George Soros, the billionaire investor, has added his voice to the debate over the role of Israel's lobby in shaping US foreign policy.
In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Soros takes issue with "the pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC]" in Washington and says the Bush administration's close ties with Israel are obstacles to a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.
Soros, who is Jewish but not often engaged in Israeli affairs, echoed arguments that have fuelled debate in academia, foreign policy think tanks and parts of the US Jewish community.
"The pro-Israel lobby has been remarkably successful in suppressing criticism," wrote Soros. Politicians challenge it at their peril and dissenters risk personal vilification, he said.
AIPAC has consistently declined comment on such charges, but many of its supporters have been vocal in dismissing them.
Historian Michael Oren, speaking at AIPAC's 2007 conference in March, said the group was not merely a lobby for Israel. "It is the embodiment of a conviction as old as this (American) nation itself that belief in the Jewish state is tantamount to belief in these United States," he said in a keynote speech.
The long-simmering debate bubbled to the surface a year ago, when two prominent academics, Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, published a 12,500-word essay entitled "The Israel Lobby" and featuring the fiercest criticism of AIPAC since it was founded in 1953.
AIPAC now has more than 100,000 members and is rated one of the most influential special interest groups in the United States, its political clout comparable with such lobbies as the National Rifle Association.
The AIPAC members are all US citizens and the group receives no funding from the Israeli government.
Its annual conference in Washington attracts a Who's Who of American politics, both Republicans and Democrats.
Unwavering support
Mearsheimer and Walt said the lobby had persuaded successive administrations to align themselves too closely with Israel.
"The pro-Israel lobby has been remarkably successful in suppressing criticism"
George Soros, the billionaire investor
"The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but much of the rest of the world," they wrote.
No other lobby group has managed to divert US foreign policy so far from the US national interest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of Israel are essentially identical, they wrote.
The two academics said that pressure from Israel and its lobby in Washington played an important role in President George Bush's decision to attack Iraq, an arch-enemy of Israel, in 2003.
Mearsheimer and Walt found no takers for their essay in the US publishing world. When it was eventually published in the London Review of Books, they noted it would be hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing such a piece.
It has been drawing criticism that ranged from shoddy scholarship to anti-Semitism, chiefly from conservative fellow academics and political supporters of the present relationship between Washington and Israel.
In his contribution to the debate, Soros said: "A much-needed self-examination of American policy in the Middle East has started in this country; but it can't make much headway as long as AIPAC retains powerful influence in both the Democratic and Republican parties."
That influence is reflected by the fact that Israel is the largest recipient of US aid in the world.
Going mainstream
Mearsheimer and Walt are now working on expanding their article into a book - to be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The company has not commented on online reports that it paid the two authors a $750,000 advance and plans to print one million copies.
Another mainstream publisher, Simon and Schuster, already discovered that not only is it possible to publish criticism of Israel but it can also be good for the bottom line.
Former president Jimmy Carter's book "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid" shot up the bestseller lists after its publication last November; stayed there for more than three months and is still selling well.
It had an initial print run of 300,000 copies and there are now 485,000 copies in print, said Victoria Meyer, a spokeswoman for Simon and Schuster.
Carter's book and its reference to apartheid provoked angry reactions - more in the United States than in Israel, where leftists opposed to the occupation of the West Bank have been accusing the government of apartheid practices for years and where the word has lost its shock value.
In response to charges of bias and anti-Semitism, Carter said he wanted to provoke a discussion of issues debated routinely and freely in Israel but rarely in the United States.
"This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times during a tour to promote his book. "It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine."
According to Oren, the pro-AIPAC historian, the Carter book and the Mearsheimer-Walt paper had the same "insidious thesis" and suffered from the same flaw - ignoring oil as a driving element in US policies on the Middle East.
Showing posts with label Jimmy Carter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jimmy Carter. Show all posts
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Monday, April 16, 2007
Soros Slams AIPAC
Sunday, April 15, 2007 9:19 p.m. EDT
The billionaire investor George Soros has added his voice to a heated but little-noticed debate over the role of Israel's powerful lobby in shaping Washington policy in a way critics say hurts U.S. national interests and stifles debate.
In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Soros takes issue with "the pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)" in Washington and says the Bush administration's close ties with Israel are obstacles to a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.
Soros, who is Jewish but not often engaged in Israel affairs, echoed arguments that have fueled a passionate debate conducted largely in the rarefied world of academia, foreign policy think tanks and parts of the U.S. Jewish community.
"The pro-Israel lobby has been remarkably successful in suppressing criticism," wrote Soros. Politicians challenge it at their peril and dissenters risk personal vilification, he said.
AIPAC has consistently declined comment on such charges, but many of its supporters have been vocal in dismissing them. Historian Michael Oren, speaking at AIPAC's 2007 conference in March, said the group was not merely a lobby for Israel. "It is the embodiment of a conviction as old as this (American) nation itself that belief in the Jewish state is tantamount to belief in these United States," he said in a keynote speech.
The long-simmering debate bubbled to the surface a year ago, when two prominent academics, Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, published a 12,500-word essay entitled "The Israel Lobby" and featuring the fiercest criticism of AIPAC since it was founded in 1953.
AIPAC now has more than 100,000 members and is rated one of the most influential special interest groups in the United States, its political clout comparable with such lobbies as the National Rifle Association.
Its annual conference in Washington attracts a Who's Who of American politics, both Republicans and Democrats.
UNWAVERING SUPPORT
Mearsheimer and Walt said the lobby had persuaded successive administrations to align themselves too closely with Israel.
"The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized not only U.S. security but much of the rest of the world," they wrote.
No other lobby group has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy so far from the U.S. national interest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. interests and those of Israel are essentially identical, they wrote.
Once considered an honest broker in the Middle East, the United States is now seen in much of the Arab world as an unquestioning backer of Israel, according to international opinion polls.
Peace moves have been at a near-standstill since the failure of Israeli-Palestinian talks in 2000 at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency. The Bush administration, accused by the Arab world of relative neglect, has said it hopes to promote peace in its final two years despite the political weakness of Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
The two academics said that pressure from Israel and its lobby in Washington played an important role in President George W. Bush's decision to attack Iraq, an arch-enemy of Israel, in 2003.
Mearsheimer and Walt found no takers for their essay in the U.S. publishing world. When it was eventually published in the London Review of Books, they noted it would be hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing such a piece.
It has been drawing criticism that ranged from shoddy scholarship to anti-Semitism, chiefly from conservative fellow academics and political supporters of the present relationship between Washington and Israel.
In his contribution to the debate, Soros said: "A much-needed self-examination of American policy in the Middle East has started in this country; but it can't make much headway as long as AIPAC retains powerful influence in both the Democratic and Republican parties."
That influence is reflected by the fact that Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world.
GOING MAINSTREAM
Mearsheimer and Walt are now working on expanding their article into a book -- to be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The company has not commented on online reports that it paid the two authors a $750,000 advance and plans to print one million copies.
Another mainstream publisher, Simon and Schuster, already discovered that it not only is it possible to publish criticism of Israel but it can also be good for the bottom line.
Former President Jimmy Carter's book "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid" shot up the bestseller lists after its publication last November, stayed there for more than three months and is still selling well.
It had an initial print run of 300,000 copies and there are now 485,000 copies in print, said Victoria Meyer, a spokeswoman for Simon and Schuster.
Carter's book and its reference to apartheid provoked angry reactions -- more in the United States than in Israel, where leftists opposed to the occupation of the West Bank have been accusing the government of apartheid practices for years and where the word has lost its shock value.
In response to charges of bias and anti-Semitism, Carter said he wanted to provoke a discussion of issues debated routinely and freely in Israel but rarely in the United States.
"This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times during a tour to promote his book. "It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine."
According to Oren, the pro-AIPAC historian, the Carter book and the Mearsheimer-Walt paper had the same "insidious thesis" and suffered from the same flaw -- ignoring oil as a driving element in U.S. policies on the Middle East.
© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Carter: Israel Backers Demand ‘Subservience’
Rachel Mauro - JTA
| (04/13/2007) |
| Carter: Israel Backers Demand ‘Subservience’ |
| Receiving award, former president calls for U.S. peace push. |
Washington — Mideast peace is possible only with forceful U.S. engagement, former President Carter said as he received an award for speaking out on controversial topics. |
Saturday, April 7, 2007
Jimmy Carter: Israel's Apartheid
Former President Jimmy Carter, author of a new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, is interviewed from his home in Plains, Georgia. He responds to a caller who asks questions concerning pressure put on the US political system and the resulting support of Israel. The caller refers to author James Bamford's book "A Pretext For War" and he asks President Carter about AIPAC and other pressure groups within the US.
President Carter: Bush Ordered Me Not to Go to Damascus
Scott Horton
PUBLISHED April 6, 2007
PUBLISHED April 6, 2007
More evidence of the White House's partisan manipulation of relations with Syria emerged yesterday, as President Jimmy Carter told a gathering in New York about his recent request to visit Syrian President Assad. The former president stated:
“I have known President Bashar al-Assad since he was a college student, and I thought it might be helpful if I went and urged him to support the peace process in the Middle East. But for the only time in my life as a former president, I was ordered by the White House not to go.”
The White House has had no criticism of three Republican Congressmen who are currently also visiting Syria. Indeed, one of them – Rep. Darrell Issa of California - sharply criticized President Bush after emerging from his meeting with Assad, something which Pelosi carefully avoided.
Attacks on Pelosi have also now regularly featured photographs of her wearing a headscarf, coupled with suggestions that she is engaged in "appeasement" of Islamic extremists. Joe Conason assesses the attacks in a column at Salon.com this morning. He states:
As for the headscarf, which Pelosi wore while visiting a mosque and a marketplace, there could be no conceivable reason to vilify this natural gesture of respect -- except to excite religious and ethnic bigotry. Women have been covering their heads upon entering certain places for hundreds of years, and so have men for that matter. Nobody complains when an American politician puts on a yarmulke in a synagogue or an American woman covers her bare arms in a cathedral, and nobody should.
No, the war against Pelosi is a rear-guard assault by the White House against moderates and liberals in both political parties who understand that the failed Bush policies have jeopardized American interests and hurt the Mideast peace process. What Wolf and Pelosi have in common is their endorsement of the Iraq Study Group's proposals, which emphasize regional diplomacy, including direct talks with both Syria and Iran. Indeed, it was Wolf who first approached James Baker about undertaking the Iraq report, and who sponsored the legislation that paid for the group's work.
