As a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, I was required to take a statistics class during my first year into the program.  I imagine that Harvard Professor Stephen Walt, who received his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley’s political science program in 1983, had to fulfill a similar requirement.

For this reason, I’m left scratching my head over a certain assertion in Walt’s latest blog post.  While criticizing Thomas Friedman’s contention that Israeli society is divided between those who see the West Bank occupation as critical to Israel’s long-term security interests and those who see it as deleterious, Walt writes:

[Friedman] omits the hard-core settlers who believe that Israel has a God-given right to all of Mandate Palestine (a group that comprises some 20 percent of Israeli society) … . [Emphasis added.]

Since Walt has shown an odd preference for Jewish sources that support his beliefs, I’ll indulge him as I correct his math:  According to B’Tselem’s most recent statistics, there were 462,000 Israelis living east of the Green Line as of September 2007: 271,400 in the West Bank and approximately 191,000 in East Jerusalem.  Take the most recent Israeli census data, which places Israel’s population at 7,208,500, and we find that only 6.4 percent of all Israelis are settlers.  (And that’s only if we include East Jerusalem; if we consider the West Bank alone, the number is under 3.8 percent.)  Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing how many of these people would satisfy Walt’s definition of “hard-core settlers” – though the relevant evidence suggests that a critical mass of settlers are fairly pragmatic.

Either way, Walt’s massive over-estimation of the prevalence of “hard-core settlers” in Israeli society is the latest indication of his profound intellectual dishonesty.  If any rule prevails in academia, it’s that conclusions should be drawn from an honest appraisal of the relevant data.  Here, Walt has committed a cardinal sin: he has actually invented data to support his otherwise unfounded claim.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 5:56 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.