[WCUSP] Thank You, Jimmy Carter

Thu Dec 7 05:45:47 CST 2006

> 
> http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1206-24.htm
> 

  Thank You, Jimmy CarterPublished on Wednesday,
December 6, 2006 by TomPaine.com  
Thank You, Jimmy Carter 
by Rabbi Michael Lerner  
 Jimmy Carter was the best friend the Jews ever had as
president of the United States.
He is the only president to have actually delivered
for the Jewish people an agreement (the peace treaty
between Israel and Egypt) that has stood the test of
time. Since the treaty, there have been bad vibes
between Israel and Egypt, but never a return to war,
once Israel fully withdrew from the territories it
conquered in Egypt during the 1967 war.

To get that agreement, Carter had to twist the arms of
Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. Sometimes that is what
real friends do—they push you into a path that is
really in your best interest at times when there is an
emergency and you are acting self-destructively.

When the U.S. government is following a
self-destructive policy, even a policy backed by
people in both major political parties, its best
friends are those who try to change its direction and
are not afraid to offer intense critique. That’s why a
majority of Americans, and 86 percent of American
Jews, voted in the 2006 midterm elections to reject
Bush’s war in Iraq and his policies suspending habeas
corpus and legitimating wire-tapping and torture. Not
because we were disloyal, but precisely because we
love America enough to challenge its policies even
when Vice President Cheney questions our loyalty. We
know that critique is often an essential part of love
and caring.

That is precisely what Jimmy Carter is trying to do
for Israel and the Jewish people in his new book
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

So it’s astounding to see the assault on Carter that
has been launched by the ADL chair Abe Foxman, law
professor Alan Dershowitz and a bevy of other
representatives of the Jewish community. I recently
received a mailing from our local Jewish Community
Relations Council containing four such attacks on
Carter, with zero representation of American Jews who
support the Israeli peace movement. 

Of course, any selection of facts is always going to
be a choice, and those who buy the mainstream
narrative of either the Palestinian or Israeli
partisans are going to be unhappy with moments in
which their narrative is not the dominant one in this
book.  

Carter recognizes the mistakes on both sides—precisely
what the “You are either for us or against us” crowd
in both camps cannot stand. Nuance, recognition that
both sides have at times been insensitive to the
legitimate needs of the other, insistence that both
sides need to take steps that are currently rejected
(by Hamas in the Palestinian world, by the Israeli
government in the Jewish world—this is what makes for
rational discussion.

Here’s an easy way to tell an extremist on
Israel/Palestine issues: Just ask that person if he or
she can list at least three terrible errors his/her
side has made in this struggle, errors that deserve
moral condemnation. If they can’t, chances are that no
amount of evidence or moral reasoning is ever going to
open their minds.

Instead, you’ll hear Palestinians who talk about their
own refugee status but never acknowledge that, when
Jews were refugees trying to escape the Holocaust in
Europe, the Palestinian leadership convinced the
British to not allow any Jews to come to Palestine.
Nor will they talk about the human suffering that
results when Palestinian terrorists explode bombs in
cafes, movie theatres or dance halls in Tel Aviv or
Jerusalem. Or you’ll hear the right-wingers in the
Jewish crowd claiming, quite mistakenly as we’ve
demonstrated in Tikkun, that Palestinians rejected a
reasonable deal presented to them at Camp David in
2000. They’ll make the equally absurd claim that the
Gaza pull-out of troops in 2005 “gave the Palestinians
what they’ve been asking for and yet they continue to
fight.” In fact, the Palestinian Authority had pleaded
with Sharon not to pull out unilaterally but to
negotiate an end to the occupation of both Gaza and
the West Bank, recognizing that negotiations would
give credence to the Palestinian Authority for being
able to deliver something in return for the nonviolent
stance it had taken since the death of Arafat, while
unilateral withdrawal would give Hamas an important
chip (which it was able to use to parlay itself to
electoral victory, claiming that it was their violence
that had driven the Israelis out). Similarly, the
apologists for the current policies of the State of
Israel simply ignore the ongoing suffering that
constitutes collective punishment for the entire
population of Palestine when Israel cuts off food and
funds and allows tens of thousands of people in the
Occupied Territories to suffer from malnutrition. The
partisans always have to see themselves as “righteous
victims” and the other side as “the evil other.”

