Harvard Professor Stephen M. Walt will speak to Tufts students about his controversial new book "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" this November.
The book, which was published last month, argues that the United States' overwhelming support for Israel is not in its best interests and that the reason for this unwarranted alliance is the influence of the Jewish lobby in Washington, D.C. in policy-making decisions.
Walt, who co-authored the New York Times best-selling book with John Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago, is set to speak in Barnum Hall on Nov. 27. The lecture is sponsored by Tufts' Political Science Department.
"The two individuals are very learned people making a controversial argument and we think that argument belongs [in] the university," said Professor Robert DeVigne, the chair of the Politic Science Department.
Walt, the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and Mearsheimer note in their book that Israel receives more economic and military aid from the United States than any other country in the world: $3 billion annually. According to the authors, that is enough to pay each Israeli citizen almost $500 a year.
They also claim that Israel is the only state that does not have to indicate how it spends the aid it receives.
Walt and Mearsheimer contend that the U.S. "gives Israel access to intelligence it denies its NATO allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons" and argue that the terrorists that target the United States tend to do so because of its close ties with Israel.
The book, originally a working paper published in the London Review of Books in 2006, has received intense criticism from the political and scholarly world.
The most extreme critics claim that Walt and Mearsheimer used neo-Nazi sources to obtain information and label them anti-Semites.
Some of Walt's colleagues at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government criticized the quality of his academic research, claiming that it did not meet fundamental standards.
Ronnie Olesker, a political science lecturer at Tufts, shares this view. She said she cannot see how an accurate assessment of the Jewish lobby could be obtained "if the people influenced by the lobby weren't interviewed."
Although Olesker feels there is a lack of primary sources in the book, she maintains that "the discourse has value" and hopes that Walt's lecture will involve Tufts students in this valuable debate.
"I hope many students participate. It is an extremely important conversation to have among ourselves and the authors," she said.
Olesker, who teaches Israeli Domestic Politics, Israeli Foreign Politics and Domestic Security, and Human Rights and the War on Terror, said people usually tend to "shy away" from this debate.
Walt and Mearsheimer predicted the accusations they received in their paper, contending that those who "lobby" for Israel are consistently trying to stop the debate over U.S. foreign policy in Israel from reaching the public.
This has gone as far as "stifling" the debate on college campuses by attempting to limit what professors say and consistently portraying those who speak out against U.S. support for Israel as anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic.
Because of the high demand for the two authors, Walt and Mearsheimer rarely appear together, according to DeVigne. The week before he speaks at Tufts, Walt will also be speaking at MIT.
Mearsheimer appeared on "The Colbert Report" at the beginning of the month. Stephen Colbert, the show's host, accused Mearsheimer of claiming that "the Jews are in control" of U.S. foreign policy. Mearsheimer defended himself by claiming that there is a important difference between the Jewish people and the Jewish lobby.
Still, Jeffrey Summit, a rabbi at Tufts, said that the authors are misguided and that it is in America's best interest to maintain a strong relationship with Israel, a "vibrant democracy in the Middle East."
"I read the paper and thought that their logic was distorted and they often misinterpreted facts," Summit said in an e-mail.
