been hard, at the time of publication, to find two more respected international relations scholars anywhere in the English-speaking world.
It is true that despite these credentials, their argument was sometimes sloppy. First, much of what they attributed to the influence of “the Israel Lobby” could easily have been at least partially credited to other forces, especially in their arguments about the US invasion of Iraq. Walt and Mearsheimer credited both AIPAC and neoconservatives with more influence over Bush’s decision to go to war than they likely deserved. True, they were able to quote AIPAC’s executive director, Howard Kohr, bragging of “quietly lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq,” and called this “one of AIPAC’s successes over the past year.” But AIPAC leaders brag about all sorts of things; it does not make them true. Was “the Lobby” really the “critical element” identified by the authors in the decision to go to war? The authors promised “abundant evidence” on this point, but nowhere among their 1,399 footnotes did they make good on that claim.17
President Bush, after all, had repeatedly expressed outrage about “the guy who tried to kill my dad.” He said repeatedly that he wanted to rid the world of “evil,” and, given his combination of arrogance and religious fervor, coupled with his near total ignorance of geography, history, and culture, he apparently believed this to be possible. The more cynical pro-war voices—including those of his top three advisers, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, along with CIA Director George Tenet—had demonstrated no particular devotion to Israel. None were Jews or neoconservatives. Each was clearly motivated by a belief that Saddam Hussein represented a genuine national security threat to the United States, or at least to key national interests. These included not only access to oil, but also strategic dominance of the entire region. One can agree that, just below this level, Wolfowitz, Feith, Wurmser, Abrams, and others were putting Israel’s security near the pinnacle of their concerns. But to imply that they bamboozled their bosses into supporting their views with lies about weapons of mass destruction and phony connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda is both naïve and, at least arguably, overly conspiratorially minded.18
Second, the authors offered up “the Lobby” as virtually the only determinant of US Middle East policy—a proposition that is all but impossible to defend. Noam Chomsky was particularly critical on this point. He insisted that US support for Israel provided “a huge service” for the United States, the Saudis, and energy corporations by “smashing secular Arab nationalism,” which he said “threatened to divert resources to domestic needs.” He thought it silly to argue that the US government was somehow in the grip of “an all-powerful force that it cannot escape.” Ironically, Chomsky’s criticism was mirrored by the conservative magazine The Economist, whose editors insisted that the Walt/Mearsheimer argument “feels like an attempt to absolve America of responsibility for a decision it took by and for itself.”19
To be fair, the authors had set themselves to what was likely an impossible task. No less a scholar/practitioner than William Quandt has observed that “pro-Israel groups are often most influential when they do nothing at all to influence policy,” as they have what he calls “the law of anticipated reaction” on their side: “Alternative courses of action are frequently rejected because of the expectation of negative reaction from pro-Israeli groups and their supporters in Congress.” The fact is that “real tests of strength are rare,” thanks to the effectiveness of anticipated reaction, which works just as well “in shaping policy as the mobilization of support in a confrontation would.” Ben Rhodes, a Jewish national security adviser to President Obama, said much the same thing when he admitted that, when it comes to making Middle East policy, “the last thing we need is any static on Israel.… [I]t’s just not worth the headache.” This dynamic is more effective in preventing action than in initiating it, but it has the added attractiveness of operating invisibly. Former US ambassador to Israel Samuel Lewis admitted as much when, speaking of what he mislabeled as the “Jewish lobby,” he observed that they “can and do set limits on the freedom of action that the White House feels like it has.” But do these factors explain the invasion? Not at all. Bush’s march of folly was based on any number of misguided motivations, and only a few of these were related in any way to Israel.20
Third, while Walt and Mearsheimer did make it clear that they were not blaming “the Jews”—“Any notion that Jewish Americans are disloyal citizens is wrong… [T]hose who lobby on Israel’s behalf are acting in ways that are consistent with longstanding political traditions”—they failed to clarify the fact that whereas the decision makers in key Jewish organizations, such as AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents, were Likud-supporting hardliners, most American Jews were not. The organized Jewish world was decidedly non-democratic: it represented its conservative funders’ views with far greater fealty than it did the views of those in whose name its leaders professed to speak. Opinion survey after opinion survey consistently demonstrated support for a far more dovish foreign policy, both for the United States and for Israel, among American Jews than these organizations demanded from Congress and the president. This, together with some mention of the Jewish organizations that sought to speak for these views at the time—such as the New Israel Fund, Americans for Peace Now, Partners for a Progressive Israel, Ameinu, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, T’ruah (The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights), and the Tikkun Community, among others—might have taken the edge off of the charge of Jewish conspiracy-mongering, even if none enjoyed even a fraction of the power or funding that would have been needed to challenge AIPAC’s overall influence.21
