[Kenneth Roth, who ran Human Rights Watch for 29 years, was denied
a fellowship at the Kennedy School. The reason? Israel.]
[[link removed]]

WHY THE GODFATHER OF HUMAN RIGHTS IS NOT WELCOME AT HARVARD  
[[link removed]]


 

Michael Massing
January 5, 2023
The Nation
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Kenneth Roth, who ran Human Rights Watch for 29 years, was denied a
fellowship at the Kennedy School. The reason? Israel. _

, Victor Juhasz

 

Soon after Kenneth Roth announced in April that he planned to step
down as the head of Human Rights Watch, he was contacted by Sushma
Raman [[link removed]], the
executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the
Harvard Kennedy School. Raman asked Roth if he would be interested in
joining the center as a senior fellow. It seemed like a natural fit.
In Roth’s nearly 30 years as the executive director of HRW, its
budget had grown from $7 million to nearly $100 million, and its staff
had gone from 60 to 550 people monitoring more than 100 countries. The
“godfather” of human rights, _The New York Times_ called him
in a long, admiring overview of his career
[[link removed]],
noting that Roth “has been an unrelenting irritant to authoritarian
governments, exposing human rights abuses with documented research
reports that have become the group’s specialty.” HRW played a
prominent role in establishing the International Criminal Court, and
it helped secure the convictions of Charles Taylor of Liberia, Alberto
Fujimori of Peru, and (in a tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) the
Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic
[[link removed]].

Roth had been involved with the Carr Center since its founding in
1999. In 2004, he participated in a debate before 300 people with
Michael Ignatieff, then its director, over whether the US invasion of
Iraq qualified as a humanitarian intervention (Ignatieff said it did;
Roth said it didn’t). The debate was moderated by Samantha Power,
one of the center’s founders.

In a video conference with Raman and Mathias Risse
[[link removed]], the Carr
Center’s faculty director, Roth said he was indeed interested in
becoming a fellow; he planned to write a book about his experience at
HRW and how a relatively small group of people can move governments,
and he could draw on the center’s research facilities. On May 7,
Raman sent him a formal proposal, and on June 9, Roth agreed in
principle to join the center. Raman sent the proposal to the office
of Dean Douglas Elmendorf
[[link removed]] for approval
in what was assumed to be a formality. On July 12, Roth had a video
conversation with Elmendorf (a former senior economist at the Council
of Economic Advisers and a director of the Congressional Budget
Office) to introduce himself and answer any questions he might have.

Two weeks later, however, Elmendorf informed the Carr Center that
Roth’s fellowship would not be approved.

The center was stunned. “We thought he would be a terrific
fellow,” says Kathryn Sikkink
[[link removed]], the Ryan
Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School. A
leading academic in the field, Sikkink has been affiliated with the
Carr Center for nine years, and during that time nothing like this had
ever happened. As she noted, the center has hosted other prominent
human rights advocates, including William Schulz
[[link removed]], the
executive director of Amnesty International USA from 1994 to 2006,
and Salil Shetty
[[link removed]], the
secretary general of Amnesty International from 2010 to 2018.

Sikkink was even more surprised by the dean’s explanation: Israel.
Human Rights Watch, she was told, has an “anti-Israel bias”;
Roth’s tweets on Israel were of particular concern. Sikkink was
taken aback. In her own research, she had used HRW’s reports “all
the time,” and while the organization had indeed been critical of
Israel, it had also been critical of China
[[link removed]], Saudi Arabia
[[link removed]]—even
the United States [[link removed]].

Sikkink included that point in a detailed e-mail she prepared for the
dean seeking to rebut the charge of anti-Israel bias. She drew on the
Political Terror Scale, a yearly measure of state repression compiled
by a team based at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. It
ranks countries on a 1-to-5 scale of least to most repressive
[[link removed]],
based on the incidence of political imprisonment, summary executions,
torture, and the like. The team codes each country’s record based on
the annual human rights reports of the US State Department, Amnesty
International, and Human Rights Watch. Every year
[[link removed]], Israel and the Occupied
Territories scored a 3 or 4, putting it in a class with Angola,
Colombia, Turkey, and Zimbabwe—a “very bad record,” Sikkink
says. She further compared HRW’s assessment to that of both Amnesty
and the State Department and found the three to be “pretty
similar.” In short, Sikkink says, the data showed that “Human
Rights Watch does not have a bias at all against Israel” and that to
conclude otherwise “is misinformation.” She sent her findings to
Elmendorf; the dean answered that he had read her e-mail but would not
reconsider his decision.