The malice behind these attacks leaves the clear impression that the "war party" is still at the helm in the White House, and that military confrontation with Syria is still given a priority ahead of talking. This belies the president's muddled statements about pursuing a dialogue with Syria.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Liberating America From Israel
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Liberating America From Israel by Paul Findley
(written a year after 9-11)
NOTE: Mr. Paul Findley, who served as a Republican congressman from Illinois for 22 years, is the author of 'They Dare to Speak Out' and a member of the American Educational Trust's Foreign Relations Committee.
Nine-eleven would not have occurred if the U.S. government had refused to help Israel humiliate and destroy Palestinian society. Few express this conclusion publicly, but many believe it is the truth. I believe the catastrophe could have been prevented if any U.S. president during the past 35 years had had the courage and wisdom to suspend all U.S. aid until Israel withdrew from the Arab land seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.read all at link above.
Nothing can justify 9/11. Those guilty deserve maximum punishment, but it makes sense for America to examine motivations promptly and as carefully as possible. Terrorism almost always arises from deeply-felt grievances. If they can be eradicated or eased, terrorist passions are certain to subside.
No one in authority will admit a calamitous reality that is skillfully shielded from the American people but clearly recognized by most of the world: America suffered 9/11 and its aftermath and may soon be at war with Iraq, mainly because U.S. policy in the Middle East is made in Israel, not in Washington.
Here's an opinion of Former President Carter's recent book,
"Palestine: Peace not Apartheid," titled, "Carter enters Lion's Den."
Despite criticism, his book is work of a true patriot by Paul Findley. From Chicago Tribune, February,2007.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Provocative president points finger at Israel
Palestine: Peace not Apartheid
Jimmy Carter
(Simon & Schuster, $45)
When US President Jimmy Carter delivered his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 2002 – awarded for “advancing democracy and human rights” and bringing peace between Israel and Egypt in 1978 – he reiterated the importance of UN Resolution 242.
“It condemns the acquisition of territory by force, calls for withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories, and provides for Israelis to live securely and in harmony with their neighbours”, he said. “There is no other mandate whose implementation could more profoundly improve international relationships.”
Carter’s uncontroversial position is now under attack by the Zionist lobby after the publication of Palestine: Peace not Apartheid in which he states that Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine has created a system that is in many ways worse than apartheid South Africa.
The numerous checkpoints, confiscation of land, building of a separation wall and indiscriminate killing of civilians is causing yet another generation of Palestinians to only know the Israelis as brutal occupiers.
Carter has said that the majority of his Zionist critics haven’t actually spent time in the occupied territories and instead label his book “anti-Israel”, code for daring to question the ever-tightening restrictions on Palestinian civilians.
Carter told Newsweek that the leading US Zionist lobby, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, “is not designed to promote peace…They have a perfect right to lobby, but their purpose in life is to protect and defend the policies of the Israeli government and to make sure those policies are approved in the United States and in our Congress.”
It is virtually impossible to objectively assess the current state of Israeli policies in Palestine without being accused of treason, anti-Semitism or dishonesty. Carter navigates these waters with general aplomb, however, and spends some of the book discussing his own role in negotiating Middle East peace.
He unequivocally blames successive Israeli governments for refusing to give up their colonial addiction to land, building more settlements on occupied territory and indulging the extremist ideology of the settler movement.
Peace will never be achieved, he argues, until the occupation mindset is buried forever. Which US President will be brave enough to start? During the Oslo peace process years, settlements doubled in size and Palestinians soon realised that the agreements between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin were meaningless. Facts-on-the-ground spoke far more loudly than any deal struck with then US President Bill Clinton.
Carter has convincingly defended his book against various charges, though the work does contain a few errors, such as mistakenly claiming that Jews and Arabs have equal rights in Israel proper, when in fact, discrimination against non-Jews is both legalised and informal.
Israel’s new Deputy Prime Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has spoken of forcibly separating Israelis and Palestinians and creating a purely Jewish state. He is not a fringe player but a prominent member of the Israeli cabinet.
This book is far from the last word on the conflict but its singular achievement has been to alert a worldwide and mainstream audience that Israel is practicing apartheid-like policies in the occupied territories.
Although Carter is correct in condemning Palestinian suicide bombing, he acknowledges that extremists on both sides will only be marginalised when honest negotiations take place.
During the Bush administration, the role of the United States has been hopelessly one-sided and the Arab world rightly sees Israel as incapable of making any serious peace initiative unless receiving permission from Washington.
“The bottom line is this”, concludes Carter. “Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law.”
Published by Antony Loewenstein March 19th, 2007 in Israel
My following book review appeared in yesterday’s Sydney Sun-Herald newspaper:
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Jimmy Carter and Apartheid
Volume 54, Number 5 · March 29, 2007
Jimmy Carter and Apartheid
By Joseph Lelyveld
Perhaps an intrepid researcher will one day go through the many Internet pages that make assertions pro and con on the question of whether Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories can properly be assessed as "apartheid." Then we may be in a position to tell whether the first polemicist to sling the term in the context of the West Bank was a foreigner, a Palestinian, or, just possibly, an Israeli. Suffice it to say, it wasn't Jimmy Carter, whose recent book, with its unpunctuated title Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, has been high on the best-seller lists for nearly three months despite—maybe, in part, because of—the wrath his use of the term has provoked among Israel's supporters.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Under fire, Israel lobby rallies US backers
By Tony Czuczka Mar 10, 2007, 2:43 GMT
Washington - After a sustained attack by critics including former US president Jimmy Carter, the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group in the US still boasts impressive political pull in Washington.
When the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) opens its annual conference Sunday, a high-powered group of politicians, academics and policy analysts - more than 6,000 people in all - is expected to pack the capital's glassy convention centre.
US Vice President Dick Cheney is due to give a keynote speech Monday stressing strong ties with Israel. The top four leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties will also speak, underscoring the tradition of bipartisan support for Israel in the US Congress.
'There's one issue - that is, support for the US relationship with Israel - that brings everyone together,' AIPAC spokesman Josh Block said.
AIPAC says the three-day conference will be its biggest ever - a signal of self-confidence and, in its own way, a rebuttal of unusually harsh questioning of the Israel lobby's influence.
Two US political scientists sparked a furious debate last spring with an essay that portrayed Washington as slavishly devoted to Israel and accused US President George W Bush's administration of launching the war in Iraq to help Israeli interests.
Harvard professor Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago's Walter Mearsheimer said their paper, published in the London Review of Books, aimed to bring a largely taboo topic into the open.
Critics condemned the essay as historically inaccurate and an opening for anti-Semitism. The authors insisted they were not suggesting a Jewish conspiracy to hijack US foreign policy.
The dust had barely settled when Carter, who brokered the 1978 Israel-Egypt peace deal, hit US bookstores in November with a broadside provocatively titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
Carter charges that a 'free and balanced discussion' of the Arab- Israeli conflict has been impossible in the US.
'This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices,' he wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
The book details 'the abominable oppression and persecution' of Palestinians, which in many ways 'is more oppressive' than apartheid was for black South Africans, Carter said.
Again, a storm erupted. Dennis Ross, a former US envoy to the Middle East, accused Carter of manipulating facts. Kenneth Stein, a Mideast scholar at Emory University's Carter Centre quit in disgust.
Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights group, accused Carter of hostility to Israel.
Carter's own centre-left Democratic Party also distanced itself. Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, one of the highest elected US officials, said it was 'wrong to suggest' that Jews would support 'ethnically based oppression.'
In the White House, Bush and his Republican administration have been one of the most staunchly pro-Israel governments of recent times, partly due to a religious affinity for Israel among Christian conservatives who strongly support Bush.
But public backing for Israel is also solid. A February poll on the Middle East conflict found 58 per cent of Americans sympathize with Israel and 20 per cent with the Palestinians. The Gallup survey had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
'All trends indicate that Americans ... understand quite clearly that the basic values we celebrate are reflected in only one country in the Middle East - our ally Israel,' AIPAC's Block said.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Washington - After a sustained attack by critics including former US president Jimmy Carter, the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group in the US still boasts impressive political pull in Washington.
When the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) opens its annual conference Sunday, a high-powered group of politicians, academics and policy analysts - more than 6,000 people in all - is expected to pack the capital's glassy convention centre.
US Vice President Dick Cheney is due to give a keynote speech Monday stressing strong ties with Israel. The top four leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties will also speak, underscoring the tradition of bipartisan support for Israel in the US Congress.
'There's one issue - that is, support for the US relationship with Israel - that brings everyone together,' AIPAC spokesman Josh Block said.
AIPAC says the three-day conference will be its biggest ever - a signal of self-confidence and, in its own way, a rebuttal of unusually harsh questioning of the Israel lobby's influence.
Two US political scientists sparked a furious debate last spring with an essay that portrayed Washington as slavishly devoted to Israel and accused US President George W Bush's administration of launching the war in Iraq to help Israeli interests.
Harvard professor Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago's Walter Mearsheimer said their paper, published in the London Review of Books, aimed to bring a largely taboo topic into the open.
Critics condemned the essay as historically inaccurate and an opening for anti-Semitism. The authors insisted they were not suggesting a Jewish conspiracy to hijack US foreign policy.
The dust had barely settled when Carter, who brokered the 1978 Israel-Egypt peace deal, hit US bookstores in November with a broadside provocatively titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
Carter charges that a 'free and balanced discussion' of the Arab- Israeli conflict has been impossible in the US.
'This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices,' he wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
The book details 'the abominable oppression and persecution' of Palestinians, which in many ways 'is more oppressive' than apartheid was for black South Africans, Carter said.
Again, a storm erupted. Dennis Ross, a former US envoy to the Middle East, accused Carter of manipulating facts. Kenneth Stein, a Mideast scholar at Emory University's Carter Centre quit in disgust.
Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights group, accused Carter of hostility to Israel.
Carter's own centre-left Democratic Party also distanced itself. Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, one of the highest elected US officials, said it was 'wrong to suggest' that Jews would support 'ethnically based oppression.'
In the White House, Bush and his Republican administration have been one of the most staunchly pro-Israel governments of recent times, partly due to a religious affinity for Israel among Christian conservatives who strongly support Bush.
