[Peace-discuss] Carter's book report

[C. G. Estabrook]

Norman Finkelstein comments on ex-president Carter's book, "Palestine: 
Peace Not Apartheid":

It seems Israel's "supporters" have conscripted me in their media 
lynching of Jimmy Carter. Count me out. True, the historical part of the 
book contains errors in that it repeats standard Israeli propaganda. 
However, Carter's analysis of the impasse in the "peace process" as well 
as his description of Israeli policy in the West Bank is accurate - and, 
frankly, that's all that matters.

A wag once said that there is no Pravda (Truth) in Izvestia (News) and 
no Izvestia in Pravda. The same can be said of our Pravda (The New York 
Times) and Izvestia (The Washington Post). Today both party organs ran 
feature stories trashing Carter using Kenneth Stein's resignation from 
the Carter Center as the hook. (I was sitting in the airport when this 
earth-shattering story came on CNN.) But like Ayn Rand's John Galt, many 
people must have wondered, Who (the hell) is Kenneth Stein? Stein wrote 
exactly one scholarly book on the Israel-Palestine conflict more than 
two decades ago (The Land Question in Palestine, 1984). Even in his 
heyday, Stein was a nonentity. When Joan Peters's hoax From Time 
Immemorial was published, I asked his opinion of it. He replied that it 
had "good points and bad points." Just like the Protocols of the Elders 
of Zion.

Later Stein wrote a sick essay the main thesis of which was, "the 
Palestinian Arab community had been significantly prone to dispossession 
and dislocation before the mass exodus from Palestine began" - in other 
words, the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 was really no 
big deal ("One Hundred Years of Social Change: The Creation of the 
Palestinian Refugee Probem," in Laurence Silberstein (ed.), New 
Perspectives on Israeli History, 1991).

The Pravda story was written by two reporters who seem to have made a 
beeline for the newsroom from their bat mitzvahs. They quote Stein to 
the effect that Carter's book is "replete with factual errors, copied 
materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply 
invented segments." I doubt there's much to this. Most of the background 
material is Carter's reminiscences. Maybe he copied from Rosalyn's diary 
(she was his note taker). Then Pravda reports that "a growing chorus of 
academics...have taken issue with the book." Who do they name? Alan 
Dershowitz and David Makovsky. Makovsky is resident hack at the 
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Israel Lobby's "think"-tank.

Pravda saw no irony in citing Dershowitz's expertise for a story on 
fabrication, falsification and plagiarism regarding a book on the 
Israel-Palestine conflict. As always, one can only be awed by the party 
discipline at our Pravda. It makes one positively wistful for the bygone 
days when commissars used to quote Stalin on linguistics.


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> /from smirkingchimp.org/
> /Published on Friday, December 8, 2006 by the //Los Angeles Times/ 
> <http://www.latimes.com/>
> *Speaking Frankly about Israel and Palestine*
> *by Jimmy Carter*
> ...