Where the authors’ argument was most successful was in its portrayal of the lengths to which Israel’s supporters would go to ensure that the public discussion of the conflict mirrored the narrow parameters that AIPAC and its allies defined as acceptable. “The Lobby,” they wrote, “strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing U.S. support because a candid discussion of U.S.-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favor a different policy.” Ironically, the treatment of Walt and Mearsheimer’s work may be the best illustration of this process we have. In no other area of debate would a scholarly argument get a fraction of the attention the authors received, or the personal opprobrium they endured. As the Paris-based columnist William Pfaff wrote in the International Herald Tribune, “The venom in the attacks made on [Walt and Mearsheimer] risks the opposite of its intended effect by tending to validate the claim that intense pressures are exercised on publishers, editors, writers, and on American universities to block criticism, intimidate critics, and prevent serious discussion of the American-Israeli relationship.” Writing for an audience of his fellow scholars, the diplomatic historian Andrew Preston made much the same point. The most “remarkable” aspect of the entire affair, he noted, was “just how, well, unremarkable it is… [to say] that politically active pro-Israel Americans have dominated debate within the United States to such an extent that they have made it all but impossible for America to be even-handed in the Middle East. For anyone who has followed U.S. politics and foreign policy of the last forty years, even if only in passing, this is not exactly breaking news.” And yet, as Preston noted, “rarely has a major book, especially one written by esteemed scholars and published by a reputable press, been received so harshly by so many reviewers.… Using personal, mostly ad hominem attacks and scattershot but totally spurious charges of anti-Semitism, some of the most shrill, hysterical reviewers… have been guilty of nothing less than character assassination.” This was, if anything, an understatement.22
Within days of the appearance of the Harvard working paper and the article in the London Review of Books, Walt and Mearsheimer found themselves described as “crackpots” (Martin Peretz); “smelly” (Christopher Hitchens); “conspiratorial” (the ADL); and “liars” and “bigots,” as well as authors of a book that “could have been written by Pat Buchanan, by David Duke, Noam Chomsky, and some of the less intelligent members of Hamas” (Alan Dershowitz); “as scholarly as [John Birch Society founder] Robert Welch and [disgraced red-baiting Wisconsin senator Joseph] McCarthy—and just as nutty” (Max Boot); the authors who “put The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to shame” (Josef Joffe); the authors of a study that “resembles nothing so much as Wilhelm Marr’s 1879 pamphlet ‘The Victory of Judaism over Germandom’” (Ruth Wisse); and the authors of “a meretricious, dishonest piece of crap” (Congressman Jerold Nadler [D-NY]). Writing in The New Republic, Jeffery Goldberg called their book “the most sustained attack, the most mainstream attack, against the political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin,” likening it to the views of Louis Farrakhan, David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Mel Gibson, and Charles Lindbergh. His review followed Benny Morris’s assessment, also published in TNR, calling the work “a travesty… riddled with shoddiness and defiled by mendacity.” Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY) found himself musing that, “given what happened in the Holocaust, it’s shameful that people would write reports like this.”23
According to reporting by The Forward, Harvard “received ‘several calls’ from ‘pro-Israel donors’ expressing concern about the Walt-Mearsheimer paper.” It reported that one contributor the university heard from was Robert Belfer, whose $7.5 million gift to the Kennedy School had endowed Walt’s chair. In an apparent panic over the firestorm of criticism and possible financial fallout, the Kennedy School disassociated itself from the working paper and agreed to add Alan Dershowitz’s non-scholarly rebuttal to its website. Dershowitz judged the working paper to be “so dependent on biased, extremist and anti-American sources, as to raise the question of motive.” In case anyone had any doubt what that motive might be, Dershowitz spelled it out: the paper had raised “the ugly specter of ‘dual loyalty,’ a canard that has haunted Diaspora Jews from time immemorial.”24
These attacks were unsupportable. Unlike the case of Patrick Buchanan, there was not a hint of antisemitism in Walt and Mearsheimer’s writing, or even what might fairly be called “anti-Zionism.” The authors did not take issue with the fact of Israel’s existence, nor did they call for its destruction. They did not compare Israelis to Nazis or seek to dehumanize them in any way. They did not “[target]… the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” or “[deny] the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” (as the European Union’s International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance defines the term “antisemitism,” in a definition so expansive that numerous Jewish groups and Jewish studies scholars have rejected it as unfair to honest critics of Israel). They did not even “[apply] double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation,” another requirement of the definition. Yes, many of the people they criticized were Jews, but how could it have been otherwise? Israel is the Jewish state, and Jews, especially neoconservative Jews, formed the backbone of political support for the policies they sought to critique. This is the conundrum that faces all critics of either Israel or its network of (mostly) Jewish supporters in the United States.25