To understand the context of that decision, Sikkink referred me to an
article by Peter Beinart that appeared in _The New York Times_ on
August 26 under the headline “Has the Fight Against Antisemitism
Lost Its Way?
[[link removed]]”
“Over the past 18 months,” Beinart wrote, “America’s most
prominent Jewish organizations have done something extraordinary. They
have accused the world’s leading human rights organizations of
promoting hatred of Jews.” After HRW issued an April 2021 report
[[link removed]] accusing
Israel of practicing a policy of apartheid toward the Palestinians,
Beinart noted, the American Jewish Committee claimed that its charges
“sometimes border on antisemitism.
[[link removed]]”
And after Amnesty International, in February 2022, issued its own
report charging Israel with apartheid
[[link removed]], the
Anti-Defamation League predicted that it “likely will lead to
intensified antisemitism.
[[link removed]]”
In addition, the AJC and ADL joined four other prominent Jewish groups
in issuing a statement
[[link removed]] claiming
that Amnesty’s report was not just biased and inaccurate but also
“fuels those antisemites around the world who seek to undermine the
only Jewish country on Earth.” It was, Beinart concluded, a
“terrible irony” that “the campaign against
‘antisemitism’” was being used by these groups as “a weapon
against the world’s most respected human rights organizations.”

The godfather: Ken Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, has
had a storied career exposing authoritarian governments. (Scott Heins
/ Getty Images)

The charge that Human Rights Watch is hostile to Israel is hardly new.
In 2009, Robert Bernstein
[[link removed]],
the former head of Random House, who founded HRW and served as its
chair from 1978 to 1998
[[link removed]],
sharply criticized it in a _Times_ opinion piece
[[link removed]]. HRW’s
original mission, he wrote, was “to pry open closed societies,
advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters,” but it had instead
“been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping
those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.” The Middle East
“is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights
records,” yet HRW “has written far more condemnations of Israel
for violations of international law than of any other country in the
region.” (Rejecting Bernstein’s claim, HRW observed that since
2000 it had produced more than 1,700 reports and other commentaries on
the Middle East and North Africa, the vast majority of which were
about countries other than Israel.)

HRW has also been regularly attacked
[[link removed]] by Gerald
Steinberg [[link removed]], an emeritus
professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and
the president of NGO Monitor. Despite its neutral-sounding name, NGO
Monitor, since its founding in 2001, has almost exclusively tracked
nongovernmental organizations that are critical of Israel, HRW chief
among them. It has accused the organization of “playing a leading
role in the demonization of Israel
[[link removed]],”
of pushing an “anti-Israel agenda
[[link removed]]”
that contributes to hatred of that country, and of hiding its
political bias behind “the rhetoric of human rights.” “Ken
Roth’s Immoral Anti-Israel Obsession and the Gaza War” ran the
headline atop a September 2014 report
[[link removed]].
For more than a decade, it stated, Roth had made “numerous false
factual claims” about Israel and routinely distorted international
law “to promote his personal and ideological objectives.” As
evidence, it offered a catalog of more than 400 tweets. (Example:
“Israel’s vaunted precision attacks when targeting civilian
structures like family homes are just plain war crimes.
[[link removed]]”)

Steinberg and other defenders of Israel were especially aggrieved
[[link removed]] by HRW’s
2021 report accusing Israel of apartheid
[[link removed]].
In 217 pages of detailed documentation and legal analysis, the report
sought to demonstrate that the Israeli authorities had met the legal
definition of the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution
(the severe deprivation of fundamental rights on racial, ethnic, or
other grounds) by pursuing policies in both Israel and the Occupied
Territories that “methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and
discriminate against Palestinians.” Those policies included
facilitating the transfer of Jewish Israelis to the Occupied
Territories and granting them rights superior to those of Palestinians
living there; the widespread confiscation of privately held land in
much of the West Bank; and the building of the separation barrier
“in a way that accommodated anticipated growth of
settlements”—all dispelling the notion “that Israeli authorities
consider the occupation temporary.”

DONATE NOW TO POWER THE NATION.
[[link removed]] Readers like you make our
independent journalism possible.

