Re: off topic
- From: "Kathleen the Loon" <Jwismille@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 7 Dec 2006 16:45:44 -0800
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Published 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).
© 2006 TomPaine.com
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