The assassination of Jimmy Carter continues …

Posted by Joshua Holland at 6:56 AM on January 22, 2007.

In Saturday's Washington Post, Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, took aim at Jimmy Carter and his recent book, Palestine: Peace Not Aparthied.

The column was a perfect example of how to baselessly smear an ideological opponent without engaging -- in any way -- that opponent's argument; it was a case study.

Its title -- drawing a not-terribly-subtle parallel between the former president who put human rights squarely in the middle of U.S. foreign policy and Adolph Hitler, a genocidal maniac -- was: "Jimmy Carter's Jewish Problem."

Lipstadt accuses Carter of giving "inadvertent comfort" to Holocaust deniers -- the subject of much of Lipstadt's scholarship and two of the three books she's authored. Carter, she wrote, has responded to "criticism" -- "witch-hunt" would be a more appropriate description -- by "reflexively" offering up "innuendo about Jewish control of the media and government." She adds, "When David Duke spouts it, I yawn. When Jimmy Carter does, I shudder."

Carter has repeatedly fallen back -- possibly unconsciously -- on traditional anti-Semitic canards. In the Los Angeles Times last month, he declared it "politically suicide" [sic] for a politician to advocate a "balanced position" on the crisis.

Of course, saying that the political climate in the U.S. is such that just about any vocal criticism of Israel's policies in the Occupied Territories -- that's the subject at hand, although one would be hard-pressed to discern it from Lipstadt's Op-Ed -- guarantees a firestorm of indignant howls is certainly not a "traditional anti-Semitic canard"; it's a fairly accurate description of the pitfalls inherent in modern America's polluted discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One need look no further for confirmation of that than Lipstadt's own toxic response to Carter's book.

What's striking about her column is not only it's stunning intellectual dishonesty -- Jimmy Carter has never suggested that Jews control the media or the government in any way, shape or form -- and it's not only that such a transparent attempt to tar a former president with innuendo and half-baked guilt-by-association would appear in a major newspaper of record; what's really amazing about Lipstadt's effort -- and the efforts of a host of Israel hawks like her -- is the degree to which it does exactly what she accuses her opponent of doing: conforming to some of the ugliest stereotypes that have long undersored hardcore anti-Semitism.

Lipstadt herself gives inadvertent comfort to the likes of David Duke.

While that statement is jarring, it is exactly as fair and accurate -- or, I'd argue, as unfair and outrageous -- as Lipstadt's charge. That's the problem with associating a substantive argument like Carter's with an illogical and hateful ideology like Duke's: it's not hard to cherry-pick almost any text and find in it some small thing that a racist might embrace as confirmation of his or her odious beliefs.

Specifically, while David Duke is certainly, unlike Jimmy Carter, a Holocaust denier and has argued --again, unlike Carter -- that there's some shadowy Jewish conspiracy exerting control over the American media, people like Duke also expound on their belief that Jews are paranoid, see themselves as perennial victims, have fetishized the Holocaust and now invoke its history to stifle any criticism of Israeli policies in the current era. Like many stereotypes, there's a kernel of truth in that and advocates like Lipstadt have chosen a rhetorical strategy that, sadly, supports those stereotypes to a T. If Jimmy Carter's arguments are illegitimate because they play into the tropes of people like David Duke, then so are Lipstadt's own.

Lipstadt makes no attempt to actually refute Carter's thesis, or even to engage it; she says, simply, "Others can enumerate the many factual errors in this book" and lists several who have (including people like Alan Dershowitz). Indeed, her criticism has nothing to do with Carter's subject; rather, she argues that Carter's book didn't devote sufficient weight to the supposed impact the Holocaust has had on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

His book, which dwells on the Palestinian refugee experience, makes two fleeting references to the Holocaust. The book contains a detailed chronology of major developments necessary for the reader to understand the current situation in the Middle East. Remarkably, there is nothing listed between 1939 and 1947.

In those years, the world's attention was squarely on Europe, and no events that were crucial to the chronology of the Middle East conflict occured. In fact, I checked the timelines for the creation of the State of Israel offered by a few different organizations and none of them listed any significant developments betwen 1939 ("The British government issues the White Paper of 1939 setting an absolute limit of 75,000 on future Jewish immigration to Palestine") and 1947 ("The United Nations approves partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. It is accepted by the Jews, but rejected by the Arab leaders" (from Wikipedia's timeline)).

Compare Carter's approach with that of Rashid Khalidi, head of Columbia University's Middle East Institute and a professor of Arab studies there. His recent book "The Iron Cage" contains more than a dozen references to the seminal place the Holocaust and anti-Semitism hold in the Israeli worldview.

Of course, Lipstadt's own 850-word column -- supposedly related to the situation in Israel and Palestine -- only refers to "Palestinians" twice, and nowhere is there a mention of Israel's refusal to resume direct talks with Palestinian leaders six years after withdrawing from the negotiating table, nor do the words "occupation," "settlement" or the phrase "human rights violations" appear anywhere in the text.