Steinberg pounced in _The Jerusalem Post_
[[link removed]].
Though HRW claimed its report was based on new material, he wrote,
“a quick read reveals the same mix of shrill propaganda, false
allegations, and legal distortions marketed by the NGO network for
decades.” In contrast to the systematic cruelty of South Africa’s
apartheid regime, Israel’s non-Jewish citizens “have full rights,
including voting for Knesset representatives.” Steinberg denounced
the report’s author, Omar Shakir
[[link removed]], citing his previous
work as “a campus activist” agitating against Israeli apartheid,
and attacked Roth for leading a “20-year campaign” invoking the
“Israel apartheid” theme.

Roth rejects such claims. Most people knowledgeable about Israel, he
says, understand that NGO Monitor “is a profoundly biased source”
that “has never found a criticism of Israel’s human rights record
to be valid.” Roth thinks that Steinberg was “particularly
incensed that I dared to criticize Israel even though I am Jewish and
was drawn to the human rights cause by my father’s experience living
in Nazi Germany.” His father escaped to New York in 1938 when he was
12, and Roth grew up hearing many “Hitler stories.”

In his recurring broadsides against HRW, Steinberg almost never
mentions the organization’s frequent reports and statements
about abuses and crimes committed by the Palestinian authorities
[[link removed]].
In a 2018 report titled “Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent
[[link removed]],”
for instance, HRW asserted that “in the 25 years since Palestinians
gained a degree of self-rule over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,
their authorities have established machineries of repression to crush
dissent, including through the use of torture.” Based on a two-year
investigation that included interviews with 147 ex-detainees and
family members and their lawyers
[[link removed]],
among others, the report listed 86 cases that together showed that
“Palestinian authorities routinely arrest people whose peaceful
speech displeases them and torture those in their custody.” The
arrests “constitute serious violations of international human rights
law,” and the torture “may amount to a crime against humanity,
given its systematic practice over many years.” The report’s
author was Omar Shakir.

In short, under Roth, Human Rights Watch held the Palestinian
authorities to the same standard that it applied to Israel and many
other governments. Roth made this point in his July 12 conversation
with Elmendorf. During it, Roth recalls, the dean said that he was
going to start vetting fellowships more closely and asked Roth whether
he had any enemies. “That’s what I do,” Roth told him. “I make
enemies.”

The list is indeed long. In 2014, Roth was denied entry to Cairo
[[link removed]] after
arriving to release a report implicating senior Egyptian officials in
the systematic killing of protesters. In 2020, he was turned away at
Hong Kong’s airport
[[link removed]] after
arriving to release HRW’s annual report, the lead essay of which,
written by Roth, criticized China’s human rights record
[[link removed]].
He was denounced by Saudi Arabia over HRW’s demands for
accountability in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi
[[link removed]]; blocked on Twitter
[[link removed]] by
Rwanda’s Paul Kagame
[[link removed]] for HRW’s
reports on atrocities and repression by his government; and placed on
the list of people sanctioned by Russia
[[link removed]] after
its invasion of Ukraine.

“But I knew what he was driving at,” Roth says of his exchange
with Elmendorf. “It’s always Israel.”

In response to a request for comment, James F. Smith, a Kennedy School
spokesman, wrote, “We have internal procedures in place to consider
fellowships and other appointments, and we do not discuss our
deliberations about individuals who may be under consideration.” To
this day, Elmendorf has given no indication of who may have objected
to Roth’s presence at the school.

Proof of policy: HRW’s reports described Israel’s discriminatory
practices. Here, Israeli soldiers guard a checkpoint in the occupied
West Bank. (Gil Cohen-Magen / AFP via Getty Images)

One precedent offers a clue, however. On September 13, 2017, the
Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics announced
[[link removed]] that Chelsea
Manning [[link removed]] would
be among its visiting fellows that fall. Manning had been released
from prison
[[link removed]] in
May after serving seven years for violating the Espionage Act and for
other offenses
[[link removed]] arising
from her leak of hundreds of thousands of classified or sensitive
military and diplomatic documents. Michael Morell
[[link removed]],
who spent 33 years at the CIA, including three-plus years as its
deputy director, and who at the time was a nonresident senior fellow
at the Kennedy School, was outraged, and the next day he sent Dean
Elmendorf a letter
[[link removed]] announcing
his resignation. “Unfortunately, I cannot be part of an
organization—The Kennedy School—that honors a convicted felon and
leaker of classified information,” he wrote. (According to Kathryn
Sikkink, during his four years at the school, Morell defended on
several occasions the Bush administration’s use of torture,
insisting that practices like waterboarding did not qualify as such.)

