Not So Lovely Lelyveld

Joseph Lelyveld, a former editor and correspondent of The New York Times, takes on Jimmy Carter and Apartheid at the New York Review of Books. And Jeffrey Goldberg, too. But he's wishy-washy.

One excerpt:-

Those who have taken issue with his book generally skirt what he has had to say about the settlements. But they represent the nub not only of his argument but of the problem. Sensing a coldness toward Israel—or at least its security establishment, struggling on a day-to-day basis to prevent bombings —his critics catch him out on errors that might otherwise have been overlooked and pose the question of why he can't be as indignant about suicide bombers as he is about the occupation. The complaint has more to do with matters of emphasis and tone than the points he actually makes. Carter condemns the dispatching of suicide bombers into crowds of Jewish civilians but does so coolly, tersely, almost clinically, stressing that such attacks are counterproductive, without conveying the kind of visceral horror that the phenomenon arouses among Israel's supporters and many others as well.

Anti-Beilin Letter in The Forward

Carter’s Israeli Chorus

Yossi Beilin assures the Forward’s readers that the rhetoric in Jimmy Carter’s book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” “is entirely harmonious with the kind of criticism that Israelis themselves voice about their own country. There is nothing in the criticism that Carter has for Israel that has not been said by Israelis themselves” (“Carter Is No More Critical of Israel Than Israelis Themselves,” January 19). Beilin is being more than a bit duplicitous.

The Israelis who do bandy about terms like “apartheid,” “imperialism” and worse are extreme radicals from the fringes of the left. These borderline post-Zionists are not your average Israelis. Indeed, they are just as wrong, malicious and immoral as Carter.

Diatribes do not contribute to a rational debate in Israel, even when they are loud enough for a peanut farmer in Georgia to hear.

Yisrael Medad
Shiloh, West Bank