March 2, 2007

As his book continues to rank on the top of the New York Times' Review of Books, I am remain hopeful that President Carter's message is reaching a large swath of the American  public despite the massive assault on his 'anti-Semitic" book "Palestine, Peace not Apartheid".  The Nation  magazine just published a stinging commentary by Henry Seigman, former American Jewish Congress director.

One merely has to read Israel’s paper of record, Haaretz, to fully comprehend how utterly pathetic our domestic political discourse on US-Israeli policy really is. Siegman proves the point in his tour de force defense of Jimmy Carter, Hurricane Carter.

Siegman starts by charting the mainstreaming of Israeli advocates of “‘transfer,’ a euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank and in other parts of “Greater Israel”. Of course, most Americans, even those who follow politics closely, have absolutely no idea that Olmert recently welcomed into the Israeli government the vicious racist Avigdor Lieberman as deputy prime minister. As Siegman says:

Neither Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France’s anti-immigrant National Front, nor Austria’s neofascist Jörg Haider (whose role in forming an Austrian government provoked international outrage that led to a diplomatic boycott), has called for measures as outrageous as Lieberman. Lieberman advocates not only the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from the occupied territories but getting rid of Arabs who are Israeli citizens. He has urged that Arab members of Israel’s Knesset be executed for having contacts with Hamas or for failing to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day.


Siegman continues to cut close when he states how out of touch our so-called leaders are when it comes to how the majority of American Jews vote:

It is also worth noting how uninformed Democratic and Republican mavens are even about the voting patterns of American Jews. The panic aroused by Carter’s book title was based on the belief of these mavens that American Jews share the hard-line right-wing views of organizations like the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and AIPAC, organizations that would go out of business if Israelis elected a government committed to a political solution rather than a military one. Indeed, when former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin came into office in 1992 and concluded that Israel’s security would be far better served by a peace agreement that recognizes Palestinian rights than by beating the Palestinians into submission, both the Conference of Presidents and AIPAC went into institutional eclipse, from which they did not emerge until Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in 1996.

The uncritical pro-Israel advocacy of these organizations has never been an accurate barometer of the political thinking or behavior of American Jews. Surely there is something Republican and Democratic leaders can learn from the fact that after six years of the presidency of the man believed by Israelis and by the pro-Israel lobby in the United States to be “the best American president Israel ever had,” 87 percent of American Jews voted for the Democratic Party, whose chair is seen by the pro-Israel lobby as untrustworthy at best.  Arab Americans should carefully evaluate this starling manifestation.   Read the article here.