Updated: "Liberal" neocon trashes Carter's new book (without reading it) ...

Posted by Joshua Holland at 12:54 PM on December 12, 2006.

Just as Jerry Seinfeld had Newman (Newman!), so too do I have a nemesis. He's David Lublin, and he's a scholar who writes for the Gadflyer, as well as on his own blog, Maryland Politics Watch (which he promised would have a "a Democratic and DC suburban point of view" -- finally white suburban Dems get a voice!).

Anyway, Lublin hates liberals and Arabs, likes to use the word "Islamofascism," supported the war in Iraq and can be counted on to classify any criticism of Israel as an outpouring of anti-Semitism. What's not to like?

We get into flame wars, which I generally don't bother AlterNet readers with -- I'm happy to encourage his obscurity. But today, Lublin came out with a hit piece on Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and I want to highlight it because it's such a good example of the kind of knee-jerk reaction that can be expected when one asserts that Palestinians may have some legitimate claims.

Lublin admits he didn't read the book, before lighting into it. I haven't read the book either, so I can only look at who he sources in his smear of Carter.

Dennis Ross is one -- he doesn't like Carter's thesis. Ross, Lublin says, is the author of "the most detailed report on [the second Camp David] talks from someone who attended them who was not Israeli or Palestinian." That's true, but as Ann Lesch noted:

Ross ignores the perspectives of other participants in these negotiations. This comes across as breathtaking egotism. Only his own opinions and recollections count; there is no need to double check or cross-check them against the memoirs of others. Thus, although he cites in passing James Baker's The Politics of Diplomacy, Clinton's press secretary George Stephanopoulos' All Too Human, and Israeli ambassador cum Syria specialist Itamar Rabinovich's The Brink of Peace, he fails to comment on or assess their viewpoints. Moreover, one searches in vain for mention of and critiques of the discussion of Middle East issues in George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft's A World Transformed, Bill Clinton's My Life, Warren Christopher's Choices of a Lifetime, and Madeleine Albright's Madam Secretary: A Memoir, much less articles by his fellow diplomats Martin Indyk, Daniel Kurtzer, Rob Malley, Aaron David Miller, and Edward (Ned) Walker. The result is a version of history that privileges not only an American perspective but one specific perspective: his own. [Read more of her critique here].

And while David presents Ross as just an impartial observer -- dismissing Carter's claim that "representatives of Jewish organizations who would be unlikely to visit the occupied territories" were the leading critics of his book -- he skips over the fact that Ross is currently Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a hawkish Israeli-American think-tank started by Martin Indyk (himself a former research director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee).

Ross's colleagues at WINEP are Joshua Muravchik, who recently wrote that "WE MUST bomb Iran," Indyk, Martin Kramer, a neo-McCarthyite who writes for the National Review and David Horowitz's Frontpage Mag (and is a supporter of Campus-Watch and an advocate of HR 3077) and Moshe Ya'alon, a former IDF Chief of Staff, briefly wanted in Australia for war crimes, who's famous for his claim that "The Palestinian threat harbors cancer-like attributes that have to be severed."

As rightweb notes, "WINEP aims to cultivate close ties among senior military officials in the United States and Israel, as well as in Turkey and Jordan…"

When he's not working his regular Fox News gig, Ross is also the first chairman of a new Jerusalem-based think tank called the Institute for Jewish People Policy Planning, which is funded by … yup, the Israeli government.

And, of course, Ross was pivotal in reshaping U.S. policy towards the ME under Reagan when he served under Paul Wolfowitz -- then the State Department's Director of Policy Planning -- with Lewis Libby, Francis Fukuyama, Alan Keyes and Zalmay Khalilzad.

Did I mention he is on the Advisory Committee of Scooter Libby's Legal Defense Trust?

So, yeah, Dennis Ross -- who I've seen speak five times and who never failed to make absurdly racist comments about the Palestinians -- is a neutral source.