Later that day, CIA director Mike Pompeo
[[link removed]] informed
the university that he supported Morell’s decision and
was canceling a scheduled appearance that evening at the Kennedy
School
[[link removed]]. Early
the next day
[[link removed]],
Elmendorf announced that the school was withdrawing the invitation to
Manning “and the perceived honor that it implies to some people.”
Two other controversial figures that the Institute of Politics had
also invited to become fellows—former Trump officials Sean Spicer
[[link removed]] and Corey
Lewandowski
[[link removed]]—faced
no such sanction. An online petition
[[link removed]] organized
by a group of Harvard graduates that criticized Elmendorf’s decision
attracted more than 15,000 signatures. “By caving in to pressure
from present and former top officials of the CIA,” it stated, “you
have jettisoned academic freedom.”

For all the differences between Chelsea Manning and Kenneth Roth—the
former a leaker and whistleblower convicted of having violated the
Espionage Act, the latter a leading human rights advocate—they
suffered similar fates, and together they suggest a fundamental
reality about the Kennedy School: the dominant presence of the US
national security community and its close ally Israel.

The Kennedy School is one of the world’s premier schools of
government and public policy. It offers everything from doctorates and
master’s degrees in public policy and administration to one-week
executive training sessions that cost $10,250
[[link removed]] and
allow participants to put Harvard on their résumés. It is not a
single cohesive institution but rather a conglomeration of fiefdoms
and bailiwicks that deal with everything from conflict resolution,
nuclear proliferation, and climate change to urban policy, financial
regulation, and voter mobilization. Among the largest of these are
the Center for Public Leadership [[link removed]],
which seeks to create “a more equitable and just world” and
includes a “leadership and happiness laboratory” (led by Arthur
Brooks [[link removed]],
a former president of the American Enterprise Institute who has
written such books as _Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About
Compassionate Conservatism_
[[link removed]]);
the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government
[[link removed]],
which brings together “thought leaders” from the public and
private sectors to create an “incubator of ideas” to “inform
policy-based options and solutions” (under the direction of former
treasury secretary Lawrence Summers
[[link removed]]);
and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy
[[link removed]], which annually brings
journalists and academics from around the country to describe and
diagnose the challenges facing the news industry. Each of these bodies
has its own fellows who serve with the approval of the dean, who
presides over the school as a whole.

The Carr Center, with an eight-person staff and 32 fellows
[[link removed]], is among the smallest
and poorest of the school’s subdivisions. Its survival from year to
year is precarious, as its mission of promoting human rights and
exposing government abuses often sits uncomfortably with the
institutes that deal with defense policy, military strategy, and
intelligence gathering.

Foremost among those institutes is the Belfer Center for Science and
International Affairs [[link removed]], and a look at
its activities can help explain why Roth was deemed too hot to handle.
Ranked the best university-affiliated think tank in the world by
the University of Pennsylvania’s _2018_ _Global Go To Think Tank
Index Report_
[[link removed]],
the center has 56 staff members
[[link removed]], 12 fellowship
programs [[link removed]], and more than
225 experts [[link removed]]—nearly
100 of them in international security and defense. From 1995 to 2017
[[link removed]],
the center’s director was Graham Allison
[[link removed]]. A professor of
government at Harvard and the author of a shelfful of books about
national security, including _Essence of Decision: Explaining the
Cuban Missile Crisis_
[[link removed]] (1971),
Allison is considered the founding dean of the Kennedy School and the
person who built it financially from scratch. (He also helped create
the Carr Center.)

Allison, who remains a strong presence at the school, has served on
the boards of Natixis, Loomis Sayles, and the Hansberger Group (all
engaged in investment and wealth management); Taubman Centers (mall
developers); Chase Bank; Chemical Bank; the International Energy
Corporation; and Getty Oil. He also served on the Defense Policy Board
under every secretary of defense from Caspar Weinberger to John
Mattis; was a special adviser to the secretary of defense from 1985 to
1987; and was assistant secretary of defense for policy and plans from
1993 to 1994. Reflecting his résumé, Allison helped make the Belfer
Center a virtual arm of the military-intelligence complex.

