In March 2006, the Harvard Kennedy School published a working paper, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by influential political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The paper, which ran in the London Review of Books and became the basis for a book published the following year, was an unflinching analysis of the impact of pro-Israel advocacy and lobbying groups on the U.S. political system, and the role of organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in shaping U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East.
Mearsheimer and Walt described a loose coalition of philanthropists, think tanks, advocacy groups, and Christian Zionist organizations that routinely pulled U.S. policy toward the Middle East away from America’s national interest, as the U.S. was being drawn into a military quagmire in Iraq. “Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored,” Walt and Mearsheimer wrote, “but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical.”
Mearsheimer and Walt described a loose coalition of philanthropists, think tanks, advocacy groups, and Christian Zionist organizations that routinely pulled U.S. policy toward the Middle East away from America’s national interest, as the U.S. was being drawn into a military quagmire in Iraq. “Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored,” Walt and Mearsheimer wrote, “but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical.”
Even before the Kennedy School posted the paper online, the project had already spooked editors at The Atlantic, who originally commissioned the essay in the early 2000s. In an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year, Mearsheimer revealed that the editor of The Atlantic offered them a “$10,000 kill fee” if the publication didn’t print the article. Mearsheimer said, “That’s the fastest $10,000 we ever made.”
The paper was written by two highly esteemed scholars of international relations; Walt had been serving since 2002 as Academic Dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School, as prestigious an appointment as exists in the field, and Mearsheimer taught at the University of Chicago. But the backlash against it was swift, intense, and unusually public in the world of academia. A wave of news articles described the authors as antisemites, while the Anti-Defamation League weighed in to denounce what they called an “anti-Jewish screed.” The pressure became so intense that the Kennedy School removed its logo from the paper and added a disclaimer distancing the institution from its arguments.
The paper was written by two highly esteemed scholars of international relations; Walt had been serving since 2002 as Academic Dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School, as prestigious an appointment as exists in the field, and Mearsheimer taught at the University of Chicago. But the backlash against it was swift, intense, and unusually public in the world of academia. A wave of news articles described the authors as antisemites, while the Anti-Defamation League weighed in to denounce what they called an “anti-Jewish screed.” The pressure became so intense that the Kennedy School removed its logo from the paper and added a disclaimer distancing the institution from its arguments.
Unknown at the time, Jeffrey Epstein gave feedback on talking points to discredit Mearsheimer and Walt, and used his extensive social network to circulate allegations of anti-semitism against the two scholars. Details of Epstein’s role in the backlash to the “Israel Lobby” paper come from a trove of emails obtained by the non-profit whistleblower organization Distributed Denial of Secrets and provided to Drop Site News.
The emails from Epstein’s Yahoo! account have been covered in part by Bloomberg, but his correspondence over Walt and Mearsheimer’s work has not previously been reported. Bloomberg conducted cryptographic verification on the email cache that they said “strongly authenticated a portion of the emails; corroborated sources of important enclosures; and found no meaningful evidence of fakery,” though evidence suggested that some emails were deleted. The source for the DDoS cache stated that they were not the source for Bloomberg—a statement DDoS said is supported by slight variations in the scope of the email tranche.
The emails from Epstein’s Yahoo! account have been covered in part by Bloomberg, but his correspondence over Walt and Mearsheimer’s work has not previously been reported. Bloomberg conducted cryptographic verification on the email cache that they said “strongly authenticated a portion of the emails; corroborated sources of important enclosures; and found no meaningful evidence of fakery,” though evidence suggested that some emails were deleted. The source for the DDoS cache stated that they were not the source for Bloomberg—a statement DDoS said is supported by slight variations in the scope of the email tranche.
The cache shows that, during the first week of April 2006, Epstein received multiple early drafts of an attack piece by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz titled “Debunking the Newest - and Oldest - Jewish Conspiracy.” In it, Dershowitz, who also served as Epstein’s defense attorney in his criminal matters, accused Mearsheimer and Walt of recycling “discredited trash” from neo-Nazi and Islamist websites, accusing them of authoring a modern counterpart to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Epstein responded to Dershowitz’s email, “terrific…congragulations (sic).”
A few hours later, Epstein received another message from Dershowitz’s email address, signed off by an assistant. The assistant asked Epstein to help circulate copies of the attack piece, writing, “Jeffrey, were you going to distribute this for Alan?? If I should forward this to someone in your office, pls let me know.” Epstein replied in the affirmative: “yes I’ve started.”
Despite holding no formal role, Epstein was a powerful figure at Harvard. He had spent years cultivating relationships at the university, donating more than $9 million between 1998 and 2008, and positioning himself as a fixer and patron for high-profile academics, including Dershowitz and economist Larry Summers—who was the president of Harvard at the time.
Full report:
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