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.

In an interview that will appear in the January issue
of Tikkun magazine, Carter points out that  he is “not
referring to racism as a basis for Israeli policy in
the West Bank, but rather the desire of a minority of
Israelis to occupy, confiscate and colonize
Palestinian land.” To enforce that occupation of
Palestinian land, Israel has built in the West Bank
separate roads for Jewish settlers and Palestinians,
built separate school systems, has totally different
allocations of money, water, food and security for
each population, wildly privileging the Jewish
settlers and discriminating against the Palestinians
whose families have lived there for centuries.  

What Carter is arguing is that the best interests of
Israel and the United States are not served by the
current policies. Some still cling to the fantasy that
holding on to land in the West Bank will improve
Israeli security, but, as the recent war with
Hezbollah conclusively showed, increasing
sophistication of military technologies makes holding
land no serious barrier for those who wish to send
rockets and bombs hundreds of miles away.

The only real protection for a small country like
Israel is to have good relations with its neighbors,
and that is precisely what the occupation
systematically undermines. The Geneva Accord provides
a good foundation for the lasting peace both sides say
they want. And it will eventually provide the
foundations for any settlement: the creation of a
Palestinian state on almost all of the West Bank and
Gaza, with full control of its own borders; full
recognition and security agreements for Israel with
all of its neighbors; joint coordination on security
and anti-terrorism between Israeli and Palestinian
police and military forces; reparations for
Palestinian refugees; and a peace and reconciliation
process that dispels the lies and propaganda that have
become “accepted truths” in the diaspora communities
of both Jewish and Arab worlds.

Jimmy Carter is speaking the truth as he knows it, and
doing a great service to the Jews.

Unfortunately, this peace is impeded by the powerful
voices of AIPAC and the mainstream of the organized
Jewish community, who manage to terrify even the most
liberal elected officials into blind support of
whatever policy the current government of Israel
advocates. Ironically, this blind support has had the
consequence of pushing many morally sensitive
Christians and Jews to distance themselves from the
Jewish world, which makes blind support for Israeli
policies the litmus test of anti-Semitism. Younger
Jews cannot safely express criticisms of Israeli
policy without being told that they are disloyal or
“self-hating,” and elected officials tell me privately
that they agree with Tikkun’s more balanced
“progressive Middle Path” which is both pro-Israel and
pro-Palestine. But we’ve found that even Jews in the
mainstream media have ignored or condemned our new
organization, The Network of Spiritual Progressives,
which is, among other things, trying to be an
interfaith alternative to AIPAC.

It’s time to create a new openness to criticism and a
new debate. Jimmy Carter has shown courage in trying
to open that kind of space with his new book, and he
deserves our warm thanks and support.        

Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine, rabbi of
Beyt Tikkun synagogue, which meets in San Francisco
and Berkeley, and national chair of the Network of
Spiritual Progressives. He is the author of Healing
Israel/Palestine (North Atlantic Books, 2003) and of
the national best-seller The Left Hand of God: Taking
Back our Country from the Religious Right (Harper San
Francisco, 2006).

 &copy; 2006 TomPaine.com (A Project of The Institute
for America's Future)

###
Printer Friendly Version E-Mail This Article   FAIR
USE NOTICE  This site contains copyrighted material
the use of which has not always been specifically
authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such
material available in our efforts to advance
understanding of environmental, political, human
rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social
justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a
'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the
material on this site is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving
the included information for research and educational
purposes. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you
wish to use copyrighted material from this site for
purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you
must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

 Common Dreams NewsCenter
A non-profit news service providing breaking news &
views for the progressive community.
               Home               | Newswire										
			| Contacting Us              | About Us            
  | Donate               | Sign-Up														|
Archives

 © Copyrighted 1997-2006
www.commondreams.org

_uacct = "UA-76573-1";urchinTracker();

____________________________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Music Unlimited
Access over 1 million songs.
http://music.yahoo.com/unlimited
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/wcusp_wilpf.org/attachments/20061207/8b3f4614/attachment-0001.htm 