Eric Alterman
In case you haven't heard, Jimmy Carter has a new book out. In it, drawing on his experiences in the Middle East over the past three decades, he sets out a game-plan for putting an end to violence in the region. The book is entitled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and you should be able to guess the rest.
Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, calls it a "tendentious, dishonest and stupid book." To Alan Dershowitz it's an "anti-Israel screed." Rick Richman of the Jewis press calls it "tendentious, dishonest, stupid," and "insidious."
An anonymous caller called into a C-SPAN interview and ranted at Jimmy Carter, calling him "a bigot, and a racist and an anti-Semite." The caller continued, accusing Carter of "cozying up with every dictator, thug, Islamic terrorist there is." MSNBC aired the attacks over and over , as if the ravings of a lunatic were somehow newsworthy--which given the fact that it's MSNBC, may be consistent).
To tell you the truth, it's not much of a book. I looked for a segment I cold excerpt on my website and couldn't find anything that was really worthy. It's simplistic and homiletic and gives only part of the story most of the time. Jimmy Carter is in some ways a great man, and in almost all ways, a good man, but he's not much of a historian,
Still the vituperation is explained not by the above, but by one thing and one thing only. Carter has departed from the accepted narrative that Israel's so-called friends in the United States insist on imposing on the Israeli-Palestinian narrative. Depart from it and expect to get called all kind of names, none of them nice.
Helpfully, Alan Dershowitz lays it out in the opening paragraphs of his review. "The former US president's use of the loaded word 'apartheid', suggesting an analogy to the hated policies of South Africa, is especially outrageous, considering his acknowledgment buried near the end of his shallow and superficial book that what is going on in Israel today 'is unlike that in South Africa - not racism, but the acquisition of land.' Nor does he explain that Israel's motivation for holding on to land it captured in a defensive war is the prevention of terrorism. Israel has tried, on several occasions, to exchange land for peace, and what it got instead was terrorism, rockets and kidnappings launched from the returned land."
Got it? Israel wants peace, not land. The more land you give the Arabs, the more they try to kill you.
It's really that simple.
Carter of course, puts it differently. In a short New Yorker piece, he explained, "I'm not alleging racism, and I'm not referring to Israel. I'm talking about Palestine." It is his contention that the situation in the Occupied Territories "is not debated or acknowledged or even known in this country," and that the "tremendous aversion" here to criticism of Israel's policies has contributed to the disintegration of the peace process. "I can't imagine a presidential candidate saying, 'I'm going to take a balanced position toward the Israelis and the Palestinians,' and getting elected," he said. "It's inconceivable."
And silently, Alan Dershowitz, Marty Paretz, AIPAC, and all the rest say, "Amen."
Eric Alterman is a Nation columnist and professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
Termed "the most honest and incisive media critic writing today” in the National Catholic Reporter, and author of “the smartest and funniest political journal out there” in the San Francisco Chronicle, Eric Alterman is professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
He is also the “Liberal Media” columnist for the Nation, the Altercation weblogger for MSNBC.com, and a contributor to the Huffington Post.
He is a senior fellow at both the Center for American Progress in Washington DC, for which he writes and edits the Think Again column, and the World Policy Institute at New School University in New York.
He wrote the national bestsellers:
What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (2003, 2004),
The Book on Bush: How George W (Mis)leads America (with Mark Green, 2004).
His Sound & Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy (1992, 2000), won the 1992 George Orwell Award and his It Ain't No Sin to be Glad You're Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen (1999, 2001) won the 1999 Stephen Crane Literary Award.
Alterman is also the author of Who Speaks for America? Why Democracy Matters in Foreign Policy (1998). His newest book is When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and its Consequences (2004, 2005).
A frequent lecturer and contributor to virtually every significant national publication in the US and many in Europe in recent years, he has also been a columnist for Worth, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and the Sunday Express. A former adjunct professor of journalism at NYU and Columbia, Alterman received a BA in history and government from Cornell, an MA in international relations from Yale and a PhD in US history from Stanford.
He lives with his family in Manhattan, where he is at work on a history of postwar American liberalism and a history of the rock‘n’roll business.
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