Document:Jewish Community Smears Carter With Charges of Anti-Semitism
| President Carter himself lamented that whenever an issue arose between the US and Israel, “American Jewish leaders would always side with the Israeli leaders and condemn us for being even-handed in our concern for both Palestinian rights and Israeli security.” |
Article by Allan C. Brownfeld dated 16 April 2023Subjects: Jimmy Carter, Zionist lobby, Camp David Accords, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, anti-Semitism, apartheid
Source: Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (Link)
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Jewish Community Smears Carter With Charges of Anti-Semitism
It is important to remember the brutal assault former President Jimmy Carter faced from militant supporters of Israel and the number of times there were attempts to silence him, claiming he was “anti-Semitic,” the usual tactic used to silence criticism of Israel.
In Israel, this tactic is openly discussed. Shulamit Aloni, a former Israeli Minister of Education and winner of the Israel Prize, declared:
“It’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe somebody criticises Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When in the United States, people are critical of Israel, then they are anti-Semitic.”
Carter dedicated himself to peace and human rights around the world. He always insisted that Israel was obligated to suspend building new settlements on the West Bank. He argued that settlements were a roadblock to a two-state solution and a peaceful resolution of the conflict. He warned that Israel was on the road to apartheid.
Dedicated to peace and human rights around the world, Carter’s tireless efforts to bring Israel and Egypt together in a peace agreement during the 1978 negotiations at Camp David are widely viewed as the most consequential contribution any US president has made toward Israel’s security since its founding. This represented the first personally negotiated peace agreement since Theodore Roosevelt successfully settled the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. Even Menachem Begin reluctantly agreed that Carter “had worked harder than our forefathers did in Egypt building the pyramids.”
Yet Carter was repaid for his success and for his commitment to both Israeli security and Palestinian rights with a consistent campaign of vilification by American Jewish leaders. Most of them never forgave him for the tenacity with which he pursued his vision of an evenhanded Middle East peace.
In 1978, the American Jewish Committee’s Washington representative Hyman Bookbinder called Carter’s Middle East policy an “anti-Israel campaign.” The New York Times columnist William Safire titled a column, “Carter Blames the Jews.”
Carter himself lamented that whenever an issue arose between the US and Israel,
“American Jewish leaders would always side with the Israeli leaders and condemn us for being even-handed in our concern for both Palestinian rights and Israeli security.”
When he wrote the book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid", which became a New York Times best-seller in 2007, the attacks on Carter became brutal. Deborah Lipstadt, then a professor at Emory University, now Special State Department Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, reviewed the book for The Washington Post and accused Carter of relying on “anti-Semitic stereotypes.” She charged that Carter “has repeatedly fallen back on traditional anti-Semitic canards. When David Duke spouts it, I yawn, when Jimmy Carter does, I shudder.”
At the time, the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman called Carter “a bigot” and denounced him in paid newspaper advertisements around the country. Martin Peretz, publisher of The New Republic and an outspoken Zionist, called Carter a “Jew-hater” and “a jackass.” We could fill pages with the bitter assaults on Jimmy Carter by Zionist activists whose first charge against anyone who criticises Israeli policy is “anti-Semitism.”
The organised Jewish community should apologise for the manner in which it assaulted the good name of Jimmy Carter, even comparing him to David Duke. Now that more and more Jewish leaders are themselves critical of Israel, shall we suddenly discover that they, too, are anti-Semitic?