By the time of the Walt/Mearsheimer controversy, the array of organizations and individuals who undertook to enforce the pro-Israel parameters of debate had grown considerably. AIPAC was undoubtedly the most important and the most effective of these, but, as we have seen, there was also Campus Watch, The David Project, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), The Israel Project, Honest Reporting, Stand with Us, NGO Watch, the Israel on Campus Coalition, and, later, the anonymously funded and operated Canary Mission. All were working pretty much the same ideological police beat, albeit in different intellectual neighborhoods. Together with pro-Israel pundits associated with magazines like The New Republic, Commentary, and The Weekly Standard, the preferred style of argument for any critic of Israel was personal vituperation rather than reasoned argument.
In leveling these attacks, the writers were, whether they were aware of it or not, taking up the cause put forth by Ruth Wisse, Harvard’s Martin L. Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature, during a 2007 program at the Center for Jewish History in New York for young, aspiring Jewish journalists. Wisse had instructed them to think of themselves not as honest and independent-minded public intellectuals—in the mold of, say, Nathan Glazer or Michael Walzer, with whom she happened to be sharing the stage. Rather, she said, they were “soldiers” in Israel’s cause, armed with pens rather than Uzis. This was, of course, not only awful advice for any aspiring journalist or intellectual, but also just about the most un-Jewish attitude a person could hold. After all, the Talmudic tradition is devoted to endless ethical and intellectual disputation. (“The ways and nature of these people, the Jews, are like fire, as, were it not for the fact that the Torah was given to the Jewish people, whose study and observance restrains them, no nation or tongue could withstand them,” God is quoted as saying in Beitzah 25b:7.) But it would also stand as evidence that there is nothing unusual about older Jews instructing younger Jews to put the good of Israel above all other concerns, including their professional credos. Another term for this sort of advice might be “dual loyalty.”26
The term is poison in public discussions of Israel and raising it almost always leads to charges of antisemitism. But it is also an undeniably genuine phenomenon. For instance, at an American Jewish Committee symposium held at the Library of Congress in 2006, the brilliant Jewish novelist Cynthia Ozick announced, “I have a dual loyalty—total loyalty to the country where I live and the same feeling toward Israel.” She was attacked for this by the Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua—not for being disloyal to the United States, but for being insufficiently committed to Israel.27
In early 2020, The Forward published an editorial by a Jewish New York City schoolteacher. Based on her experiences in six different schools where she had been employed, she said she judged the schools’ respective connections to Israel to be “the most essential attribute” of their identity. At these institutions, she noted, “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, was more commonly heard than the Pledge of Allegiance or the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and Israeli national holidays were taught with greater reverence than either religious or American ones. “Veteran’s Day was never discussed, but Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, had special projects and assemblies,” the teacher noted. She also quoted her fellow faculty members saying to student assemblies, “You don’t belong in America”; “Israel is your country”; and “The IDF are your soldiers.” Joshua Shanes, an Orthodox Jewish scholar who serves as director of the Arnold Center for Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston, sends his children to a Jewish day school in Illinois where Israel is referred to as “our homeland.” He observed the presence of the Israeli flag at many synagogues as well as the fact that while “most synagogues that recite a blessing for America and/or its military forces also recite one for Israel and its military forces,” some “ONLY do so for Israel.”28
The public assault on the character of the scholars Walt and Mearsheimer may have been extreme in its size and scope, but it was hardly unique. In and around 2006, the year they published their initial critique, similar controversies arose across the US mainstream media. These involved Richard Cohen, a Jewish Washington Post columnist with decades of experience; Tony Judt, a much-admired Jewish European historian and contributing editor to The New Republic; Jimmy Carter, the former (obviously) non-Jewish president of the United States; and Steven Spielberg, the Jewish film director who is among the only creative people in the business who can get his blockbuster movies funded at the snap of his fingers. All four controversies resulted in apologies of sorts—or at least extensive explanations—by those being accused, designed to keep the wolves at bay. And, as with Walt and Mearsheimer, each example acted as a kind of cautionary tale for anyone considering stepping outside the permissible boundaries.
