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 omorrow,
Joel Beinin of Stanford University will become president of the
Middle East Studies Association, the leading organization for professors
who focus on that part of the world. He would be a lousy choice
any year, but he's an especially bad one in the wake of September
11.
That's because
Beinin has spent much of his career belittling U.S. policy in the
Middle East and chastising its ally Israel. He is symptomatic of
a much bigger problem, too: the complete failure of Middle Eastern
studies as an academic field to prepare the United States for the
brutal terrorism of Islamic radicalism. "It is no exaggeration
to say that America's academics have failed to predict or explain
the major evolutions of Middle Eastern politics and society over
the past two decades," writes Martin Kramer in Ivory Towers
on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, a
sharp monograph just out from the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy. "Time and again, academics have been taken by
surprise by their subjects; time and again, their paradigms have
been swept away by events."
Beinin embodies
this failure in his area of purported expertise. In 1988, he described
Israel as a "garrison state" and said its "total
economic collapse is not inconceivable." Then he set forth
a bold prediction: "In the coming decade, we can expect to
see a series of crises in the Israeli economy, sharpening social
and political conflict, a more aggressive stance toward the Arab
world, and growing Israeli dependence on the United States."
He also said he was "pessimistic" that Israel would have
a government that would "seek to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict
on terms which will secure self-determination for the Palestinian
people."
He turns out
to have been fabulously wrong. As Kramer points out, "In the
decade following publication of this grim forecast, Israel's economy
doubled in size; Israel became a global center for civilian hi-tech;
military industries retrenched; and Israel's dependence on American
aid, measured in absolute terms as a percentage of gross domestic
product, diminished sharply. Israel launched no aggressive wars.
Instead it recognized the PLO and turned formerly occupied territory
over to exclusive Palestinian control. Politicians across the Israeli
spectrum either welcomed or resigned themselves to the inevitability
of a Palestinian state."
Beinin views
himself as something more than an objective scholar: He is a full-time
political activist. Last summer, for instance, he was agitating
for the United States to suspend all military aid to Israel, according
to the Chicago Tribune.
The only thing
MESA can possibly say in its defense is that Beinin was elected
long before September 11; it's only now, at MESA's annual convention,
that he will formally take the helm. Yet Beinin is hardly alone
in his prejudices. They helped get him elected in the first place,
and they add a troubling flourish to Kramer's compelling thesis
that the whole field of Middle East studies lies in shambles.
On
The Site
Ramesh Ponnuru on the Democratic strategy after 9-11.
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