But public backing for Israel is also solid. A February poll on the Middle East conflict found 58 per cent of Americans sympathize with Israel and 20 per cent with the Palestinians. The Gallup survey had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
'All trends indicate that Americans ... understand quite clearly that the basic values we celebrate are reflected in only one country in the Middle East - our ally Israel,' AIPAC's Block said.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Monday, February 26, 2007
Balanced stand on Middle East is political suicide, says Carter
Balanced stand on ME is political suicide, says Carter
Hinting Israel is not interested in fair peace, former US president says any member of Congress taking balanced stand on conflict risks 'political suicide' Yitzhak Benhorin
Published: 02.26.07, 03:57 / Israel News
| WASHINGTON - "I don't see any present prospect that any member of the US Congress, the House or Senate, would say, "Let's take a balanced position between Israel and the Palestinians and negotiate a peace agreement," said Former US President Jimmy Carter in an interview to the ABC network on Sunday.
Appearing on "This week with George Stephanopoulos," the former President got the chance to defend himself, and his contraversial book "Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid" which, three months after publication, continues to makes waves in the American media.
Carter however, did not pass up the chance to harm Israel's PR yet again, and said, "It's almost politically suicidal in the United States for a member of the Congress who wants to seek reelection to take any stand that might be interpreted as anti- policy of the conservative Israeli government, which is equated, as I've seen it myself, as anti-Semitism."
Carter reiterated that he felt his book "accurately describes what's going on in the West Bank," and said that he did not regret writing it.
'Book is necessary for peace' "The book is necessary. I think this book will make…a little step toward, first of all, precipitating a debate or an open discussion about what's going on in Palestine. Secondly, I hope it will be a little factor in renewing the abandoned effort to bring about a peace agreement between Israel and its neighbors."
When asked if he was being too hard on Israel, Carter said, "My honest opinion is that a strong majority of Israelis agree with me. Secondly, I believe a clear majority of American Jewish citizens agree with me that Israel must exchange Palestinian land for peace."
Almost 30 years after leading to the signing of the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, Carter said he still hopes for peace, "If I have had one burning desire in my heart and mind for the last 30 years, I would put peace for Israel at the top of the list.… And commensurate with that has to be justice and human rights for the Palestinians next door. And I believe this book… will contribute to accomplishing that goal." | ||||||||||||
Honest Broker
February 26, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative
Jimmy Carter’s book stirs a critical debate.
by Philip Weiss
Since the publication last November of Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, his critics have pretty much held the floor. In fact, days before the book was available, its argument that Palestinians suffer “abominable oppression and persecution” at the hands of the Israelis was dismissed outright by Democratic Party leaders Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean, as though it might harm their party in the midterm elections. Their disavowals gave way to the kind of vituperative feeling in pro-Israel quarters that is usually saved for Holocaust deniers and Nazis: Carter will go down in history as “a Jew-hater,” according to The New Republic’s Martin Peretz; the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg called him un-Christian; and Commentary published a long attack on Carter as “the very worst ex-President,” a would be “prince of peace” who was in fact a busybody with a martyr-wish, embittered by his 1980 re-election defeat.
In January came news that Carter’s views had cost him among his own former adherents. Saying that Carter had abandoned an honorable role as honest broker between two sides, 15 Jewish members of the Carter Center advisory board resigned en masse—the sort of thrilling moral stand I hoped for, and never got, during much bigger presidential flaps like Clinton’s sexual harassment saga and Bush’s descent into Iraq.
The conventional wisdom seemed to be that Carter had damaged himself, and badly.
But the fury has masked a quieter trend —nodding support for the president’s views across the country. The book still ranks sixth on the New York Times bestseller list three months after publication, and Carter has taken on a moral halo among progressives and realists, the shotgun marriage of the Bush years. Film director Jonathan Demme, who mainstreamed gay rights with “Philadelphia,” is making a documentary on the book tour. “NBC Nightly News” featured the former president breaking down in tears on a panel at the Carter Center when relating a story of praying to God to give him strength before he confronted Anwar Sadat at Camp David in 1978, when Carter forged an historic peace accord between Israel and Egypt.
“I think the attacks in some ways have made the book more effective,” says Michael Brown, a fellow at the Palestine Center. “It’s extraordinary, but when people oppose a book or a movie, and make a big fuss out of it, most Americans will say, ‘I want to know what this is about.’”
Some of the fury hides an old-fashioned power struggle. For the first time since the State of Israel was created in 1948, a prominent American politician has publicly taken up the cause of the Arabs, describing Israel’s practices as oppressive. Such voices are common in Europe and in Israel itself. But they are uncommon here, where staunchly Zionist voices routinely assert that Israeli and American interests are identical, a view uniformly reflected in our politics and policies. The Carter groundswell seems to represent a real political threat to that claim. A recent batch of letters to the Houston Chronicle ran three-to-one in Carter’s favor. “Can’t Israel defend itself without subjecting all Palestinians in the occupied territories to such shameful conditions?” one asked. “Nothing justifies treating an entire group of people as if they were second-class human beings.”
The education Americans are seeking began nearly a year ago with an academic paper widely circulated in intellectual circles. “The Israel Lobby,” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, realist scholars at the University of Chicago and Harvard, sharply criticized the hegemony exercised by pro-Israel opinion makers in the United States. Famously, that piece was killed by the American magazine that commissioned it (The Atlantic) and eventually published by the London Review of Books. Now Jimmy Carter has brought some of the same arguments home and popularized them.
The ground seems to be shifting under our feet. M.J. Rosenberg, a progressive Zionist activist who works for Israel Policy Forum, wrote that he was surprised by the attitudes expressed at a Washington social gathering where Carter’s book had come up. The book had empowered gentiles to voice criticisms they have long held. One such person said that the Jewish community is “out of line for getting ‘bent out of shape’ by a book,” according to Rosenberg. “[N]on-Jewish Americans feel very inhibited . . . talking about Israel out of fear that any criticism will be labeled ‘anti-Semitism.’”
The Palestine Center’s Michael Brown has been pleased by the new turn in the conversation. “He has gotten the word ‘apartheid’ in the discussion. A lot of progressives used to roll their eyes at the comparison and said it’s too much. But Carter has put it out there. Carter has done an enormous service to the other narrative. Some of these groups are on the defensive for once.”
Carter’s first speech about his book was at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts on Jan. 23. I was eager to go. As a Jew who believes that the Israeli occupation is harming American interests in the Middle East, I am interested in the internal debate over Carter in the Jewish community. Jews have generally led the discussion of Israel in this country—and often closed ranks. Had Carter caused any slippage in the bloc?
I got to Brandeis’s Gosman Center gym at 3 p.m., 90 minutes ahead of the speech, and the first signs I saw surprised me—literally. In the barricaded pen for demonstrators was a wide banner: “Jewish Voice for Peace Supports Jimmy Carter. End the Occupation.” The Boston chapter of the Oakland-based group had brought a dozen people. Each had a poster describing an atrocity, like how many Palestinian children the Israeli military has allegedly killed (153) or how many dunams of Palestinian land Israel has confiscated in the West Bank in 2006 (7,749). In this pen, Jewish diversity meant a sprinkling of Zionists. Three young people represented CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) and handed out a leaflet titled “Carter’s Falsehoods,” which claimed that Carter misrepresented Palestinian leaders as moderates when they were actually extremists. The piece featured photographs of a Brandeis student killed by a suicide bomber in 1995 and of the Palestinian prime minister meeting with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The gym was jammed with 2,000 folding chairs. All soon filled. Carter was the first president to visit the campus in 50 years (Harry Truman being the last), and there was excitement, along with an air of respect and decorum. Another surprise: I’d been expecting rage. After all, Shulamit Reinharz, the wife of Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz, had called Carter a “plagiarist” in an article for The Jewish Advocate and said, in a vicious spirit, that Carter should have kept his thoughts to himself, just as he should have kept private the famous “lust in my heart” confession he made during his presidential campaign 30 years ago.
But Mrs. Reinharz was not in attendance (“major commitment out of town,” she told me later), and looking around, I saw only a handful of students wearing blue and white in solidarity with Israel, a common response when critics of Israel visit campus. I talked to four of them—all female members of Zionists for Historical Veracity, a Brandeis group dedicated to spreading the word that Israel is the only democracy in the region. This is a new tactic for responding to the criticism of Israel—showing that Israel guarantees free speech, gay rights and women’s rights, when Arab tyrannies do not. It sidesteps the question of human rights and political self-determination for the estimated 3 million Palestinians under Israeli authority. I brought up the occupied territories, and one girl said that I meant Judea and Samaria. “That’s the way it’s referred to in the Bible,” she noted.
I asked the girls why so many Arabs seem to hate Israel. “I wish we knew,” one answered. “I think it has a lot to do with the education system,” another said. “Sadly for the children being affected, they are not getting the correct historical account, and a new generation is brought up to hate Israel.”
My impression of diversity was reinforced by a talk with Getzel Davis, a long-haired kid whose t-shirt said in Hebrew, “You Should Love Your Neighbor as Yourself.” Davis criticized Carter as imbalanced, singling out the Israelis. Yes, it was time to acknowledge that there was a cycle of violence in Palestine, but it must be considered “holistically.” Then Davis told me how haunted he was by a visit to the Orthodox Jewish settlement in Hebron in the West Bank: “The most broken place I’ve ever been in my life.”
Carter arrived, and—what a surprise—no one booed. People rose to their feet and applauded strongly for a minute. Seventy minutes later, when Carter smiled his Cheshire cat grin and disappeared, the applause was even more sustained.
In the interim, he achieved a lot. His performance had a vulnerable, human manner. He flattered Brandeis by saying that it was the most exciting invitation to speak he had received since the Congress called on him to give his inaugural address exactly 30 years before. And this might have been a sincere statement; despite being a statesman whose every utterance has a public quality, Carter actually seemed nervous. He said, with a hint of defensiveness, “I don’t often write my speeches, but I decided to this morning. I read over it before I left home in Plains, Georgia. It took 15 minutes without any pauses for applause. So I can predict for you that I’ll be ready to answer questions in about 15 minutes.”