Cohen had penned a column wondering if perhaps the creation of Israel had a been “a mistake” that “produced a century of warfare and terrorism.” CAMERA attacked his “historical ignorance and appeasement mentality,” and the American Jewish Committee published a study titled “The New Anti-Semitism,” featuring a lengthy argument about Cohen’s alleged self-hatred. Cohen was grouped together with others whom the author Alvin Rosenfeld deemed to be “proud to be ashamed to be Jews.” Cohen responded by writing an entire book about Israel that functioned as a 273-page abject apology. Cohen’s new view: “What a marvelous people these Jews were!” What’s more, Cohen now found the ridiculous version of Israel’s history presented in the film Exodus to be accurate, “more or less.”29
Tony Judt, a British-born historian who had lived in Israel as a young man and served as a volunteer in the IDF auxiliary, did not cave nearly so easily. In 2003, he published an essay in the New York Review of Books titled “Israel: The Alternative.” In it he argued that Israel had “imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.” Judt was summarily fired as a contributing editor at TNR, where he had been among its most frequent essayists, and pilloried elsewhere. Three years later, he was scheduled to give a talk on “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” to a nonprofit organization that regularly rented space from the Polish consulate in New York. But after receiving calls from top officials at both the ADL and the American Jewish Committee, Krzysztof Kasprzyk, the Polish consul general, canceled the talk, just an hour before it was to begin.30
As Kasprzyk explained to reporters, the callers “were… exercising a delicate pressure.” The AJC’s executive director, David Harris, told journalists that he had made his call “as a friend of Poland” to let Kasprzyk know “that Tony Judt was not a universally popular figure in the Jewish community”—as if this were somehow a proper criterion for who should be allowed to speak to the organizations that rented space in the consulate for private meetings. When Judt published a collection of his work in 2008, he omitted the offending essay. In 2011, at a Paris conference sponsored by the New York Review of Books in Judt’s honor, a year after he had passed away from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), the Review’s longtime editor and founder, the much-revered Robert Silvers, insisted that Judt’s article had merely posed his suggestion as a “thought experiment,” which was not true. The intention, once again, appeared to be to make Judt’s article disappear.31
Jimmy Carter may have become a much admired ex-president, but he was still not strong enough to resist the pressure that came after he published a book in November 2006 provocatively titled Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. The ADL’s Abraham Foxman responded by calling Carter a “bigot” and denouncing him in paid newspaper advertisements across America. Alan Dershowitz called the book an “anti-Israel screed,” and Martin Peretz termed it a “tendentious, dishonest and stupid book,” adding in various blog posts that the former president of the United States was “a Jew-hater,” a “jackass,” and “a downright liar.” Less biased sources were hardly any more sympathetic. The liberal pundit Michael Kinsley, in Slate, the web magazine he founded, called Carter’s book “moronic,” and the comparisons he drew between Israel and South Africa “foolish” and “unfair.” The former executive editor of the New York Times, William Keller, also attacked the book in the ultra-liberal New York Review of Books. Almost all the attention paid to its contents focused on the book’s title. Following the attacks, Carter chose to issue an “Al Het,” which is a prayer Jews usually say on Yom Kippur to atone for their sins and ask God for forgiveness. He added, “We must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel.”32
The most interesting of these cases involved the Hollywood icon Steven Spielberg. The director chose to make a movie about the patient, long-term Mossad campaign, launched by Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, to murder every one of the Palestinian terrorists who participated in the massacre of Israel’s athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Spielberg hired Tony Kushner, the outspoken left-wing playwright and critic of Israel, to write the script. The film, Munich, examined the moral ambivalence experienced by the Mossad agents who were asked to carry out the vengeance murders, without ever implying anything but evil intentions on the part of the Palestinian kidnappers.
