One of the frequent complaints heard from academics and others who are publicly critical of Israel, including former president Jimmy Carter, is that their criticism is met with powerful, some say oppressive, backlash from those eager to defend both Zionism and Israel.
In fact, the fallout from President Carter’s recent book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, was so pronounced that members of the board of the Carter Center at Emory resigned to express their own disapproval of the work.
Critics worldwide denounced both the theme and intent of the book, causing Carter to contend, as other Israel-bashers have also done, that it is difficult to openly criticize the Jewish state, that he had felt “severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts,” and that supporters of Israel, in his view, try to suppress criticism, stifle debate and intimidate those who speak against the country’s policies.
Just this month at Harvard University, Professor L. Roland Matory expressed a similar notion when he said that there was “widespread censorship of dissent about Israel-Palestine.” That alleged censorship had made him feel “unsafe,” the same sensation experienced by Carter, no doubt, as he toured college campuses with his view that Israel was singularly at fault for the chronic suffering of the Palestinians.
Matory and Carter are not the first to bemoan the oppressive and fearful might of pro-Israel forces in stifling any criticism or discussion of Israel: Their outrage and trepidations might inspire sympathy save for the inconvenient fact that the sheer volume and frequency of chronic, unrelenting, vitriolic and one-sided demonization of Zionism and Israel on campuses worldwide makes both Matory’s and Carter’s claims of being cowered into silence by Israel’s supporters a bit disingenuous.
In that respect, they share a similar view with Harvard’s Stephen Walt, who, with the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer, recently published The Israel Lobby, a book-length version of an earlier paper that revealed the existence, in their minds, of a powerful, cabalistic lobby in America working to sway public policy and jeopardize America’s international standing, all to Israel’s advantage.
“The goal [of the Israel lobby],” they wrote, in words similar to Matory’s and Carter’s own wild observations, “is to prevent critical commentary about Israel from getting a fair hearing in the political arena.”
While their insidious bit of scholarship, which Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, called an “inept, even kooky academic work,” soared to the top of the non-fiction bestseller’s list and sent the pair off on a nationwide book tour, they still manage without embarrassment to proclaim that they are, like Matory, touching the “third rail” of political discussion and fearfully go public with criticism of Israel.
What Walt, Mearsheimer, Matory and the former president have all apparently failed to realize is that they have not been silenced at all in their unrelenting rants against Israel. In fact, the very opposite is true: They have achieved increased notoriety and, in some quarters, wide acclaim for their views.
More importantly, in their zeal to preempt the insulating force of this notion of “academic freedom,” they have sought to deprive their ideological opponents of the same rights and protection; that is, while they want to be able to utter any calumny against the Jewish state and suffer no recriminations for their speech, they view any speech from those challenging their views to be oppressive, stifling, unreasonable, and, in the popular term used by those who frequently utter second-rate ideas, “chilling.”
But the issue is far more obvious than the professors care to realize, and much less insidious. Those who speak back to anti-Israel ideologues do so not to suppress criticism of Israel; academic freedom grants the professors the right to spew forth any academic meanderings they wish, but it does not make them free from being challenged for their thoughts.
“Free speech does not absolve anyone from professional incompetence,” says Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Those who question using the term “apartheid” to define Israeli society or critique the anti-Israel and anti-American “scholarship” parading on campuses as Middle Eastern studies or answer back when a work purports to reveal a sinister Jewish cabal controlling U.S. foreign policy or correct such notions as Professor Matory’s that Israel is “quashing the rights of millions of Palestinians refugees to lands, houses, and goods stolen as a condition of Israel’s founding in the late 1940s” are not stifling debate about Israel. They are using their own academic freedom to rebut what they see as distortions, half-truths, propaganda, mistakes about history or outright lies.
There is nothing unseemly about countering speech — even hateful speech — with more speech. In fact, that is the very heart of the University’s mission. These critics of Israel and Zionism claim that they are seeking solutions to difficult political situations through reasoned discourse, but their real intention seems to be to have only one side of the ideological discussion be heard — without the uncomfortable necessity of hearing other, dissenting views.
Like many of their fellow scholars, they proclaim widely the virtues of open expression, but only for those who utter those thoughts with which they agree. But true intellectual diversity — the ideal that is often bandied about but rarely achieved — must be dedicated to the protection of unfettered speech, representing opposing viewpoints, where the best ideas become clear through the utterance of weaker ones.
Richard L. Cravatts is the former director of publications at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a lecturer at Boston University, Simmons and Babson.