The second question, about the hurtfulness of the word “apartheid,” occasioned Carter’s broken moment, when in a halting voice he described his pain at the accusations against him:
I am deeply concerned about the tensions that might have arisen. That was not my intention at all. And I’ve been hurt and so has my family by some of the reaction. I’ve been through political campaigns for state senate and for governor and for president, and I’ve been stigmatized and condemned by my political opponents and their stories. But this is the first time that I’ve ever been called a liar and a bigot and an anti-Semite and a coward and a plagiarist. This has hurt me. I can take it. But I think that that group of people who have made those statements — sometimes in full-page ads in the New York Times — I think they are an extreme minority.
Carter was trying to mend bridges. His book has pained many Jews for a reason. The strong feeling throughout the book is one progressives often have on visits to the Holy Land: that the Arabs we meet are kinder and more righteous than the Israelis, that the Israelis are the power. The moral core of Carter’s book can be seen is his treatment of Hafez al-Assad, the late Syrian dictator reviled in this country. Carter seems to see Assad as brilliant, and his text offers, without contradiction, Assad’s analysis of the Israelis as expansionist and racist, imitating the Jews’ European persecutors by performing ethnic cleansing on Arabs. At other times, Carter openly identifies, as a Christian, with the Christian Arabs whom Israel has pushed around. Israeli leaders, “[u]niversally . . . seem rather to evoke his dislike, and Israel as a whole seems to have the same effect on him,” neoconservative Joshua Muravchik wrote in Commentary. I share some of Carter’s anger, but it would have been diplomatic for him to say that some of his best friends are Jews, a statement he made at Brandeis when he reeled off the names of Jewish former aides.
The speech offered an ashen Carter who understood that Jews suffer too. When a youth asked about a line on page 213 of the book, Carter simply apologized for it. The sentence stated that Palestinians must abandon suicide bombing when they are granted a state. Of course, they ought to abandon such tactics right now, Carter said. “That sentence was worded in a completely improper and stupid way. … So again let me repeat, I apologize for the wording of that sentence. It was a mistake on my part, and it is now being corrected in future editions.”
No one lacking outsize political talents ever got to be president, and the ashen moments only bolstered Carter’s refrain: Jewish settlers have confiscated the best land in the West Bank, which is after all only 22 percent of the original Palestine, including choice hilltops and water sources. Israel has built a “spiderweb” of roads serving the settlers alone. This was wrong, indeed abominable, but this reality had not been reflected widely in the United States. That is why he wrote the book. Hard to argue with. And more than that, embarrassing to Jews.
While the audience may not have embraced Carter, it honored him, and having cut through the name-calling, he issued a challenge that hung in the air: Don’t believe me, he said. Find out for yourself. Observe the conditions of Palestinian life and see for yourself whether I am exaggerating. Bring back a report. It will have a huge impact—on Israel, on Brandeis, on Congress, and even on the president. (Brandeis has since taken up his challenge and will send a delegation.)
“Make it three professors and seven students, and go to the West Bank, and just spend three days. I can give you a list of people that you might want to talk to, or you can use your own judgment.”
As I walked out, I sensed a thrill in the crowd. I met two older Jews in the front hall who were as jangled as I was. Jack Porter was handing out copies of a positive review of Carter’s book by leftwing Knesset member Yossi Beilin, saying that the “agonizing” book correctly identifies the path Israelis and Palestinians are moving down. Porter said that he had never felt so empowered: “This is a watershed event. It’s about free speech in the Jewish community. For the first time in two decades, I’m not feeling guilty. I felt that criticizing Israel would be feeding its enemies. But now I see it’s just the opposite. A lot of us held back.”
Nearby was a man of about 80 with a middle-European accent, trembling with fury: “He is a politician, and he knows what to avoid and how to dodge questions. He didn’t tell any lies, he just didn’t tell the truth.” “Were you moved at all?” I asked. “Yes. I was moved to think: we survived Carter. The country was tanking under him because he told Americans to expect less.”
Neither of these men was a student. Not eligible for rationed tickets to the event, they watched on a remote feed in Shapiro Campus Center. They had come into the gym to hear Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor, respond to Carter’s speech. Brandeis had at first demanded that Carter debate Dershowitz. The president had demurred, saying that the professor didn’t know anything about occupied Palestine, and Brandeis then invited him on his own, to be followed by Dershowitz. (The Radical Students Association subsequently demanded that Dershowitz be followed by his nemesis, Norman G. Finkelstein, who was tentatively scheduled to visit the campus this month.)
Carter showed tactical smarts by saying that he had declined to meet “a Harvard professor” who wanted to debate him. “I am that nameless Harvard professor,” Dershowitz announced, grinning, but it was plain that the comment upset him. He pointed out that he had met Carter on a few occasions, and Carter had once sought his opinion. Later, when he was interviewed by local television, Dershowitz said that Carter was a “little bit of a coward for not mentioning my name, and a little too cute.”
Of course, Alan Dershowitz and Jimmy Carter are very different types: one a combative defense lawyer, the other a lofty statesman. Having never seen the Dershowitz show before, I was impressed. He’s smart, informative, and quick on his feet. He makes jokes. He encourages students to challenge and rebut him. He doesn’t always like what they have to say. When a Palestinian girl nervously said that going through a checkpoint the previous summer was “the most humiliating experience that you ever have,” Dershowitz broke in: “You’re talking to the wrong people.” He meant that Palestinians could make the checkpoints disappear by ending violent attacks. (Yes, but what about the 500 checkpoints said to be inside the territories as opposed to the 30 on the Israeli border?)
When a student suggested that Hamas must be respected because it won an election, Dershowitz said that she was probably for the Nazis when they were elected in 1933. When another student said that he had lost count of the number of times Dershowitz cited Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, Dershowitz stomped him by recounting anti-Jewish statements by Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad, then saying, “Everyone thought Hitler was a tinhorn dictator” in the 1930s. If France and England had taken Hitler at his word and crushed him then, they would have gone down “as the bullyboys of history.” That was the great vice of preemption, he said. But it was also the great virtue: they would have “saved tens of millions of lives.” The kid shut up and sat down, punctured. Jonathan Demme’s documentary photographers, who had not been allowed in the hall for the Carter event, rushed over with a release for him to sign.
Dershowitz’s answer was brilliant, but it was incomplete. His references to Hitler and the Nazis were not confined to Iran. For instance, Dershowitz referred to the pre-1967 border in Israel as the “Auschwitz border.” After the speech, I stood with a group of students getting Dershowitz’s autograph and asked him what that meant. He said it was former Israeli Ambassador to the UN Abba Eban’s statement and referred to the fact that Israelis were extremely vulnerable to Palestinian attack inside the borders of the Jewish state from 1949-67.
I introduced myself to history professor Jacob Cohen, who had emceed the Dershowitz event, and asked him about my impression that Brandeis had showered Carter with respect. He said, “The respect and the open-mindedness was not an illusion. I think he speaks very naïvely and often harmfully. He speaks to a vein of idealism, and that’s what young people are.”
Well, I said, young people want to have a hopeful view of history. They don’t want to hear about the Holocaust all the time. They don’t want to see history as having a tragic destination.
Cohen became angry: “You’re talking about a symbol, the desecration of which deeply hurts the Jewish people …” He went on to say that if I thought that “the elimination of Israel” would end Islamic world’s hatred of the West, I was wrong. “Osama bin Laden is still remembering the Crusades.”
It seemed to me that like the 80-year-old I had met in the hall, Cohen was hurt and frightened by Carter’s acceptance and felt that it might signal a period of renewed persecution of the Jews.
But that was the last I was to hear of the Holocaust that night. I spent the rest of the evening with Brandeis kids, none older than 21 or so, and the Holocaust isn’t nearly as real to them as it is to Cohen’s generation and not as prominent for them as it was for my generation. They have little personal connection to it and are imagining the world in different ways. I would say unencumbered by it, Cohen would say nescient.
In the road in front of the gym was a clump of five or six students, most of them Jews, three of them wearing Palestinian scarves (or kaffiyehs)—a defiant symbol. Jews like these are becoming more common in American cities. The kids were saying that Carter had not gone far enough, that he hadn’t talked about the Israel lobby. “There has been a dam of silence,” one of them said. I asked the kids how many Jews on the Brandeis campus felt the way they did. They looked around at one another. “About five,” one said, and they laughed.
Nearby, an Arab student wearing a kaffiyeh said that Arabs were gathering at 9 p.m. in Shapiro to discuss the Carter visit. I went but couldn’t find the Arabs. A kid working on a punk magazine hopped on his computer and said that Democracy for America, a group inspired by Howard Dean, was meeting in the university’s replica Scottish castle, a campus landmark.
I soon found myself with 18 kids in a circle. Most were Jewish, ranging from liberal to progressive. Fearing anger and dispute, Danielle Sunberg, the group’s chairman, had brought a stuffed teddy bear. The rule was that you could only talk when you were holding the bear. When you were finished, you could throw it to someone else.
For the second or third time that day, I was surprised. A couple of students were sharply critical of Carter, but mostly they were enthused. “The campus is on fire tonight,” one remarked. It was exciting to them that the president had visited. “He was making a mea culpa to the Jewish community. To correct things, to move forward…” said Ari Fertig. They were moved by his largeness of spirit. They felt that they had a positive role to play in this discussion; they wanted to play their part as young people. “We need a few generations to die out,” one said.
Several students said they were offended by Dershowitz’s tone. Even though they tended to agree with him more than Carter on substance, they were angered that he had been so disrespectful to students, jumping in on what they were saying. “He was rude,” one said.
Twenty feet away in the common room, two students watched a television airing George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech. Bush’s words broke in on our group’s conversation, but he was largely ignored. Whatever Jimmy Carter’s failings as president long ago, he has touched a moral chord in our public life, one that countless Americans want to rediscover, especially now that Bush’s militarism has created a bloody cul-de-sac in Iraq.
“Just now I heard George Bush saying, ‘We have to take the fight to our enemies,’” James Ansorge said. “I’m of Jewish blood, but I’m not an Israeli citizen, I’m an American citizen. I’m not much of a historian of Israel and Palestine, but I do see Israel in perpetual conflict with their neighbors ... and that seems to be extending to us now. Many Arab extremists seek the destruction of the Israeli state, and now they want the same for us. Things are becoming very belligerent. It’s at a breaking point. We must start the peace process.”
