Professor Alan Dershowitz has posted on the Harvard Kennedy School of Government website his 45-page (with 157 footnotes) response to the Walt & Mearsheimer paper on the ?Israel Lobby.? In his response, Dershowitz expressly questions their motive:

[A]s I will show, this study is so filled with distortions, so empty of originality or new evidence, so tendentious in its tone, so lacking in nuance and balance, so unscholarly in its approach, so riddled with obvious factual errors that could easily have been checked (but obviously were not), and so dependent on biased, extremist and anti-American sources, as to raise the question of motive: what would motivate two well recognized academics to depart so grossly from their usual standards of academic writing and research in order to produce a ?study paper? that contributes so little to the existing scholarship while being so susceptible to misuse? [Page 6].

 

 

 

Dershowitz repeats the question again 38 pages later, at the end of his paper, but does not answer it. After summarizing some of the more egregious factual mistakes and easily refutable distortions that even a serious student, much less a scholar, would never make, Dershowitz leaves it at this: ?I simply do not understand, what is the motive?? (emphasis in original).

Perhaps, since Walt & Mearsheimer?s paper makes the same argument, in the same tone, with the same subtlety as such prior scholars as Charles Lindbergh (here), Louis Farrakhan (here) and David Duke (here), Dershowitz?s questions are simply rhetorical. 

Or perhaps the failure to provide what, by the end of the paper, is an obvious answer is simply Dershowitz?s attempt to comply with the new Harvard Kennedy School ?Guidelines for Submitting Responses to KSG Faculty Research Working Papers? (there do not appear to be any Guidelines for posting the ?research working papers? themselves):

Full-time Harvard University faculty members may submit a response to a KSG faculty research working paper. To be eligible for posting on this website, all response papers must be academic in form and content, with references and footnotes as appropriate, must respond directly to the intellectual ideas and evidence presented in the original working paper, and must avoid ad hominem critiques.

 

 

By raising the elephant-in-the-room question but not answering it, Dershowitz may simply be trying to ?respond directly to the intellectual ideas and evidence? presented by Walt & Mearsheimer -- such as they are -- without running afoul of the prohibited ?ad hominem critique? that an explicit answer might necessarily entail. 

But the failure to provide any alternative hypothesis is itself an answer (and in any event, the answer is here). It needs no further explication.

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