A soft landing: After his disgraceful exit from the CIA, David
Petraeus was invited to be a fellow at the Kennedy School’s Belfer
Center, where he held court. (Jae C. Hong / AP)

Ash Carter [[link removed]], the
outgoing secretary of defense in the Obama administration, directed
the center from 2017 until his sudden death this past October
[[link removed]]. During
his 35-year career, Carter was a member of the Draper Laboratory and
served on the boards of the MITRE Corporation, Mitretek Systems, and
MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory—all defense contractors and weapons
researchers involved in such matters as cybersecurity,
counterterrorism, drone warfare, and missile technology. Carter’s
replacement, Eric Rosenbach
[[link removed]], served as the
Pentagon’s chief of staff from 2015 to 2017 and as assistant
secretary of defense for global security. Before that he was an Army
intelligence officer and the commander of a telecommunications
intelligence unit. According to his web page
[[link removed]], Rosenbach worked
on two contracts for the CIA (no specifics given) in 2020 and 2021.

One of the Belfer Center’s highest-profile initiatives is the
Intelligence Project, which (according to its website) “links
intelligence agencies with Belfer researchers, Faculty, and Kennedy
School students, to enrich their education and impact public
policy.” It is led by Paul Kolbe
[[link removed]], who spent 25 years
in the CIA’s directorate of operations in both foreign and domestic
roles. Among its 52 senior fellows is James Clapper
[[link removed]], the US director
of national intelligence from 2010 to 2017.

Every year, the project hosts more than a dozen “rising intelligence
stars” from around the world as part of a fellowship program
conceived by David Petraeus
[[link removed]], the retired
four-star Army general who served as CIA director from September 2011
to November 2012. As CIA director, Petraeus wanted to find a way to
connect young intelligence officers with top universities
[[link removed]]. For
support, he approached Thomas Kaplan, a superrich metals speculator,
art collector, and foreign policy adventurer, and persuaded him to
fund a fellowship for clandestine intelligence officers. Together,
they reached out to their friend Graham Allison, who promptly offered
to house it at the Belfer Center.

In its first year, the program hosted two clandestine officers. It has
since been recast, expanded, and renamed the Recanati-Kaplan
Fellowships; this year, it is hosting 16 fellows from nine countries
and 13 intelligence agencies
[[link removed]]. Leon
Recanati
[[link removed]] is
Kaplan’s father-in-law and an Israeli investor. Kaplan (along with
Sheldon and Miriam Adelson) provided most of the initial funding for
United Against Nuclear Iran
[[link removed]],
which was created in 2008 to combat the perceived threat from that
country; the group (which has strong ties to the US and Israeli
militaries) led the campaign to undo the 2015 nuclear agreement with
Iran. Graham Allison sits on UANI’s board
[[link removed]] and has
lobbied on its behalf in Washington.

Petraeus was forced to resign as head of the CIA
[[link removed]] after
it was disclosed that he was having an extramarital affair with Paula
Broadwell, who was writing a biography of him, and had given her
access to top-secret documents
[[link removed]] (about
which he later lied to the FBI). In March 2015, Petraeus reached a
plea deal with the Justice Department
[[link removed]] in
which he was sentenced to two years’ probation plus a $100,000 fine.
After Petraeus’s resignation, Allison arranged for him to become a
nonresident fellow at the Belfer Center. There he held court, “with
fellows and students lining up to see him,” as Daniel Golden relates
in his 2017 book _Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign
Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities_
[[link removed]].

Golden devotes a chapter of the book to the Kennedy School. Once known
“as the refuge of out-of-office politicians,” he observes, the
school “now swarms with former intelligence brass.” Golden writes
that the school discourages the CIA from active recruiting on campus,
but a look at the Belfer Center’s calendar shows that such
recruiting in fact now takes place openly. On October 25, for
instance, the center hosted a session on “Careers in the U.S.
Intelligence Community
[[link removed]],”
with former and current intelligence practitioners sharing their
experiences with Harvard students.

As Golden notes, the members of foreign intelligence services also
flock to the Kennedy School, because it offers “a conduit to the
highest echelons of the U.S. government.” Israelis are prominent
among them. A key pipeline is the Wexner Israel Fellowship
[[link removed]] (part
of the Center for Public Leadership [[link removed]]).
It was created in the late 1980s by Leslie Wexner
[[link removed]], the founder and former
CEO of L Brands (which once owned Victoria’s Secret and is now
called Bath & Body Works). A rabbi representing Wexner approached the
Kennedy School with the idea of bringing Israeli officials and civic
leaders to Cambridge for a year of mid-career study, and the school
agreed. Among the 10 fellows who come annually are ministry officials,
local government representatives, policy analysts, and directors of
nonprofits, as well as members of the Mossad, the Israel Defense
Forces, and the Shin Bet security service. Wexner has donated
[[link removed]] more
than $40 million to the Kennedy School over the years, and in 2018 a
new building there was named for him
[[link removed]].
After it was revealed in 2019
[[link removed]] that
Wexner had for decades employed Jeffrey Epstein
[[link removed]] as
a personal adviser and given him sweeping powers over his finances and
philanthropy, there were calls for Wexner’s name to be removed from
both the building and the fellowship
[[link removed]],
but it remains on both, and the Israeli fellows are highly visible at
school events.