But the most ironic part of David's smear was citing Alan Dershowitz -- who says legalized torture "is inevitable," as long as the victims are Muslim -- in a post accusing Jimmy Carter of plagiarism. After all, Dershowitz lifted wholesale from Joan Peter's wholly discredited book From Time Immemorial for his polemic, The Case for Israel. That Dershowitz would criticize another book for factual inaccuracies is laughable.

(Lublin also trusts Judith Miller's Jeffrey Goldberg's take on a book he didn't read. I found Goldberg's book, Prisoners, an interesting read, but let's recall that Goldberg also discredited himself completely by swallowing the neocon spin on Iraq hook, line and sinker and becoming one of the invasion's more influential proponents. Goldberg peddled all sorts of easily-debunked conspiracy theories about Saddam's links to al Qaeda in articles embraced by the Bushies as justification for their war. Obviously, that isn't directly related to the topic at hand but it goes to credibility.)

The point here is not to defend a book I haven't read -- Norman Finkelstein, who documented all of the falsehoods and plagiarized bits in Dershowitz's The Case for Israel, also found inaccuracies and "tendentious and untenable interpretations" in Carter's historical chapters, while endorsing the former president's view of the current situation.

The reason I'm responding to Lublin's post is because it is such a good exemple of how the discourse about Israel/ Palestine is framed. Lublin presents Dershowitz and Ross as credible, neutral observers (just as the media does) when they are, obviously, anything but.

The ultimate effect of WINEP's scholars and eliminationists like Dershowitz -- ideologically and institutionally tied not to Israel but to the Israeli right -- is that it creates a false center. To say that the Israel / Palestinian conflict is driven by rejectionists on both sides -- rejectionists who are equally culpable for the current conflict -- is a truly centrist view, but in the U.S. that view is tantamount to "rejecting israel's right to exist," being an anti-Semite or "coddling terrorists." A fair debate is out of bounds.

The effect on U.S. policy is devastating; since the Bush administration came to office, even the appearance of being a neutral broker has been abandoned and there is now intense pressure from Washington on the Palestinians to rein in their rejectionists and absolutely none on the Israelis -- they've been given leave to act unilaterally, ignore commitments made to the U.S. and create facts on the ground that will make any future attempts at a peace process that much more difficult. We didn't get here by accident.

The other thing that stands out is the degree to which the Lublins, Dershowitzes and other hardliners claim to speak on the behalf of Jewish Americans. There's an Israeli right and an Israeli left, and a big part of the U.S.'s dysfunctional ME policy stems from the fact that so many otherwise left-of-center Americans lay down with Israeli reactionaries and believe they're supporting Israel. In fact, they're aligning themselves with Israel's rejectionists and doing their part to extend the conflict. The fact remains that majorities of Israelis and Palestinians endorse some variation of the many proposals falling under the umbrella of "land-for-peace," and that has long been the case.

Anyway, Jimmy Carter was the first American president since FDR to insist on a foreign policy based on Kantian moral imperatives. He wasn't perfect -- far from it -- but he can say what no other former president can: he brokered an Arab-Israeli peace deal that's stood up for three decades. For that alone, he deserves better than to be smeared by someone who didn't read his book, citing nothing but the opinions of vocal voices within the Israel Lobby.

PS: Lublin thinks you're dumb. How else could he write: "Israel, tired of the burdens of occupation, also dearly wants to give up the bulk of its West Bank settlements (the current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was elected on exactly this platform)…"

Olmert ran on a platform of "realignment" that would have pulled about 60,000 settlers (out of a population of around 300,000) from 72 illegal settlements. David may believe that's "the bulk of" the West Bank settlements, but reasonable people will disagree (more here). Olmert said his plan would "keep significant settlements near Jerusalem, including much of Jerusalem, and other significant parts of the West Bank." The unilateral plan was widely perceived as an attempted land-grab and was even rejected by the Bush administration -- which is saying something -- because it violated a central tenet of Bush's long-dormant "Road Map."

Update: Lublin makes a fool of himself responding to my post (I use the word "responding" loosely) here, and I smack his neoconservative ass down again here. Ahh, good times.

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid&topic=politics">

Tagged as: israel, jimmy carter

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.