Munich inspired political attacks by Leon Wieseltier in TNR and David Brooks in the New York Times even before its December 2005 release. Both writers accused the director of treating the terrorists and the Mossad agents as moral equivalents. Brooks’s criticism, in particular, was filled with false and misleading accusations wrapped in an almost comical injection of whataboutism. He thought the film unfair, he wrote, because, “in 1972, Israel was just entering the era of spectacular terror attacks and didn’t know how to respond. But over the years Israelis have learned that targeted assassinations, which are the main subject of this movie, are one of the less effective ways to fight terror.” This was nonsense. Mossad did not get to the Munich murderer Atef Bseiso until 1992. Moreover, Brooks had to know that the robust Mossad assassination program continued then, as it does today. The vast majority of Rise and Kill First, the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman’s massive history of the Mossad’s assassination program, published in 2018, is devoted to killings (and failed killings) that took place after the ones portrayed in the movie. Brooks also complained that “in Spielberg’s Middle East, there is no Hamas or Islamic Jihad. There are no passionate anti-Semites, no Holocaust deniers like the current president of Iran, no zealots who want to exterminate Israelis.” This is both irrelevant and wrong. Indeed, to emphasize the reality of the terrorist attacks that inspired the murders, the director employed actual news footage from the coverage of the massacre, and neither Iran nor Hamas nor Islamic Jihad had anything to do with the story. Hamas was not founded until February 1988. Islamic Jihad was founded earlier, in 1983, but was active almost exclusively in Lebanon. Neither could have had anything to do with the 1972 Olympic massacre. Once the film appeared, Commentary’s reviewer, Gabriel Schoenfeld, termed it “a blatant attack on Israel in virtually every way, shape, and form.” Perhaps the most spectacular attack on the film, however, came from Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who compared Spielberg, the primary patron behind the creation of the Shoah Foundation, director of the Holocaust epic Schindler’s List, and the youngest person ever to be accorded Hebrew University’s Scopus Award, to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had questioned the actuality of the Holocaust: “It takes a Hollywood ignoramus to give flesh to the argument of a radical anti-Semitic Iranian,” Krauthammer wrote.33
Spielberg, the creative genius responsible for billions of dollars in movie receipts in the past, had the resources to hire high-powered PR firms to defend the film and his reputation. He also secured the services of Dennis Ross, the pro-Israel presidential adviser; former State Department spokesman Mike McCurry; and Eyal Arad, the chief PR consultant for Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. Ignoring the specifics of the attacks, Spielberg trotted out his Zionist bona fides, telling an interviewer, “I made this picture as a committed Jew, a pro-Israeli Jew and yet a human Jew. I made this movie out of love for both of my countries, USA and Israel,” the two countries for which, Spielberg added, he would “be prepared to die.” Kushner, perhaps America’s greatest playwright since Arthur Miller, also had sufficient resources to shield himself from his harshest critics. He published an imaginary conversation with his mishpocheh (family) in which he called himself “an American and a proudly Diasporan Jew.” He argued therein that his “criticism of Israel has always been accompanied by declarations of unconditional support of Israel’s right to exist,” and added, “I have written and spoken of my love for Israel.” (Kushner would experience another attempt to silence his criticism of Israel when, in 2011, John Jay College at the City University of New York decided first to give him an honorary degree, then saw that decision reversed by “pro-Israel” partisans on the university’s board of trustees, only to have that decision reversed in an emergency board meeting following an outcry over the original reversal.)34
Each person targeted in the attacks described in this chapter, including the two tenured professors Walt and Mearsheimer, had at least some of the resources they needed to withstand the abuse they encountered and emerge afterward with damage only to their reputations, and perhaps their future job prospects. But as much as these campaigns to silence critics of Israel were directed at specific individuals, they were no less intended to intimidate others, especially those who were far less able to survive, either professionally or politically, the predictable onslaught of criticism against anyone who dared transgress the boundaries of what the pro-Israel voices defined to be acceptable. Ironically, this was true despite the fact that these boundaries were almost constantly in motion.