Originally, the Kennedy School planned to have a parallel program for
Palestinians
[[link removed]],
but it never materialized, and only a small fraction of Wexner fellows
are Palestinian citizens of Israel. Palestinians do, however, have
access to other fellowships at the school, including the Emirates
Leadership Initiative Fellowship
[[link removed]],
which is funded by the United Arab Emirates—America’s strongest
ally in the Gulf. (The UAE is also a close ally of Saudi Arabia and a
serial violator of human rights.) In 2020, Saeb Erekat
[[link removed]],
a Palestinian diplomat and senior official with the PLO, was awarded a
fellowship at the Belfer Center, but he died from Covid before he
could start it. The Palestinian presence at the Kennedy School is
sparse and discussion of the Israel-Palestine issue fleeting.
According to people knowledgeable about the school’s programs, its
administration is terrified of touching anything related to Palestine,
and Palestinian voices have largely been silenced. That’s due not to
any particular administrator, they say, but to “the ethos of the
place” and the people who fund the Belfer Center.

The benefactor: Philanthropist and former Enron board member Robert
Belfer has donated copiously to the Kennedy School. (Patrick McMullan
/ Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

Prominent among those people is Robert Belfer
[[link removed]], who has donated
more than $20 million to the Kennedy School since the 1980s—money
that has come from his family’s fortune. Born in 1935 and raised in
Krakow, Poland, Belfer fled the Nazis with his family in early 1941
and arrived in New York in January 1942, speaking no English. He
graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law but decided to join
his father’s business. Arthur Belfer worked in feathers and down,
selling products to the US military, including down-filled sleeping
bags, but in the 1950s he branched out into foam rubber and then oil,
buying an oil-producing tract in north Texas. The company he created,
Belco Petroleum, did so well that Arthur eventually made
the _Forbes_ 400. In 1983, he sold Belco to InterNorth
[[link removed]].
In 1985, InterNorth merged with Houston Natural Gas, which then
changed its name to Enron
[[link removed]].
Robert joined Enron’s board, and the family became the company’s
largest shareholder. In 1992, a year before his death, Arthur helped
Robert set up a separate entity, Belco Oil & Gas, which went public in
1996, bringing in more than $100 million.

Through his donations to the Kennedy School, Belfer got to know Graham
Allison. Allison helped build the Belfer Center, and Belfer in turn
arranged for Allison to join the board of Belco. (In 1999, Allison
bought 39,000 shares of Belco stock; in 2000, the company announced
two stock buybacks, which nearly doubled its stock price. A request to
Allison for comment went unanswered.)

After a dizzying rise that saw Enron’s stock hit $90 a share in the
summer of 2000, the company imploded in 2001
[[link removed]] amid
revelations of fraudulent accounting and insider trading. By the time
it declared bankruptcy in December 2001, its shares were trading for
pennies, and the Belfers’ stake—almost $2 billion a year
earlier—had virtually vanished. As a board member who stood by while
the company collapsed, Robert Belfer faced the wrath of thousands of
shareholders whose investments were wiped out. But the Belfers
retained sizable holdings in real estate as well as control of Belco
Oil, and in August 2001 that company merged with Westport Resources in
a transaction valued at around $866 million.

So despite Enron’s collapse, Robert Belfer remained very rich—and
philanthropic. In addition to the Kennedy School, he and his wife,
Renée, have given to an array
[[link removed]] of
cultural institutions, medical research centers, private schools,
universities, and Jewish and Israeli institutions. In a 2006 interview
with the US Holocaust Museum, Belfer observed that most of his
extended family (including his paternal grandparents) perished in
World War II—a loss that gave him “a sense of identity” of
“being Jewish, of being very supportive of Israel.”