Again I heard the term “watershed.” Fertig, tall, curly-haired, and in a sweatshirt, said, “You know, before tonight, I was very hesitant to ever debate the Middle East. I think this is a watershed moment, both personally and for this community. . . . I am trained in the pro-Israeli way of thinking. This is the first time I came away from a forum more favorable to the Palestinians—the first time I ever came down more favorably on the guy supporting Palestinians than on Israel.”
The teddy bear was thrown this way and that until at the end it was passed around the circle for closing statements. When it came to me, I said that I hoped my generation’s attitudes died out and made way for theirs.
Philip Weiss is at work on a book about Jewish issues. He writes a blog for the New York Observer, Mondoweiss.
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative
Jimmy Carter’s book stirs a critical debate.
by Philip Weiss
Since the publication last November of Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, his critics have pretty much held the floor. In fact, days before the book was available, its argument that Palestinians suffer “abominable oppression and persecution” at the hands of the Israelis was dismissed outright by Democratic Party leaders Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean, as though it might harm their party in the midterm elections. Their disavowals gave way to the kind of vituperative feeling in pro-Israel quarters that is usually saved for Holocaust deniers and Nazis: Carter will go down in history as “a Jew-hater,” according to The New Republic’s Martin Peretz; the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg called him un-Christian; and Commentary published a long attack on Carter as “the very worst ex-President,” a would be “prince of peace” who was in fact a busybody with a martyr-wish, embittered by his 1980 re-election defeat.
In January came news that Carter’s views had cost him among his own former adherents. Saying that Carter had abandoned an honorable role as honest broker between two sides, 15 Jewish members of the Carter Center advisory board resigned en masse—the sort of thrilling moral stand I hoped for, and never got, during much bigger presidential flaps like Clinton’s sexual harassment saga and Bush’s descent into Iraq.
The conventional wisdom seemed to be that Carter had damaged himself, and badly.
But the fury has masked a quieter trend —nodding support for the president’s views across the country. The book still ranks sixth on the New York Times bestseller list three months after publication, and Carter has taken on a moral halo among progressives and realists, the shotgun marriage of the Bush years. Film director Jonathan Demme, who mainstreamed gay rights with “Philadelphia,” is making a documentary on the book tour. “NBC Nightly News” featured the former president breaking down in tears on a panel at the Carter Center when relating a story of praying to God to give him strength before he confronted Anwar Sadat at Camp David in 1978, when Carter forged an historic peace accord between Israel and Egypt.
“I think the attacks in some ways have made the book more effective,” says Michael Brown, a fellow at the Palestine Center. “It’s extraordinary, but when people oppose a book or a movie, and make a big fuss out of it, most Americans will say, ‘I want to know what this is about.’”
Some of the fury hides an old-fashioned power struggle. For the first time since the State of Israel was created in 1948, a prominent American politician has publicly taken up the cause of the Arabs, describing Israel’s practices as oppressive. Such voices are common in Europe and in Israel itself. But they are uncommon here, where staunchly Zionist voices routinely assert that Israeli and American interests are identical, a view uniformly reflected in our politics and policies. The Carter groundswell seems to represent a real political threat to that claim. A recent batch of letters to the Houston Chronicle ran three-to-one in Carter’s favor. “Can’t Israel defend itself without subjecting all Palestinians in the occupied territories to such shameful conditions?” one asked. “Nothing justifies treating an entire group of people as if they were second-class human beings.”
The education Americans are seeking began nearly a year ago with an academic paper widely circulated in intellectual circles. “The Israel Lobby,” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, realist scholars at the University of Chicago and Harvard, sharply criticized the hegemony exercised by pro-Israel opinion makers in the United States. Famously, that piece was killed by the American magazine that commissioned it (The Atlantic) and eventually published by the London Review of Books. Now Jimmy Carter has brought some of the same arguments home and popularized them.
The ground seems to be shifting under our feet. M.J. Rosenberg, a progressive Zionist activist who works for Israel Policy Forum, wrote that he was surprised by the attitudes expressed at a Washington social gathering where Carter’s book had come up. The book had empowered gentiles to voice criticisms they have long held. One such person said that the Jewish community is “out of line for getting ‘bent out of shape’ by a book,” according to Rosenberg. “[N]on-Jewish Americans feel very inhibited . . . talking about Israel out of fear that any criticism will be labeled ‘anti-Semitism.’”
The Palestine Center’s Michael Brown has been pleased by the new turn in the conversation. “He has gotten the word ‘apartheid’ in the discussion. A lot of progressives used to roll their eyes at the comparison and said it’s too much. But Carter has put it out there. Carter has done an enormous service to the other narrative. Some of these groups are on the defensive for once.”
Carter’s first speech about his book was at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts on Jan. 23. I was eager to go. As a Jew who believes that the Israeli occupation is harming American interests in the Middle East, I am interested in the internal debate over Carter in the Jewish community. Jews have generally led the discussion of Israel in this country—and often closed ranks. Had Carter caused any slippage in the bloc?
I got to Brandeis’s Gosman Center gym at 3 p.m., 90 minutes ahead of the speech, and the first signs I saw surprised me—literally. In the barricaded pen for demonstrators was a wide banner: “Jewish Voice for Peace Supports Jimmy Carter. End the Occupation.” The Boston chapter of the Oakland-based group had brought a dozen people. Each had a poster describing an atrocity, like how many Palestinian children the Israeli military has allegedly killed (153) or how many dunams of Palestinian land Israel has confiscated in the West Bank in 2006 (7,749). In this pen, Jewish diversity meant a sprinkling of Zionists. Three young people represented CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) and handed out a leaflet titled “Carter’s Falsehoods,” which claimed that Carter misrepresented Palestinian leaders as moderates when they were actually extremists. The piece featured photographs of a Brandeis student killed by a suicide bomber in 1995 and of the Palestinian prime minister meeting with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The gym was jammed with 2,000 folding chairs. All soon filled. Carter was the first president to visit the campus in 50 years (Harry Truman being the last), and there was excitement, along with an air of respect and decorum. Another surprise: I’d been expecting rage. After all, Shulamit Reinharz, the wife of Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz, had called Carter a “plagiarist” in an article for The Jewish Advocate and said, in a vicious spirit, that Carter should have kept his thoughts to himself, just as he should have kept private the famous “lust in my heart” confession he made during his presidential campaign 30 years ago.
But Mrs. Reinharz was not in attendance (“major commitment out of town,” she told me later), and looking around, I saw only a handful of students wearing blue and white in solidarity with Israel, a common response when critics of Israel visit campus. I talked to four of them—all female members of Zionists for Historical Veracity, a Brandeis group dedicated to spreading the word that Israel is the only democracy in the region. This is a new tactic for responding to the criticism of Israel—showing that Israel guarantees free speech, gay rights and women’s rights, when Arab tyrannies do not. It sidesteps the question of human rights and political self-determination for the estimated 3 million Palestinians under Israeli authority. I brought up the occupied territories, and one girl said that I meant Judea and Samaria. “That’s the way it’s referred to in the Bible,” she noted.
I asked the girls why so many Arabs seem to hate Israel. “I wish we knew,” one answered. “I think it has a lot to do with the education system,” another said. “Sadly for the children being affected, they are not getting the correct historical account, and a new generation is brought up to hate Israel.”
My impression of diversity was reinforced by a talk with Getzel Davis, a long-haired kid whose t-shirt said in Hebrew, “You Should Love Your Neighbor as Yourself.” Davis criticized Carter as imbalanced, singling out the Israelis. Yes, it was time to acknowledge that there was a cycle of violence in Palestine, but it must be considered “holistically.” Then Davis told me how haunted he was by a visit to the Orthodox Jewish settlement in Hebron in the West Bank: “The most broken place I’ve ever been in my life.”
Carter arrived, and—what a surprise—no one booed. People rose to their feet and applauded strongly for a minute. Seventy minutes later, when Carter smiled his Cheshire cat grin and disappeared, the applause was even more sustained.
In the interim, he achieved a lot. His performance had a vulnerable, human manner. He flattered Brandeis by saying that it was the most exciting invitation to speak he had received since the Congress called on him to give his inaugural address exactly 30 years before. And this might have been a sincere statement; despite being a statesman whose every utterance has a public quality, Carter actually seemed nervous. He said, with a hint of defensiveness, “I don’t often write my speeches, but I decided to this morning. I read over it before I left home in Plains, Georgia. It took 15 minutes without any pauses for applause. So I can predict for you that I’ll be ready to answer questions in about 15 minutes.”
The second question, about the hurtfulness of the word “apartheid,” occasioned Carter’s broken moment, when in a halting voice he described his pain at the accusations against him:
I am deeply concerned about the tensions that might have arisen. That was not my intention at all. And I’ve been hurt and so has my family by some of the reaction. I’ve been through political campaigns for state senate and for governor and for president, and I’ve been stigmatized and condemned by my political opponents and their stories. But this is the first time that I’ve ever been called a liar and a bigot and an anti-Semite and a coward and a plagiarist. This has hurt me. I can take it. But I think that that group of people who have made those statements — sometimes in full-page ads in the New York Times — I think they are an extreme minority.
Carter was trying to mend bridges. His book has pained many Jews for a reason. The strong feeling throughout the book is one progressives often have on visits to the Holy Land: that the Arabs we meet are kinder and more righteous than the Israelis, that the Israelis are the power. The moral core of Carter’s book can be seen is his treatment of Hafez al-Assad, the late Syrian dictator reviled in this country. Carter seems to see Assad as brilliant, and his text offers, without contradiction, Assad’s analysis of the Israelis as expansionist and racist, imitating the Jews’ European persecutors by performing ethnic cleansing on Arabs. At other times, Carter openly identifies, as a Christian, with the Christian Arabs whom Israel has pushed around. Israeli leaders, “[u]niversally . . . seem rather to evoke his dislike, and Israel as a whole seems to have the same effect on him,” neoconservative Joshua Muravchik wrote in Commentary. I share some of Carter’s anger, but it would have been diplomatic for him to say that some of his best friends are Jews, a statement he made at Brandeis when he reeled off the names of Jewish former aides.
The speech offered an ashen Carter who understood that Jews suffer too. When a youth asked about a line on page 213 of the book, Carter simply apologized for it. The sentence stated that Palestinians must abandon suicide bombing when they are granted a state. Of course, they ought to abandon such tactics right now, Carter said. “That sentence was worded in a completely improper and stupid way. … So again let me repeat, I apologize for the wording of that sentence. It was a mistake on my part, and it is now being corrected in future editions.”
