Have former US president Jimmy Carter's recent statements crossed the line from legitimate criticism of Israel to illegitimate anti-Semitism? In his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Carter unfairly, one-sidedly, a historically - even indecently - condemns Israeli policies, but in my view he does not cross the line into overt anti-Semitism. His book is riddled with factual errors, virtually of them unfavorable to Israel. His history is all wrong.
He claims that Israel launched a preemptive attack against Jordan. Historians all agree that Jordan attacked Israel first.
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Israel tried desperately to persuade Jordan to remain out of the war with Egypt and Syria, and Israel counterattacked after the Jordanian army surrounded Jerusalem, firing missiles into the center of the city. Israel then captured the West Bank, which had been occupied by Jordan for nearly 20 years, and which Israel was willing to return in exchange for peace and recognition from Jordan.
Carter repeatedly condemns Israel for refusing to comply with Security Council Resolution 242, which called for return of captured territories in exchange for peace, recognition and secure boundaries, but he ignores that Israel accepted and all the Arab nations and the Palestinians rejected this resolution. The Arabs met in Khartoum and issued their three famous noes: "No peace, no recognition, no negotiation." But you wouldn't know that from reading the Carter version of history.
Carter faults Israel for its "air strike that destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor" without mentioning that Iraq had threatened to attack Israel with nuclear weapons if it succeeded in building a bomb and that the UN refused to intercede
Carter, who thinks Israel isn't religious enough, faults Israel for its administration of Christian and Muslim religious sites, when in fact Israel is scrupulous about ensuring those of every religion the right to worship as they please - consistent, of course, with security needs. He fails to mention that between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan occupied the West Bank and east Jerusalem, it destroyed and desecrated Jewish religious sites and prevented Jews from praying at the Western Wall. He also never mentions Egypt's brutal occupation of Gaza between 1949 and 1967.
Carter blames Israel for the "exodus of Christians from the Holy Land," totally ignoring the Islamization of the area by Hamas and the comparable exodus of Christian Arabs from Lebanon as a result of the increasing influence of Hizbullah and the repeated assassination of Christian leaders by Syria.
Carter blames Israel, and exonerates Yasser Arafat, for the Palestinian refusal to accept statehood on 95 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza pursuant to the Clinton-Barak offers at Camp David and Taba in 2000-2001. He accepts the Palestinian revisionist history, rejects the eyewitness accounts of president Bill Clinton and Dennis Ross and ignores Saudi Prince Bandar's accusation that Arafat's rejection of the proposal was "a crime" and that Arafat's account "was not truthful" - except, apparently, to Carter. The fact that Carter chooses to believe Arafat over Clinton speaks volumes.
Carter also uses maps derived from Dennis Ross's book The Missing Peace without attribution. He mislabels one of the maps as representing "the Israeli interpretation" of the December 2000 Clinton parameters, when in fact the map represents the actual US proposal, as drawn up by Ross, which was understood by all parties, accepted by the Israelis and rejected by the Palestinians.
THESE ARE all grievous and one-sided errors, especially for a former president who has easy access to the historical facts. And there are more - too many to list here. Yet they do not qualify as anti-Semitic.
Since the publication of the book, however, Carter has been on a whirlwind tour featuring television, radio and print appearances. In his interviews - and without the benefit of the kind of reflection and self-restraint that comes with the writing and editing process - Carter has gone well beyond what he says in his book and may have crossed the line into bigotry. I will lay out the facts and leave it to the readers to decide.
First, Carter has strongly implied - based on an entirely false factual premise - that Jews control the media, academic and political process in the United States. In interview after interview, he has stated - quite categorically and quite falsely - that the plight of the Palestinians in the West Bank is "not something that has been acknowledged or even discussed in this country... You never hear anything about what is happening to the Palestinians by the Israelis."
This, of course, is entirely false. The situation with regard to the Palestinians has become the number one human right issue on American university campuses - exceeding the attention paid to Rwanda, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia, Tibet, Chechnya and other places where actual genocide has taken place. The West Bank and Gaza are regularly and extensively covered by all major US newspapers. The indisputable fact is that more space per capita is devoted to the Palestinians than to any other occupied or victimized group in the world.
Why, then, would Carter promote this canard? There is only one answer: to play into the old anti-Semitic stereotype of Jewish control of the media. When Carter has been asked why does he think there has been no media attention paid to the Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, he smiles and says, "I don't know," but goes on to say that he has "witnessed and experienced the severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts" - thus implying that someone or some group is restraining free discussion. In his appearance on Meet the Press, Carter pointed to "the Jewish lobby" as "part" of the problem. What exactly the "Jewish" lobby - as contrasted with the Israel Lobby - is, Carter, never explains.
