NYU Prof
Admits MESA's Anti-Israel Stance, Rails Against 'Israel Lobby'
by Mara Schiffren
Jihad Watch
March 4, 2015
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How does a detail-oriented lecture on research methodology and academic
field building in Middle Eastern Studies (MES) descend into a one-sided and
unprovoked salvo against Israel? Last month, Zachary Lockman, a professor
of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University (NYU),
provided the answer with a talk
entitled, "Anxieties of Field-Building in U.S. Middle East
Studies." It was the first in a new series at NYU meant to introduce
students to faculty members' methodological approaches; however, Lockman
used the occasion of the question and answer period to peddle "Israel
Lobby" conspiracy theories that bordered on classical anti-Semitism.
The talk took place in the museum-like
Richard Ettinghausen Library in the Hagop Kevorkian Center. Half the room
was high-ceilinged with built-in mosaic-covered arches in the Islamic style
along one wall and floors with inlaid mosaics, the other half walled in
honey-stained wood and lined with reference books. The audience of
approximately fifty, primarily graduate students and research fellows,
filled the room.
Part of the research for a new project, Lockman focused on political
vectors influencing how the field of Middle Eastern studies was built in
the post-WWII period. In particular, he examined the role of the Social
Science Research Council (SSRC), their multi-decade lavish funding from the
Ford Foundation, and, ultimately, their failure to create an agenda to
influence the study of the modern Middle East. His project ends in the
1980s, the point at which the Middle East Studies
Association (MESA) began, as he put it, to accommodate "the
opposition left wing caucus within Middle East studies" composed
"of people, myself included" with the resultant "political
[and] intellectual consequences." Indeed, from that point onwards,
MESA's politicization took on a leftward and anti-Zionist slant, causing
many scholars to leave the organization and, in some cases, to form alternatives.
Although no one brought up Israel during the question and answer period
following the lecture, Lockman proved the point when he began, in his own
language, to "free associate" at length about the country's
alleged faults, all the while employing an objective, professorial tone.
In answer to an audience member's question, "I'm just curious as to
when you started to see foreign governments fund area studies departments
and . . . to what extent [did] their funding ha[ve] any sort of conditions
attached to it?," Lockman noted briefly that, in the 1970s, Saudi
Arabia "created a King someone or other chair . . . and appointed an
old Aramco [the Saudi Arabian Oil Company] guy to it." He acknowledged
this was "problematic" before focusing on what he believed to be
the truly controversial characteristic of the situation:
So, by this point, you begin to get criticism often from American Jewish
groups for this kind of thing. There hadn't been much criticism before
that, but it's part of the emergence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
organized Jewish groups lobbying a whole range of things, and those kind of
donations come to be seen as questionable or problematic in ways that they
weren't so much before.
In other words, Lockman diverted the discussion to the alleged
depredations of the "Israel Lobby." Alluding further to Israel
and its lobbyists, he assured the audience that, "[F]or those of you
who feel you are under siege, let me reassure you there's a very long
history to this."
From this Lockman segued to Senator William Fulbright's 1963 hearings
on "Activities of Nondiplomatic Representatives of Foreign Principals
in the United States," which were aimed at uncovering abuses of the
Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938 and making necessary
amendments to the law:
Among other things, the hearings showed that money from Israel was being
channeled, again, not in conformance with American law—you're supposed to
register before getting money from foreign governments—to something called
the council for Middle East Studies, which published a journal through the
50s and into the 60s . . . which was subsidized surreptitiously by the
Israeli government, passing money through the American Foundation.
His preoccupation and thorough familiarity with this topic—declassified
through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by anti-Israel conspiracy
monger Grant F. Smith in order to write an anti-American-Israeli Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) screed—further
reveals his obsession with alleged Israeli influence-buying.
Lockman then told a convoluted story concerning a "secret"
donation from Israel that he traced personally, even writing a letter decades
later to its recipient, Henry Siegman—a former executive director of the
American Jewish Congress who later became a harsh
critic of Israel and hence, in Lockman's words, "a very sweet
guy." This ostensibly nefarious donation amounted to the princely sum
of five hundred dollars—a paltry gift indeed compared to the Ford
Foundation's "hundreds of millions" to academe in the early
1950s.
Next Lockman claimed that by 1984 MESA was "denouncing the
Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC because they [were] circulating blacklists
of scholars, anti-Israel, whatever." In fact, it is anti-Israel
agitators who have a history of leveling spurious "blacklisting" accusations against
outside critics.
Returning to the evolution of MESA, Lockman noted that:
In its early years, it quite deliberately refused to talk about what was
then called the Arab-Israeli conflict. . . . No papers at MESA, no panels
at MESA in its first couple of years because they were terrified about
divisiveness, conflict, whatever.
Today's MESA is no stranger to divisiveness and conflict. Its membership
recently agreed to provide platforms for "sustained
discussion of the academic
boycott of Israel," a move that even Lockman, a former MESA
president, opposed, arguing that the organization could suffer a loss of
prestige, membership, and Title-VI
congressional funding. Ironically, the politicization of MESA has now
reached the culmination for which Lockman and his cohorts were agitating in
the 1970-80s, while Lockman has become one of the graying heads urging
restraint.
The contrast between Lockman's lecture and his conspiratorial assertions
against Israel during the Q&A was noteworthy: during the former, his
tone was restrained and objective, while during the latter his every
utterance was negative. He obviously assumed his audience shared his
prejudices—a safe bet in contemporary academe. Beyond describing the
methodology of field-building, Lockman offered unscripted instructions on
how to build a biased case against Israel.
Mara Schiffren, who has a Ph.D. from Harvard University in
comparative religion, is currently working on a book about historical
Israel. She wrote this essay for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.
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