According to the 990 forms of his family foundation
[[link removed]],
between 2011 and 2015 Belfer gave more than $300,000 to the American
Jewish Committee [[link removed]], on whose board of governors
he sits. In 2018, he joined with the Anti-Defamation League
[[link removed]] to endow a new fellowship at the Belfer Center
to study disinformation, hate speech, and toxic content online. Every
year, the school hosts three ADL Belfer Fellows. In short, the primary
funder of the Belfer Center has been a significant backer of two of
the groups—the AJC and the ADL—that Peter Beinart cited as
assailing human rights organizations because of their criticism of
Israel.

Stephen Walt [[link removed]] has
been the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations
for the past two decades. In 2007, when Walt and John Mearsheimer
published _The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy_
[[link removed]]—which
argued that AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups have redirected US
policy away from America’s national interests—it caused an uproar
at the Kennedy School, including complaints from some Wexner fellows.
After a summary version appeared in the _London Review of Books_
[[link removed]],
the school was flooded with calls from “pro-Israel
donors,” according to the _New York Sun_
[[link removed]]—Robert
Belfer reportedly among them. Then-Dean David Ellwood
[[link removed]] asked Walt to
omit Belfer’s name from his professor’s title in any publicity
related to the article. Walt declined.

Belfer’s influence at the Kennedy School extends far beyond his
center. He and his son Laurence sit on the Dean’s Executive
Board—“a small group of business and philanthropic leaders who
serve as trusted advisors to the Dean and are among the most committed
financial supporters of the School,” according to its site
[[link removed]].
The board’s chair, David Rubenstein
[[link removed]], is the
cofounder and former CEO of the Carlyle Group
[[link removed]], the private equity giant, and one of the
most well-connected members of the US financial and cultural elite;
among the many prestigious boards on which he sits is the Harvard
Corporation
[[link removed]],
the university’s main governing body.

The 16 members of the Dean’s Executive Board also include Idan Ofer
[[link removed]] and his wife, Batia. Idan
is the son of Sammy Ofer
[[link removed]], an Israeli shipping
magnate who until his death in 2011 was one of Israel’s richest men.
Worth about $10 billion, Idan has come under fire in Israel for moving
to London to reduce his tax bill and for a lavish lifestyle
highlighted by the €5 million party
[[link removed]] that
he threw on the island of Mykonos for his 10th wedding anniversary.

The Kennedy School dean cannot afford to lose the confidence of this
board; nor can he afford to alienate the US national security
community, with which the school has such close ties. The Carr Center
itself is enmeshed in the US foreign policy establishment: Samantha
Power [[link removed]] has served
on the National Security Council and as US ambassador to the United
Nations, and she currently heads the US Agency for International
Development.

The bastion: The Kennedy School is world-renowned for its public
policy programs. (Caleb D. Schwartz /The Harvard Kennedy School)

In 2018, the Kennedy School opened a renovated campus
[[link removed]],
made possible by a capital campaign that raised more than $700
million. Anchoring it were three buildings bearing the names Ofer,
Rubenstein, and Wexner. “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our
buildings shape us,” Dean Elmendorf said at the ribbon-cutting
ceremony, adding that “our buildings are the structural framework
for our lives here. Here important ideas will be born and nurtured.
Generations of students will learn from world-class scholars and
practitioners.”

In Elmendorf’s view, Kenneth Roth had no place among those scholars
and practitioners. The school could accommodate a former CIA director
who leaked classified information and a former senior CIA official who
apologized for torture—but not the person who led Human Rights Watch
for three decades.

“The Kennedy School lost out by not having him with us,” Kathryn
Sikkink says. The Carr Center’s research “would have benefited
from his perspective.” The same is true of its students, she added,
many of whom “would give an eyetooth to get a job there.”

After being vetoed by Harvard, Roth accepted a visiting fellowship at
the University of Pennsylvania
[[link removed]].
“It’s crazy,” he says of his Kennedy School encounter. “You
have this human rights center. Who is better qualified than me?” As
for Doug Elmendorf, Roth adds, “He has no backbone whatsoever.

_MICHAEL MASSING is the author of Now They Tell Us: The American
Press and Iraq and Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for
the Western Mind. He is writing a book about money and influence._

_Copyright c 2023 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
[[link removed]].
Distributed by PARS International Corp
[[link removed]]. _

_Please support  progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
[[link removed]] to
The Nation for just $24.95!_

* Israel
[[link removed]]
* Human Rights
[[link removed]]
* Harvard
[[link removed]]

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