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Carter issues letter; defends use of the
word ‘apartheid’ for Israeli policies


ATLANTA (BP)–Former President Jimmy Carter has issued an open letter to Jews in America, defending his characterization of Israeli policies in the Palestinian autonomous zones as “apartheid” and denying that he claimed Jews control the American political system and news media.

Carter issued the letter Dec. 15 from the Carter Center, a human rights advocacy program he founded at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. He claimed that the title of his new book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” had prompted six rabbis in Phoenix to protest his recent book signing there. But when he explained his views to the Jewish leaders in the community, Carter wrote they were satisfied that he made no derogatory accusations about conditions inside Israel.

“Five of them had read my book completely and one partially, and I answered their questions about the text and title,” Carter wrote in the letter. “I emphasized, as I had throughout the tour, that the book was about conditions and events in the Palestinian territories and not in Israel, where a democracy exists with all the freedoms we enjoy in our country and Israeli Jews and Arabs are legally guaranteed the same rights as citizens.

“We discussed the word ‘apartheid’ which I defined as the forced segregation of two peoples living in the same land, with one of them dominating and persecuting the other. I made clear in the book’s text and in my response to the rabbis that the system of apartheid in Palestine is not based on racism but the desire of a minority of Israelis for Palestinian land and the resulting suppression of protests that involve violence. Bishop Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and prominent Israelis, including former attorney general Ben Yair, who served under both Labor and Likud prime ministers, have used and explained the appellation in harsher terms than I, pointing out that this cruel oppression is contrary to the tenets of the Jewish faith and the basic principles of the nation of Israel,” Carter also wrote.

Carter’s book has garnered attention on morning talk shows and news programs, such as NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Carter said on that news program Dec. 3 that he hoped the book would stir controversy and provoke debate about Israel’s policies toward Palestine, which he described as largely absent from discussions about U.S. foreign policy. But Carter has also been under fire in recent weeks for making comments about Israel that Jewish groups in the United States have described as anti-Semitic and as enabling the policies of terrorist-sponsor states such as Iran, whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has repeatedly called for Israel’s destruction.

One of the most surprising critics of the book has been a former aide to Carter. Kenneth Stein, director of the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel at Emory University, resigned Dec. 5 as one of the Carter Center’s Middle East Fellows. Stein served as the Carter Center’s first executive director from 1983-93 and directed its first major event in 1983, a Middle East consultation.

Stein said Carter’s book was “clearly handicapped” by its failure to provide unvarnished analysis of the Middle East and also by its lack of Hebrew and Arabic sources. He also claimed that several portions of the book were invented, or based on faulty recollections of events that took place more than 30 years ago.

“It is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments,” Stein wrote in his letter of resignation to Carter, Emory University President Jim Wagner and John Hardman, the Carter Center’s current executive director.

Deanna Congileo, spokeswoman for the Carter Center, said the former president would not retract his assertions about Israeli policy in Palestinian territories. Carter also issued a statement, claiming that Stein had not been involved with the work of the Carter Center for 12 years, and that he had not been involved with the writing of the book.

The book and Carter’s comments also provoked responses from several Jewish groups, among them the Anti-Defamation League, and from conservative commentators such as David Horowitz.

Abraham Foxman, national director with the Anti-Defamation League, called Carter’s account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “biased” in a posting on the group’s website.

“It is truly shocking, at a time of Islamic extremism running rampant, of suicide bombs polluting cities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, of Iran publicly stating its desire to wipe Israel off the map and building nuclear weapons to achieve that end, of the missile and rocket attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas on Israel, that Jimmy Carter can to a large degree only see Israel as the party responsible for conflict between Israel and the Palestinians,” Foxman wrote.

“In order to reach such a simplistic and distorted view of the region, Carter has to ignore or downplay the continuing examples of Palestinian rejection of Israel and terrorism, which have been part of the equation from the beginning and which are strong as ever today,” Foxman wrote. “He has to minimize or condemn all the instances of Israel’s peace offers and withdrawals, most particularly former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s initiative at Camp David in 2000, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s campaign pledge to withdraw from the West Bank. And he has to frame every example of Palestinian distress as simply the product of Israeli repression instead of Palestinian extremism, e.g., the economic condition of the Palestinians, which has much to do with the continued terrorism against Israel.”