As'ad Abukhalil remarked sarcastically that Lipstadt has a point. "After all, the Palestinian refugees were part of the Nazi regime. And did Lipostadt [sic] think that Carter was writing a book on European history?"

Lipstadt doesn't think that; she believes -- but is too smart to say so openly -- that the fact that the Holocaust was perpetrated in the 1930s and 1940s should give Israel a pass for continuing an armed and brutal occupation of the Palestinians in 2007. She makes that belief clear in choosing to devote so much of her column to the Holocaust's significance in the "Israeli worldview."

[The] event sealed in the minds of almost all the world's people then the need for the Jewish people to have a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland … A guiding principle of Israel is that never again will persecuted Jews be left with no place to go. Israel's ideal of Jewish refuge is enshrined in laws that grant immediate citizenship to any Jew who requests it.

This is irrelevant to Carter's thesis that the framework for peace in Israel and Palestine has long existed, and that while rejectionists on both sides bear the blame of that "roadmap" not having been implemented, the United States only calls out the minority of Palestinians who stand in its way, not the minority of Israelis who do the same.

More to the point, the discussion of the Holocaust is the "hook" on which Lipstadt hangs the central straw-man long used by Israeli hawks to stifle criticism of Israel's policies: Lipstadt accuses Carter -- whom she acknowledges signed the legislation creating the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum -- of downplaying the Holocaust and, in so doing, giving ammunition to those who "deny Israel's right to exist."

One cannot ignore the Holocaust's impact on Jewish identity and the history of the Middle East conflict. When an Ahmadinejad or Hamas threatens to destroy Israel, Jews have historical precedent to believe them. Jimmy Carter either does not understand this or considers it irrelevant.

I, too, consider the Holocaust irrelevant to any discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today, but not for the reasons that Lipstadt suggests (like most American Jews, lives of members of my own family were destroyed by the Nazis' atrocities). It's irrelevant because perception and reality are two different things. The reality rests on Israel's air force, its state-of-the-art military -- one that dwarves the conventional capacity of all of its Arab neighbors combined -- and its ample nuclear arsenal. Israel's existence -- within the "green-line" -- is, simply, not in question, regardless of anyone's bluster. More to the point, Israel's value as a refuge for world Jewry has nothing whatsoever to do with its activities outside of its internationally-recognized borders; discussing it in the context of Carter's book is a transparent bait-and-switch.

I call the argument the fundamental straw-man of the debate because those who call into question Israel's right to exist within its own borders represent a fringe minority, including among Palestinians themselves (scroll down a bit for the data). The issue for the vast majority of Israel's critics is whether A) the Palestinians also have the right to exist within their internationally-recognized territory and B) whether Israel has the right to maintain about 7 percent of its population in heavily-armed compounds in Palestinian territory.

They don't have that right -- no more than Americans have the right to build armed camps in Canada -- and the legion of Lipstadts who jump on works like Jimmy Carter's know it. It's a debate they'll lose every time if they engage it honestly, so, sadly, they avoid it by disparaging those who have the audacity to call them out.

As Carter told the AP, ""I have been called a liar…I have been called an anti-Semite … [and] I have been called a bigot. I have been called a plagiarist. I have been called a coward. Those kind of accusations, they concern me, but they don't detract from the fact the book is accurate and is needed." He added, "Not one of the critics of my book has contradicted any of the basic premises … that is the horrible persecution and oppression of the Palestinian people and secondly that the formula for finding peace in the Middle East already exists."

PS: Check out Alexander Cockburn's take on the many attacks on Carter. Here's a taste:

Suppose the movers and shakers in the Israel lobby here -- Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the crew -- had simply decided to leave Jimmy Carter's Palestine Peace Not Apartheid alone. How long before the book would have been gathering dust on the remainder shelves? Suppose even that Dershowitz had rounded up his unacknowledged co-authors in all their tens of thousands and sallied forth to buy up every copy of Carter's book and toss each one into the Charles River, would not that have been a more successful suppressor than the blitzkrieg strategy they did adopt?

Of course it would. For weeks now the lobby has hurled its legions into battle against Carter. He has been stigmatized as an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, a patron of former concentration camp killers, a Christian madman, a pawn of the Arabs who "flatly condones mass murder" of Israeli Jews. (This last was from Murdoch's New York Post editorial, relayed to its mailing list by the Zionist Organization of America.)

Read the rest.

Evan adds...

Rabbi Michael Lerner, one of the only voices in the Jewish community to support Carter, calls him: "the best friend the Jews ever had as president of the United States," writing that:

Carter does not claim that Israel is an apartheid state. What he does claim is that the West Bank will be a de facto apartheid situation if the current dynamics represented by the construction of the wall, by the passage of discriminatory legislation and by the inclusion of racists in the leadership—most recently that of pro-ethnic cleansing Israeli Cabinet member Avigdor Lieberman—continue. The only way to avoid Israel turning into an apartheid state is a genuine peace accord.

Tagged as: israel, carter, lipstadt

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