No one lacking outsize political talents ever got to be president, and the ashen moments only bolstered Carter’s refrain: Jewish settlers have confiscated the best land in the West Bank, which is after all only 22 percent of the original Palestine, including choice hilltops and water sources. Israel has built a “spiderweb” of roads serving the settlers alone. This was wrong, indeed abominable, but this reality had not been reflected widely in the United States. That is why he wrote the book. Hard to argue with. And more than that, embarrassing to Jews.
While the audience may not have embraced Carter, it honored him, and having cut through the name-calling, he issued a challenge that hung in the air: Don’t believe me, he said. Find out for yourself. Observe the conditions of Palestinian life and see for yourself whether I am exaggerating. Bring back a report. It will have a huge impact—on Israel, on Brandeis, on Congress, and even on the president. (Brandeis has since taken up his challenge and will send a delegation.)
“Make it three professors and seven students, and go to the West Bank, and just spend three days. I can give you a list of people that you might want to talk to, or you can use your own judgment.”
As I walked out, I sensed a thrill in the crowd. I met two older Jews in the front hall who were as jangled as I was. Jack Porter was handing out copies of a positive review of Carter’s book by leftwing Knesset member Yossi Beilin, saying that the “agonizing” book correctly identifies the path Israelis and Palestinians are moving down. Porter said that he had never felt so empowered: “This is a watershed event. It’s about free speech in the Jewish community. For the first time in two decades, I’m not feeling guilty. I felt that criticizing Israel would be feeding its enemies. But now I see it’s just the opposite. A lot of us held back.”
Nearby was a man of about 80 with a middle-European accent, trembling with fury: “He is a politician, and he knows what to avoid and how to dodge questions. He didn’t tell any lies, he just didn’t tell the truth.” “Were you moved at all?” I asked. “Yes. I was moved to think: we survived Carter. The country was tanking under him because he told Americans to expect less.”
Neither of these men was a student. Not eligible for rationed tickets to the event, they watched on a remote feed in Shapiro Campus Center. They had come into the gym to hear Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor, respond to Carter’s speech. Brandeis had at first demanded that Carter debate Dershowitz. The president had demurred, saying that the professor didn’t know anything about occupied Palestine, and Brandeis then invited him on his own, to be followed by Dershowitz. (The Radical Students Association subsequently demanded that Dershowitz be followed by his nemesis, Norman G. Finkelstein, who was tentatively scheduled to visit the campus this month.)
Carter showed tactical smarts by saying that he had declined to meet “a Harvard professor” who wanted to debate him. “I am that nameless Harvard professor,” Dershowitz announced, grinning, but it was plain that the comment upset him. He pointed out that he had met Carter on a few occasions, and Carter had once sought his opinion. Later, when he was interviewed by local television, Dershowitz said that Carter was a “little bit of a coward for not mentioning my name, and a little too cute.”
Of course, Alan Dershowitz and Jimmy Carter are very different types: one a combative defense lawyer, the other a lofty statesman. Having never seen the Dershowitz show before, I was impressed. He’s smart, informative, and quick on his feet. He makes jokes. He encourages students to challenge and rebut him. He doesn’t always like what they have to say. When a Palestinian girl nervously said that going through a checkpoint the previous summer was “the most humiliating experience that you ever have,” Dershowitz broke in: “You’re talking to the wrong people.” He meant that Palestinians could make the checkpoints disappear by ending violent attacks. (Yes, but what about the 500 checkpoints said to be inside the territories as opposed to the 30 on the Israeli border?)
When a student suggested that Hamas must be respected because it won an election, Dershowitz said that she was probably for the Nazis when they were elected in 1933. When another student said that he had lost count of the number of times Dershowitz cited Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, Dershowitz stomped him by recounting anti-Jewish statements by Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad, then saying, “Everyone thought Hitler was a tinhorn dictator” in the 1930s. If France and England had taken Hitler at his word and crushed him then, they would have gone down “as the bullyboys of history.” That was the great vice of preemption, he said. But it was also the great virtue: they would have “saved tens of millions of lives.” The kid shut up and sat down, punctured. Jonathan Demme’s documentary photographers, who had not been allowed in the hall for the Carter event, rushed over with a release for him to sign.
Dershowitz’s answer was brilliant, but it was incomplete. His references to Hitler and the Nazis were not confined to Iran. For instance, Dershowitz referred to the pre-1967 border in Israel as the “Auschwitz border.” After the speech, I stood with a group of students getting Dershowitz’s autograph and asked him what that meant. He said it was former Israeli Ambassador to the UN Abba Eban’s statement and referred to the fact that Israelis were extremely vulnerable to Palestinian attack inside the borders of the Jewish state from 1949-67.
I introduced myself to history professor Jacob Cohen, who had emceed the Dershowitz event, and asked him about my impression that Brandeis had showered Carter with respect. He said, “The respect and the open-mindedness was not an illusion. I think he speaks very naïvely and often harmfully. He speaks to a vein of idealism, and that’s what young people are.”
Well, I said, young people want to have a hopeful view of history. They don’t want to hear about the Holocaust all the time. They don’t want to see history as having a tragic destination.
Cohen became angry: “You’re talking about a symbol, the desecration of which deeply hurts the Jewish people …” He went on to say that if I thought that “the elimination of Israel” would end Islamic world’s hatred of the West, I was wrong. “Osama bin Laden is still remembering the Crusades.”
It seemed to me that like the 80-year-old I had met in the hall, Cohen was hurt and frightened by Carter’s acceptance and felt that it might signal a period of renewed persecution of the Jews.
But that was the last I was to hear of the Holocaust that night. I spent the rest of the evening with Brandeis kids, none older than 21 or so, and the Holocaust isn’t nearly as real to them as it is to Cohen’s generation and not as prominent for them as it was for my generation. They have little personal connection to it and are imagining the world in different ways. I would say unencumbered by it, Cohen would say nescient.
In the road in front of the gym was a clump of five or six students, most of them Jews, three of them wearing Palestinian scarves (or kaffiyehs)—a defiant symbol. Jews like these are becoming more common in American cities. The kids were saying that Carter had not gone far enough, that he hadn’t talked about the Israel lobby. “There has been a dam of silence,” one of them said. I asked the kids how many Jews on the Brandeis campus felt the way they did. They looked around at one another. “About five,” one said, and they laughed.
Nearby, an Arab student wearing a kaffiyeh said that Arabs were gathering at 9 p.m. in Shapiro to discuss the Carter visit. I went but couldn’t find the Arabs. A kid working on a punk magazine hopped on his computer and said that Democracy for America, a group inspired by Howard Dean, was meeting in the university’s replica Scottish castle, a campus landmark.
I soon found myself with 18 kids in a circle. Most were Jewish, ranging from liberal to progressive. Fearing anger and dispute, Danielle Sunberg, the group’s chairman, had brought a stuffed teddy bear. The rule was that you could only talk when you were holding the bear. When you were finished, you could throw it to someone else.
For the second or third time that day, I was surprised. A couple of students were sharply critical of Carter, but mostly they were enthused. “The campus is on fire tonight,” one remarked. It was exciting to them that the president had visited. “He was making a mea culpa to the Jewish community. To correct things, to move forward…” said Ari Fertig. They were moved by his largeness of spirit. They felt that they had a positive role to play in this discussion; they wanted to play their part as young people. “We need a few generations to die out,” one said.
Several students said they were offended by Dershowitz’s tone. Even though they tended to agree with him more than Carter on substance, they were angered that he had been so disrespectful to students, jumping in on what they were saying. “He was rude,” one said.
Twenty feet away in the common room, two students watched a television airing George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech. Bush’s words broke in on our group’s conversation, but he was largely ignored. Whatever Jimmy Carter’s failings as president long ago, he has touched a moral chord in our public life, one that countless Americans want to rediscover, especially now that Bush’s militarism has created a bloody cul-de-sac in Iraq.
“Just now I heard George Bush saying, ‘We have to take the fight to our enemies,’” James Ansorge said. “I’m of Jewish blood, but I’m not an Israeli citizen, I’m an American citizen. I’m not much of a historian of Israel and Palestine, but I do see Israel in perpetual conflict with their neighbors ... and that seems to be extending to us now. Many Arab extremists seek the destruction of the Israeli state, and now they want the same for us. Things are becoming very belligerent. It’s at a breaking point. We must start the peace process.”
Again I heard the term “watershed.” Fertig, tall, curly-haired, and in a sweatshirt, said, “You know, before tonight, I was very hesitant to ever debate the Middle East. I think this is a watershed moment, both personally and for this community. . . . I am trained in the pro-Israeli way of thinking. This is the first time I came away from a forum more favorable to the Palestinians—the first time I ever came down more favorably on the guy supporting Palestinians than on Israel.”
The teddy bear was thrown this way and that until at the end it was passed around the circle for closing statements. When it came to me, I said that I hoped my generation’s attitudes died out and made way for theirs.
Philip Weiss is at work on a book about Jewish issues. He writes a blog for the New York Observer, Mondoweiss.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Jimmy Carter Tells Truth about Palestine but Lies about Israel
Analysis
By Genevieve Cora Fraser
Jimmy Carter tells the truth about the impact of the Israeli Occupation on Palestine in "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid." In Gaza, Israel is practicing a slow form of genocide where the people are sealed off from the world and encounter non-stop military assaults, he points out. And the Wall Israel is erecting separates Palestinians from Palestinians. The Wall steals Palestinian land just as the illegal settlements do, and is creating a prison. But Carter is far from candid about the crisis in Israel itself, claiming that Arab Israelis enjoy full rights as citizens and that it is a wonderful and open society.
Sure, Arab Israelis can vote and have a few token representatives in the Knesset, but they do not have full rights as citizens - or human rights for that matter. In January, for example, Shimon Peres requested the ethnic cleansing of over 40,000 Arab Israelis from their centuries old villages, the Knesset voted for it, and shortly thereafter the bulldozers arrived. The purpose was to clear out the people to put up luxury condos for Jews-only.
And this summer before the war on Lebanon, Israeli Jews were fighting Jews in riots. The White Ashkenazi Jews didn't like the Middle Eastern Jews driving on their streets or walking on their sidewalks. Why? Because, according to the non-Semite Jews, they are religiously superior to Jews of color.