Foxman was presumably referencing Carter’s repeated assertions that the U.S. government’s response to recent elections in Palestine — in which more than 40 percent of voters supported militant Hamas candidates — had only caused more suffering.

In his recent letter, Carter said he told the rabbis in Phoenix during his book tour that Palestinians were being “deprived of the necessities of life by economic restrictions imposed on them by Israel and the United States because 42 percent had voted for Hamas candidates in the most recent election. Teachers, nurses, policemen, firemen, and other employees are not being paid, and the U.N. has reported that food supplies in Gaza are equivalent to those among the poorest families in sub-Sahara Africa with half the families surviving on one meal a day.” Carter also wrote that he called on the American Jewish community to aid the Palestinians.

Foxman also called Carter’s understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict both “simplistic” and “disturbing.” Most troubling for Foxman and the ADL is Carter’s intimation of the “Jewish control of American policy.”

“Referring to U.S. policy and the ‘condoning’ of Israel’s actions, Carter says: ‘There are constant and vehement political and media debates in Israel concerning its policies in the West Bank but because of powerful political, economic, and religious forces in the U.S., Israeli government decisions are rarely questioned or condemned, voices from Jerusalem dominate our media, and most American citizens are unaware of circumstances in the occupied territories.’ In other words, the old canard and conspiracy theory of Jewish control of the media, Congress, and the U.S. government is rearing its ugly head in the person of a former president.”

Carter wrote in the letter that he told the Jewish leaders in Phoenix that he “never claimed that American Jews control the news media, but reiterated that the overwhelming bias for Israel comes from among Christians like me who have been taught since childhood to honor and protect God’s chosen people from among whom came our own savior, Jesus Christ. An additional factor, especially in the political arena, is the powerful influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is exercising its legitimate goal of explaining the current policies of Israel’s government and arousing maximum support in our country. There are no significant countervailing voices.”

Conservative commentator David Horowitz, director of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, wrote in a column on frontpagemagazine.com Dec. 14 that Carter had enabled genocide with the publication of his book.

“Even as Islamic Hitlerites gather in Iran to deny the first Holocaust of the Jews and to plot the second, former president Jimmy Carter tours America with a new book that describes Jews as racists and oppressors, and suggests they are also a conspiratorial mafia that intimidates ‘critics,’ controls America’s media and war policy, and are therefore also the source of Islamic terrorism and the Arabs’ genocidal campaign to eliminate them from the map of the Middle East. In other words, Americans beware of the Jew in your midst,” Horowitz wrote.

Horowitz also took exception to Carter’s characterization of Israeli policy during an interview on National Public Radio Dec. 12. Carter said then that Palestinians had seen their land “occupied and then confiscated and colonized.” He also said the Palestinians are restrained in their movements, denied entrance to certain areas, and forbidden from using certain Israeli roads built in Palestinian territory. “So this has been in many ways worse than it was in South Africa,” Carter said on NPR.

“When hundreds of millions of Muslims are calling for the extermination of the Jews of Israel this is more than a lie; it is a blood libel,” Horowitz wrote of Carter’s assessment.

Representatives of The American Jewish Committee and The Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles have also criticized Carter’s book, calling the association of Israeli policies with the past of South Africa a win for the Palestinian cause.

Carter wrote in his letter to Jewish Americans Dec. 15 that he would continue to work for peace in the Middle East. His efforts, according to the letter, would focus on renewing peace talks, encouraging Israeli compliance with U.N. resolutions, and “calling for Hamas members and all other Palestinians to renounce violence and adopt the same commitment made by the Arab nations in 2002: the full recognition of Israel’s right to exist in peace within its legally recognized 1967 borders (to be modified by mutual agreement by land swaps).”

“I have spent a great deal of my adult life trying to bring peace to Israel, and my own prayer is that all of us who want to see Israelis enjoy permanent peace with their neighbors join in this common effort,” Carter wrote in the letter.
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The full text of Carter’s letter is available online at:
http://www.cartercenter.org/news/pr/carter_letter_121506.html.

    About the Author

  • Gregory Tomlin