To the Editor,
Washington Jewish Week.
In light of the sad news that former President Jimmy Carter is entering hospice care, it is important that we remember the brutal assault he faced from supporters of Israel and the number of times there were attempts to silence him
by calling him “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 criticizes Israel. We bring up the Holocaust. When in the United States people are critical of Israel, then they are anti-Semitic.”
Jimmy Carter has dedicated himself to peace and human rights around the world. His tireless efforts to bring Israel and Egypt together in a peace agreement during the 1979 negotiations at Camp David are widely viewed as the most consequential contribution any U.S. 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 paid 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.” New York Times columnist William Safire titled a column, “Carter Blames the Jews.” Carter himself lamented that whenever an issue arose beteeen the U.S. and Israel, American Jewish leaders “would always side with the Israeli leaders and condemn us for being evenhanded in our concern for both Palestinian rights and Israeli security.”
When he wrote the book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” in 2016, which became a New York Times best-seller, the attacks upon Carter became brutal. Deborah Lipstadt, then a professor at Emory University, now Special State Departmeng Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, reviewed the book in 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 this 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 criticizes Israeli policy is “anti-Semitism.”
The. Organized Jewish community should apologize 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.”
Upon learning of Jimmy Carter’s health condition, many prominent Jewish voices have been heard. Former Sen. Al Franken says that Carter was “the greatest ex-President so far.” Political commentator and comedian Jon Stewart described him “as one of the kindest and most thoughtful people I’ve ever had the honor of meeting. He was the best of us.” David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Barack Obama, called Carter “a remarkable man and a great American who had done so much for the world.”
When, if ever, will the soul-searching begin in the organized Jewish community?
Allan C. brownfeld,
Editor of ISSUES,
the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism