In Defense of Jimmy Carter

And now, in case I haven’t made myself unpopular enough already, I feel compelled to rise to the defense of Jimmy Carter.

The fact is that I haven’t read the former president’s book Palestine: Peace or Apartheid that has gotten him into such trouble in the Jewish community, so I am not in a position to say I agree with everything he has written there. Yet I do agree strongly with the following sentences from an op-ed piece Carter wrote a couple of days ago in the Washington Post.

"The clear fact is that Israel will never find peace until it is willing to withdraw from its neighboring occupied territories and permit the Palestinians to exercise their basic human and political rights. With land swaps, this "green line" can be modified through negotiations to let a substantial number of Israeli settlers remain in their subsidized homes east of the internationally recognized border."

That’s the truth, that’s reality and that’s the simple equation that many in the American Jewish community don’t seem to get. For 40 years, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and Arab East Jerusalem has involved a determined denial of the basic human and political rights of another people and it is long since obvious that violence will continue until it ends.

Some say Carter is being unfair in putting all the onus on Israel for the present impasse; noting that the Palestinians, with their rejection of the 2000 Camp David agreement, their subsequent violent behavior, including suicide bombings, and election of Hamas have contributed mightily to the situation. I would agree with that, but lets be honest here; if Israel hadn’t wanted to absorb the West Bank, why would it have allowed a quarter of a million Israelis (not including the several hundred thousand in East Jerusalem) to settle there? If the security fence is supposed to be the new border, why are thousands of Israelis still moving every year to settlements on the other side of the fence? Why has the Israeli government been unable or unwilling even to remove the scores of illegal outposts it has repeatedly promised to remove? So don’t tell me Israel is on the West Bank only because it is forced to be there by Palestinian militancy; not because it still isn’t trying to grab as much land as possible.

Is it fair or accurate to label the Israeli occupation of the West Bank ‘apartheid’? True, the whites of South Africa set up their system of ‘separateness’ de jure; Israel’s system in the West Bank has kind of evolved in piecemeal fashion, often in response to acts of Palestinian violence. Still, there it is; a system that has been in existence for 40 years now, in which one set of human beings residing on the territory of the West Bank are citizens of the State of Israel with all democratic rights, whereas the others—the great majority---are not citizens and have few if any rights guaranteed by law. They can be jailed for long periods without charges and without access to attorney. They are penned in by an ever-expanding series of roadblocks that not only make it ever more difficult to enter Israel, including Jerusalem, but even to move from one West Bank town to another. There a series of roads running through the territory set up primarily for settler and military traffic upon which Palestinians are barred from driving. The settlers, who hate them, are armed and frequently violent, and the Palestinians know that the army will rarely protect them from settler attacks.

The Jewish members who resigned from the Carter Center, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Dennis Ross and others, have all complained that Carter go this or that fact wrong in his book as a way of discrediting his overall argument. They may have a point or two, but Carter is right about the bottom line, which is that Israeli oppression of the Palestinians in the West Bank has become institutionalized and it’s a grim and ugly business that demeans Israelis as well as Palestinians. It also contributes powerfully to the ongoing radicalization of the Palestinians and the whole Islamic world, something that is very much NOT in Israel’s and America’s interests.

The truth is that American Jewish lovers of Israel (including myself), don’t like to look this reality in the face, so we often employ a liberal amount of airbrushing. We fasten onto the word ‘apartheid’ and say Carter got it wrong, that its not really apartheid, as a way to prevent an honest examination of what is really going on. Or we snort loudly and indignantly and scream ‘anti-Semitism’. A few weeks ago I attended a speech by Alan Dershowitz at a Chabad-Lubavitch event in which Dershowitz literally bellowed; "Jimmy Carter has blood on his hands” for having written Palestine; Peace or Apartheid? Now, one may disagree strongly with Carter’s arguments, but where does Dershowitz get off with this ’blood on his hands’ charge? This is after all, the same Jimmy Carter who helped Israel to reach its peace agreement with Egypt, a peace agreement still with us today that has given Israel three decades of peace on its southern border. Does this man deserve to be charged with causing Jewish blood to be shed?

When I asked Dershowitz what he meant by his charge, he replied that Carter was contributing to an atmosphere of demonization of the Jews along with the likes of Iranian President Ahmadinejad with his Holocaust denial and threats against Israel’s survival, specifically by charging that American Jewish supporters of Israel prevent a rational debate from taking place in Washington on Israeli policy. Well, the ferocious reaction to Carter’s book by Dershowitz and others, who have responded by smearing the former President and savaging his reputation, seems to be Example A of what Carter is talking about; if you criticize Israeli policy in a serious way, expect to see yourself charged with anti-Semitism and literally having Jewish blood on your hands. No wonder that many American politicians are leery to speak what they know to be the truth for fear of getting the kind of clobbering Jimmy Carter is now enduring. Who needs that kind of tsuris?

I am sure 82-year-old Carter did not need this kind of trouble either, but he spoke out because his conscience impelled him to do so and because he knew that the present Israeli-Palestinian impasse is not good for Israel, the Palestinians, America or the world. Again, there is plenty of blame to go around, and the Palestinians shopuld get their fair share, but there should also be no whitewashing of Israel’s own contribution to the mess; its 40-year-campaign to grab as much of the West Bank as possible and oppress its Palestinian residents in the process. That needs to end, for the sake of Israel and the Jewish people, as well as the Palestinians, and kol hakavod to Jimmy Carter for having the guts to say so forcefully.