The uproar provoked by two eminent professors from Harvard and Chicago who have challenged the strategic and moral value of the US-Israeli relationship intensified on Wednesday after Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School, denounced their scholarship as having an “illogical and conspiratorial approach”.

In a 15,000-word response paper, published on Wednesday afternoon on the website of the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard, Prof Dershowitz condemned the paper by professors Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago as “little more than a compilation of old, false and authoritatively discredited charges dressed up in academic garb”.