During the war against Lebanon it was the Arab Israelis who were killed because Israel had not provided warning sirens or air raid shelters to their communities. Ironically, it was Hezbollah that warned the Arab villages in Southern Israel that they were about to attack.
If you want the facts - read the Israeli papers as I do. Israel is an extremely racist country as anyone who lives there, or has spent time there knows. Whether or not they admit it is another story. Yes, Jimmy Carter would have us believe that Israel behaves one way toward the Palestinian Arabs and in a completely opposite way toward the Arabs in Israel. No, Mr. President, Israeli racism is consistent inside and outside of Israel for Arabs whether they are Jews or non-Jewish.
By Genevieve Cora Fraser
Jimmy Carter tells the truth about the impact of the Israeli Occupation on Palestine in "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid." In Gaza, Israel is practicing a slow form of genocide where the people are sealed off from the world and encounter non-stop military assaults, he points out. And the Wall Israel is erecting separates Palestinians from Palestinians. The Wall steals Palestinian land just as the illegal settlements do, and is creating a prison. But Carter is far from candid about the crisis in Israel itself, claiming that Arab Israelis enjoy full rights as citizens and that it is a wonderful and open society.
Sure, Arab Israelis can vote and have a few token representatives in the Knesset, but they do not have full rights as citizens - or human rights for that matter. In January, for example, Shimon Peres requested the ethnic cleansing of over 40,000 Arab Israelis from their centuries old villages, the Knesset voted for it, and shortly thereafter the bulldozers arrived. The purpose was to clear out the people to put up luxury condos for Jews-only.
And this summer before the war on Lebanon, Israeli Jews were fighting Jews in riots. The White Ashkenazi Jews didn't like the Middle Eastern Jews driving on their streets or walking on their sidewalks. Why? Because, according to the non-Semite Jews, they are religiously superior to Jews of color.
During the war against Lebanon it was the Arab Israelis who were killed because Israel had not provided warning sirens or air raid shelters to their communities. Ironically, it was Hezbollah that warned the Arab villages in Southern Israel that they were about to attack.
If you want the facts - read the Israeli papers as I do. Israel is an extremely racist country as anyone who lives there, or has spent time there knows. Whether or not they admit it is another story. Yes, Jimmy Carter would have us believe that Israel behaves one way toward the Palestinian Arabs and in a completely opposite way toward the Arabs in Israel. No, Mr. President, Israeli racism is consistent inside and outside of Israel for Arabs whether they are Jews or non-Jewish.
The Carter effect
Ironically, the campaign to discredit the 2002 Nobel peace laureate has achieved nothing but open up forums of discussing
---
"One of the major goals of my life, while in political office and since I was retired from the White House by the 1980 election, has been to help ensure a lasting peace for Israelis and others in the Middle East."
If such was Jimmy Carter's opening statement in his latest book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, why would the Israel-sympathetic words cause uproar among US Jews and elsewhere? And why would the former US president be accused by many Jewish groups of being a liar, a bigot, an anti- Semite, a coward and a plagiarist? And why would staunch protest to the book come from none other than 14 members of the advisory board of the 25-year-old Atlanta-based Carter Center, resigning en masse, stating that "we can no longer endorse your strident and uncompromising position." The letter of resignation addressed to Carter went on attacking the book as being "unfairly critical of Israel and riddled with inaccuracies". In effect, the most vociferous of protestations were geared against the comparison of Israel's treatment of Palestinians with South Africa's gruesome apartheid system of racial segregation.
In his first direct address to Jewish Americans on his book at Brandeis University last month, Carter said the word "apartheid was intended to provoke debate on the rights of Palestinians, unfairly treated by Israel," he stressed to his audience. Ironically, the campaign to discredit the 2002 Nobel peace laureate has achieved nothing but open up forums of discussing Palestine in the context of apartheid and focus on the crimes of Israeli occupation. For the 11th consecutive week now since it hit the market last November, Palestine Peace not Apartheid has ranked high on the New York Times best selling list, unyieldingly defiant in the face of its assailants. For the mere effect of injecting such a debate into American circles, Carter's latest publication is no meagre accomplishment.
Outlining steps that ought to be taken for Palestinians and Israelis to share the Holy Land without the benefit of an apartheid system and the constant fear of "terrorist" attacks, is the book's declared objective. And Carter does not mince his words when he asserts that Israel's refusal to fully withdraw from the Occupied Territories is the main obstacle to a settlement. A glance through the last few pages of the book is sufficient to learn of the author's three most basic premises for peace: Israel's right to exist within recognised borders accepted by Palestinians and all other neighbours, a halt to acts of violence against civilians and the necessity for Palestinians to live in peace and dignity in their own land as specified by international law unless modified by good-faith negotiations with Israel.
But it would indeed be a great pity if the reader limited him or herself to the last two pages, for the author has been very clever and skilful in building up his case. Contrary to his stated objective, the prescription for peace is in fact not the only goal; rather more important for Carter is pricking the existing abscess.
Apart from the controversial title, the word apartheid does not resurface till relatively late in the chapter on the separation wall, or the "imprisonment wall" as Carter emphasises, that being a more accurate description than "security fence" . Absent it may be, yet apartheid is the omnipresent thread running throughout the various chapters reviewing the Oslo agreement, the Camp David summit in 2000, the subsequent Clinton parameters, the road map, the Geneva Accord of 2003, Sharon's unilateral disengagement from Gaza, the legislative elections won by Hamas, the war in Lebanon and finally the deteriorating situation in Gaza. Page after page, Carter skilfully introduces the intrinsic details of daily life under occupation in Palestine, unravelling the essence of an apartheid system beyond scholarly definitions and philosophical interpretations.
It is no coincidence that a strong emphasis is placed on the use of the term "Holy Land" in the first chapter. Carter dwells on his biblical affiliation with Jerusalem and dedicates considerable space to narrating his impressions of the first trip he made to the holy sites in Palestine in the early 1970s. By the end of the chapter, the average American reader imbued with a Judeo-Christian affinity with Palestine as a holy land has warmed to Carter and is indeed ready to receive what the following chapters have to say.
The realities of living under occupation in Palestine come in a flashing sequence of simple narrative: Truckloads of Palestinian oranges held by the Israeli army till they rot and their owner matter-of-factly giving away the spoilt fruit as livestock feed; a family describing to the author how their home was demolished by Israeli bulldozers and dynamite; doctors pointing at idle ambulances donated by the European Union, left to bask in the sun, denied a license... Some of the most powerful pages describe the voting process in East Jerusalem and the systematic intimidating measures imposed by Israeli authorities on the voters. And even though Carter, who was an observer to the elections in 2006, hails the clean elections leading to Hamas's victory, he does not hide his condemnation of the suicide bombing policy of the movement. Nevertheless, the author painstakingly delineates why some Palestinians may consider this as an option to resist occupation.
Likewise, settlements in the reader's psyche change from being leafy compounds perched on hills, welcoming New Yorkers wishing to fulfil their dreams of living in the Holy Land, to an image of how the West Bank is sliced into three Bantustan-like parts where 200 Jewish-only settlements are mostly erected on confiscated Palestinian land. For the safety and convenience of some 187,000 settlers, about 2,460,000 Palestinians suffer considerable restriction of movement imposed by a rigid permit system enforced through 520 checkpoints and roadblocks
Interestingly, the many reviews flooding the world press have either emphasised the truth of the grim situation of occupation in Palestine or Carter's "biased" position towards Palestinians. None or few have dwelt on the peace blueprint Carter proposes. Several observations are noteworthy in this regard. From the very beginning Carter emphasises international law as a basis for solving the conflict. Yet he fails to explain what international law is in more concrete terms, letting it span a wide variety of norms, principles and issues ranging from relevant United Nations resolutions to state responsibility to reparations to self-determination -- to name just a few. Carter also declares a penchant for Security Council resolution 242 of 1967 and stays mute on General Assembly resolution 194 of 1948. One of the reasons for this may be to avoid delving into the Palestinian refugee problem. With one out of three refugees in the world Palestinian, Carter may have deemed it easier to avoid discussing resolution 194, calling for the right of return, compensation and restitution of property. In fact, the refugee problem is so strikingly trivialised throughout the book that it is almost unperceived and one wonders how peace can be discussed without a mention of the fate of over five million Palestinian refugees.
From another perspective, the only US president to have succeeded in brokering a peace agreement within the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict offers surprisingly little on his insights into bridging gaps between conflicting parties. We are told nothing about the lessons learnt from negotiating Camp David between Egypt and Israel in 1978. Nor do we find resonance of the wealth of experience accumulated throughout the presidency of a superpower and a conflict-resolution centre dealing with conflicts throughout the globe.
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid is not an authoritative analytical view of the conflict, nor is it innovative regarding its resolution. What Carter succeeds in doing is shake up Americans slumbering under George Bush's interpretation of the world and a media confusing its readers over who is fighting over what in Palestine. More importantly, for the many who have not read the book, debating the realities of the Israeli occupation of Palestine is very much on the menu of the written and visual media. Jimmy Carter is indeed paying tribute to the Holy Land.
* The writer is a lecturer in political science at the British University in Egypt. She specialises in the field of reparations and historical injustice, Palestinian refugees, displacement and the Arab-Israeli conflict
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Israeli Policy Makes Apartheid More Likely
Sun Feb 18, 2007 at 08:38:25 AM EST
The founder of the Israeli organization, Israel Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), is a guy named Jeff Halper. Along with Naim Ateek, Halper recently spoke at the National Press Club (February 12, 2007) and provided his latest analysis of the prospects for peace in Palestine. His article, The Problem With Israel, was posted at Daily Kos sa few months ago, where it received a lot of attention. It provided a unique understanding about Israel's intentions regarding a Palestinian state. These intentions are seldom what they seem to be. He called Israel's actions over the decades "muddling through" by "conflict management" rather than making any real movement toward peace. Israeli leaders talk it up, in other words, but always seem to fall short when peace is threatening. At the same time, building on the West Bank continues as if there is an intention to stay (http://www.icahd.org/eng/).
Halper's talk at the National Press Club was called, Israeli Policy Makes a Two-State Solution Less Likely. I'm reprinting a report I received of the event from the Council for the National Interest, which they disseminated. They sponsored the talk. I turned the title around after reading it and listening to Halper's talk (see down below), because that was really what he seemed to be saying.
