Jimmy Carter’s meeting with Hamas has been roundly condemned as
another expression of his anti-Israel sentiment. Ken
Stein, director of the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel
at Emory University, who resigned as a fellow of the Carter Center
in the wake of the former president’s book Palestine: Peace Not
Apartheid, said at the time that Carter recasts Hamas as a
moderate partner ready to negotiate with Israel. He launders its
reputation both with careful word choice and omission. He uses the
past tense, for example, to describe Hamas as an “Islamic militant
group that opposed recognition of Israel [and] perpetrated acts of
violence.”
But Carter is not alone in this sordid exercise. Three weeks ago
I wrote an article
revealing that Barack Obama’s national campaign co-chairman
believed that the real obstacle to peace in the Middle East were
Jewish voters who were acting in opposition to American interests
and against a lasting peace. Most of the criticism of the piece
came from Jewish leftists who not only support the Carter trip but
share his view — and the view of many Obama advisers — that the
principal obstacle to peace in the Middle East is a small handful
of neocons and Christian Zionists who abet Israel in its
willingness to hang on to Jerusalem and the territories.
Much like Carter, groups such as the Israel Policy Forum seek a
“shift” in America’s approach to the Middle East that begins and
ends with making nice to Hamas. Read how Seymour Reich, President
of IPF — like Jimmy Carter — played down Hamas’s genocidal
actions Hamas through semantics and omission in a recent Boston
Globe
editorial:
While there are legitimate concerns [!] over Hamas
policy and over direct engagement with it, it is impossible to
achieve an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians on any of
the key issues without engaging Hamas through some means. Hamas is
the governing authority in Gaza, a reality we can no longer
ignore… Hamas can torpedo talks between Israel and the
Palestinian Authority by intensified rocket attacks or suicide
bombings…
Reich is correct when he notes that Hamas is the governing
authority. But like the rest of the Jewish Left, he construes
terror as a tactic, not an instrument of jihad. He ignores the fact
that when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 Hamas-sponsored rocket
activity surged by 500 percent. That increase, along with the
tunnels that were built to allow genocide bombers to enter Israel
even as Israel was forcibly dismantling settlements, had nothing to
do with an effort to undermine peace talks. Negotiating for a
cessation of violence that a return of territory was supposed to
produce is called rewarding terrorism.
Except in the eyes of Jimmy Carter and the likes of the Israel
Policy Forum. When Hamas was elected and took over Gaza, Congress
crafted legislation that would insure any funds going to the
Palestinian Authority did not go to Hamas. The Israeli government
supports the initiative. Who opposed it? Hamas and the IPF.
M. J. Rosenberg, IPF’s policy director who has kinder things to
say about Hamas than he does the Jewish residents of the
settlements, said at the time, “We oppose the legislation. The U.S.
should be extending carrots to Hamas, and not just slapping them
with sticks.”
Indeed, Rosenberg has kinder things to say about Hamas, Stephen
Walt, and John Mearsheimer than he does about his Jewish brethren.
He calls Jewish settlers that have, with support of the government
and often at the cost of their lives and the lives of their
children, tamed a dangerous border, “the worst of the worst.” (He
claims young Israeli soldiers hate every minute of their service in
Hebron. He should speak to my son who serves in the IDF and has
nothing but good things to say about Hebron’s residents.)
Meanwhile, here’s what he has to say
about Walt-Mearsheimer and their j’accuse, The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy:
It’s an important, heavily sourced and documented book
(108 pages of footnotes) by two distinguished professors at two of
our best universities. It deals with Middle East policymaking at a
time when America’s problems in that region surpass our problems
anywhere else. And it is a serious book about a subject that is
decidedly provocative, a much improved and expanded version of the
original London Review of Books article.
Neither Rosenberg nor the IPF are alone in their passions or
positions. Something called the J-Street Project is being
launched by left-wing Jews who worked for
Carter, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The J-Street board of
advisers includes former Clinton aide Daniel Levy, Obama Mideast
adviser Robert Malley, and Alan Solomon, a top Obama fundraiser.
The invitation to the first meeting of J Street
observes:
For too long, the loudest American voices in political
and policy debates have been those on the far right — often
Republican neoconservatives or extreme Christian Zionists….We are
the first and only lobby and PAC (political action committee)
dedicated to ensuring Israel’s security, changing the direction of
American policy in the Middle East and opening up American
political debate about Israel and the Middle East.
As noted, change boils down to blaming Israel for the actions of
Hamas and Islamic hatred of Israel.
Here’s Daniel Levy blaming terrorism and genocidal acts on…Israel, of
course:
There is also very strong case to be made that the
endless humiliations of the occupation and its manifestations in
checkpoints, closures, military raids, and sonic boom over flights,
etch a more powerful image into a young Palestinian conscience than
words occasionally heard on unpopular TV stations or on a mosque on
a Friday.
SETTING ASIDE THE “blame Israel first” approach of these groups,
what exactly would their Carteresque approach to negotiating a
ceasefire with Hamas accomplish? These groups call for UN forces or
a “robust” international military presence. A good example can be
drawn from the recent ceasefire in Lebanon. Since the UN forces
entered Lebanon, Hezbollah has been rearming itself with tons of
weapons, including Russian-made antitank missiles, short- and
long-range rockets, small arms, mines, and ammunition. Hezbollah
now has substantially more rockets in its arsenal than the 14,000
it had before the conflict — likely more than double that
number.
Similarly, each time a ceasefire has taken place in Gaza, Hamas
has re-armed and re-grouped for its next round of attacks on
Israel, courtesy of Iran. As David Hazony has pointed out, thanks
to Iranian cash and training, Hamas now has a terrorist Army equal
to Hezbollah. The al Qaeda presence has grown with Iranian assent.
Hamas functions as an arm of Iran. It exists so that there will be
another front against Israel’s Western flank, to parallel the one
up north.
Which is exactly the strategic vision that binds Jimmy Carter
and his supporters on the Jewish Left. To them, Israel’s ultimate
configuration, demographic, strategic, political, should be decided
by others than the Israeli people — especially those despicable
settlers and Orthodox — who are obviously too stubborn to know
what’s best for regional peace.
But there is also something else growing. Groups like the IPF
consist of Jews who feel uncomfortable with a powerful Jewish state
instead of a scattered and battered Jewish people. They wish to
reduce Israel into an extension of the Jewish Diaspora, assimilated
and marginally committed to Jewish continuity. They rush to defend
Israel’s most venal critics. But worst of all, to paraphrase
Mitchell Cohen in Dissent magazine, there is nothing Hamas
does that they ultimately don’t blame on Israel. That’s an
enslavement of a totally different type to contemplate during
Passover.