Two Israeli peace activists told an audience in Washington, DC, this week that, as long as current Israeli policies continue, a real two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is increasingly unlikely and perhaps impossible.
The speakers were the Rev. Dr. Naim Ateek, founder and director of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem, and Jeff Halper, founder and coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). Halper and Ateek spoke at the National Press Club on Monday, February 12th, 2007, at the CNI Foundation's 22nd "public hearing" to bring a much-needed debate about U.S. Middle East policy to Washington, DC.
Halper stated that his background as an anthropologist taught him to see things "from the ground up" and to "go where the field takes him," even if it means he has to occasionally admit that he is wrong. As a peace activist, Halper said he believes that while a "two-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an article of faith among Israelis, Palestinians, and virtually every other party involved or interested in the conflict, activists should admit that such an outcome is no longer possible because of Israel's policy of apartheid in the territories. He said that this position has made him a pariah among American groups, such as Americans for Peace Now and the Foundation for Middle East Peace, who refuse to host him for public talks.
In short, Halper said that the two-state solution is a "political program based on wishful thinking." He said he defines the word "apartheid" the same way as Jimmy Carter does in his book "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid": a separation of populations in which one people structurally and conceptually dominates the other permanently. One difference between Israeli apartheid and that of South Africa, Halper notes, is that Israel "feels like it can finesse a bantustan [for the Palestinians] in a way that South Africa could not."
As evidence he pointed to what he calls Israel's "matrix of control" in the occupied territories. The population of the Jewish-only settlements has more than doubled since Yasser Arafat's PLO recognized Israel, and thus endorsed the two-state solution, in 1988. The wall, the military checkpoints, and Israeli "bypass roads" criss-cross the West Bank and allow settlers easy travel, while carving up the territory and preventing Palestinian freedom of movement. Halper hinted at an alternative solution to the two-state model, which he calls a "two-stage" solution, based on an economic federation of Israel/Palestine and neighboring states.
Rev. Ateek cited scripture's command to "do justice and love mercy" as a reason why he once advocated for one state in Palestine, where, he said, "Jews, Muslims, and Christians can live together democratically." Later, he said he came to see that a one-state solution "may not be fair for a Jewish state," but that "a 'Jewish state' cannot be democratic." As a Palestinian Christian, he argued that, in the same way, an Islamic state in Palestine would not be democratic for the Christian minority. A one-state solution to the conflict would represent "justice without mercy."
As long as the final outcome is based on prior UN Security Council resolutions and international law, Ateek said that he would support a two-state solution. Specifically, he said that any solution must address the current disconnect between nationality and citizenship in the conflict. For example, he argued that Palestinians who live in Israel with Israeli citizenship, like himself, are not considered part of Israeli society, just as Israeli settlers living in the West Bank do not consider themselves Palestinian. He stated that he would tell the Israeli settlers, under any future agreement, "You are welcome to become Palestinians," but that until then, they are living illegally on Palestinian land. Any arrangement that takes justice and mercy as its basis must "protect the sovereignty of both states," which includes keeping "Palestinians secure from encroachment from their more powerful neighbor."
This view of the West Bank is really different from what anyone expected. You have to wonder if Jimmy Carter will be exonerated if the Palestine Halper sees unfolding actually happens, apartheid. This is just what Carter was damned for writing about in his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
If that reality does unfold, how would Israel face the world. Its apartheid creation would no longer be hidden from view. Such a potential development really makes you wonder if the Israeli people actually know what's going on in the West Bank. If they knew that their government is working toward a solution like South Africa's, I can't believe they would be pleased. The world clambered about South Africa's apartheid and it could happen to Israel if it continues down this path.
It also makes you wonder if Jeff Halper isn't just begging his countrymen not to go there. In the video of the conference below, he states that 70% of the Israeli people want a two state solution, that they just want the Palestinians far away from Israel behind the Wall. But that's the thing. When the government talks about a Palestinian state, it may not be the kind of state that most of the Israeli people or anyone else has in mind. Halper says it's a Bantustan that they are shooting for.
If you have the time, take in the video of Jeff Halper's talk online at this website (click Windows Media).
http://www.archive.org/details/Is_the_Tw o-State_Solution_Still_Possible
The Council for the National Interest Foundation can be found here:
Friday, February 9, 2007
Politics and Apartheid
February 8, 2007
The Meanness of Separation
By NEWTON GARVER
"Now everyone is prouder--and poorer."
--Orhan Pamuk
Jimmy Carter's most recent book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, has raised a storm of criticism from the Derschowitz-AIPAC wing of American Judaism, stung by his even-handed recounting of events and conversations, as well as his straightforward presentation of the failure to implement UN Security Council resolutions. From the criticism one might think that in the book Carter places all the blame on the Israelis, but that is far from the case. There is, in fact, at least one point (page 13) where he seems unbalanced in the other direction, citing the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as among continuing impediments to peace. Fair enough. But is not the rise of Jewish fundamentalism also a continuing impediment, responsible for the persistence and intransigence of settlement expansion, the massacre in the mosque in Hebron, and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin? Of course not every detail can be included. The book is impressive for its plain speaking, its illumination of the big picture, Carter's personal history in the discussions, and its careful attention to accuracy about the facts.
One of the features of Carter's style is to recount sympathetically and without judgment conversations he has had with key figures on all sides to the various controversies. It is this unjudgmental reporting that must be so infuriating to the AIPAC-Derschowitz crowd. One can readily understand that the facts and stories about what has happened and continues to happen in the supposedly Arab land of the West Bank and Gaza are on their face outrageous-unless the victims are themselves to blame for their distress. Carter refrains from expressing outrage, keeping instead his focus on the need for peace and reconciliation. But it is a feature of partisans and their pride in their side to regard evenhanded unjudgmental presentations as themselves intrinsically outrageous.
But what about Carter's opposition between peace and apartheid? Here there perhaps lies a perspective on the world that would be more alarming to world leaders than the even-handedness about Palestine. Does Carter mean to suggest that there can never be peace through apartheid? Is not the idea that you get peace through separation the principle behind a whole host of political sacred cows, including border fences, gated communities, bloated prisons, boycotts and blockades? Does enforced and ideologically buttressed separation lead to the sort of partisan pride that Pamuk has in mind, in the words above that he puts into the mouth of one of the wise minor figures in his recent novel?
Consider our prisons, for example. People are generally sent to prison for offenses against civil order, that is for having upset the peace of our society. One option might be to spend time and money to rehabilitate them, with the underlying thought that punishment is something the offender needs in order to regain his or her place in society (Simone Weil's idea), so that peace is regained by a kind of reconciliation. In practice, however, we lock them up and throw away the key, with the underlying thought that it is separation rather than reconciliation or integration that will bring peace. After all, we are so far superior to those criminals!! Isn't that why politicians support life sentences without the chance of parole, and imprisonment of the world's largest percentage of our own citizens? Has any sheriff or governor in recent history won office by promising to integrate convicted offenders more rapidly into society? One could raise similar questions about each of the other sacred cows mentioned above. And in each case there is partisan pride on at least one side.
The US is not only building a wall to separate us from Mexico but is also maintaining other walls to separate us from Cuba, Iran, Syria, and North Korea, often with the cooperation of wall-builders on the other side. The world might not call it peace, but our politicians think it means peace for ourselves, isolated from the miscreants who disdain our leadership and our good offices. And of course these separations are based on, and in turn reinforce, our sense of being the party of democracy and freedom, much superior to those brutal dictatorships, and better off isolated from them. Peace through apartheid. Just what Carter rules out, by implicit definition it seems, in his title.
Why does Carter disdain peace through separation, so much that he leaves it out of account? Could it be because he addresses this problem, as well as others, with his focus on the needs of government and the requirements of welfare rather than the ideas and tools of politcs?
Government is often confused with politics, but they are worlds apart. The aim of government is stability and prosperity, for which peace and tranquility are very helpful, if not necessary. The aim of politics is control and domination, for which crisis and war are convenient, and sometimes indispensable. Our elections are intensely political, since they concern who will be in power and best able to dominate the affairs of government. Sometimes those in power give us decent government. At other times mediocrity is perpetuated because there is a war, and the emergency powers of the commander-in-chief attracts support that overcomes political opposition. Carl Schmitt, one of the profound thinkers of the twentieth century, pointed out in The Concept of the Political that politics begins with a distinction between friends and enemies-a neglected insight that is confirmed over and over, both domestically and internationally. Politicians in the Middle East know who their enemies are, and they refuse to talk with them, just as Schmitt would expect. So, too, Bush refuses to talk with Iran or Syria, arbitrarily, but definitively, counting them as enemies. As elsewhere, the most successful Israeli and Palestinian politicians are fearmongers, reinforcing the walls of separation. There is little hope for peace along the lines that politics inhabits. Carter, without saying so, seeks to refocus the issues in terms of government and the welfare of people rather than politics, and so he speaks of the requirements of government in Palestine and Israel.
The thing about peace is that no one can be in control, because cooperation is required. Peace is a normal consequence of good government, and it can be achieved through negotiation, when there are legitimate and reliable negotiating partners; but it can no more come through politics than it can be achieved through apartheid.
In the work of Aristotle, politics just means government, but the words diverge sharply in our current discourse. Schmitt has his finger on the pulse of contemporary discourse. Because politics thrives on distinctions between friends and enemies, and enemies (unlike mere adversaries) can never become part of our community, politics entails apartheid. Carter could just as well have called his book, Palestine Peace or Politics. No doubt a different controversy would then have ensued, touching a wider range of issues. Carter's title is better suited to keeping the focus on Palestine. But the close interdependence between apartheid and partisan politics should not be forgotten.
Carter's message is one of hope, not fear, as is characteristic of steps toward peace and prosperity. Such a message goes contrary to partisan politics, as well as to apartheid. In a previous article ("Decider vs. Negotiator," I pointed out that there are many real life circumstances in which nice guys finish first, and meanness leads to impoverishment. In the context of that discussion, apartheid, or enforced and ideologically buttressed separation, together with the partisan politics that supports it, count as one prominent form of meanness, and one cause of the continuing public impoverishment.
Newton Garver is SUNY Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at University at Buffalo. An expanded edition of his book Limits of Power: Some Friendly Reminders (2005) will be published this spring by Center Working Papers.
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