Former President Jimmy Carter, former Secretary of State James Baker and former President George H. W. Bush are in the news.
Carter has a new book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” (See Nov. 24 Chronicle.) Baker is crafting a new Middle East policy for America. Papa Bush’s “realist” foreign policy is being vindicated by his son’s misadventures, and his men are moving back into power in Washington.
Naturally, Israelis are filled with dread. As far as they’re concerned, the title of Carter’s book tells you everything you need to know about how he feels toward Israel.
As for Baker, didn’t he say “F— the Jews” or something like that? And Bush the First refused Israel those loan guarantees, which shows how much of a friend he is.
Israelis don’t like American leaders trying to tell them what to do, and they especially don’t like American leaders protesting the way they treat Palestinians.
So Carter is widely viewed in Israel as an anti-Semite, while Baker and H. W. are thought of as “Arabists,” which is a euphemism for anti-Semites.
In my view, this is redneck thinking, Israeli Archie Bunkerism.
Not only don’t I see Carter, Baker and Bush Sr. as anti-Semites, I appreciate them all as proven friends of Israel. They just dared to be friends of the Palestinians, too; and this Israelis won’t accept.
To many Israelis, it’s not enough to be pro-Israel. You have to be both pro-Israel and anti-Arab, like Bush the Second, to be our friend.
Helping us try to make peace with our enemies — as former President Bill Clinton did — doesn’t get you anywhere with us. Helping us make war against our enemies, that’s the litmus test of friendship around here.
Hating the messenger
Carter brokered and enabled Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt. It wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t dragged Sadat and Begin into signing it.
That peace treaty has kept the Middle East from blowing up any number of times. It’s one of the most valuable political assets Israel has.
And the majority of Israelis couldn’t care less. The Egyptians hate us, and Carter hates us, all he cares about is the Palestinians — that’s the mainstream Israeli view.
Here is a quote from Carter’s interview with The Forward printed a few weeks ago: “I’ve been teaching the Bible and my belief is that God ordained that the Jews should have a homeland there, and I think that international law beginning in 1948 says the same exact thing, and that’s what I believe.”
Is this an anti-Semite, an Israel-hater? No. But that’s what most Israelis think as soon as they see the word “apartheid” associated with the word “Palestine.” For many, use of “Palestine” by itself is proof of anti-Semitism.
But while there are important differences between the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the former apartheid regime of South Africa, after 39 years of occupation the similarities have come to outweigh the differences.
The Palestinian majority in the West Bank lives under the harsh, frequently brutal rule of the Israeli army, while Jewish settlers are the lords of the land.
If comparing the occupation to apartheid makes one an anti-Semite, then Carter has Israeli company — for example, in Labor MK and former Navy and Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon, and in Yediot Aharonot columnist Nahum Barnea, the country’s number one print journalist.
As for Bush Sr., what Israelis remember most about him is that he refused us $10 billion in loan guarantees because some of that money would have been used by then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to build settlements. The consensus view is that Bush was meddling in Israel’s affairs.
Somehow Israelis think America is required to finance our settlements, even if these settlements are the bane of the Palestinians’ existence, because America is required to obey Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians.
So Bush Sr. is branded as anti-Israel. It doesn’t matter that most Israelis have become fed up with the settlements and wish they could wash their hands of them.
Even the elder Bush’s extraordinary conduct of the first Persian Gulf War, which stopped Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and thereby did a tremendous service to Israel, fails to win him any points in Israel. He didn’t finish the job, we say, he didn’t get rid of Saddam once and for all as he should have.
We prefer his son’s way, which turned into a disaster whose end can’t even be imagined. If H. W. knew the limits of force and W. doesn’t, that’s one more reason why Israelis love W. and dislike his dad.
Knowing when to talk
Regarding Baker, his close partnership with Bush in getting the world’s support, including Arab support, for the first Persian Gulf War means less than nothing to people in this country.
What Israelis remember is that he sat in Congress and had the shameless, Arabist, anti-Semitic gall to read out the State Department’s telephone number and suggest that the Shamir government call if and when that government ever got “serious about peace.”
And if anybody here still had any doubts about Baker, they didn’t after he said “F— the Jews!”
Here is why I’m glad Baker is the man drawing up a new U.S. policy in the Middle East, and why I think that if anybody is going to bring peace to Israel, it’s him.
When Baker said the Shamir government wasn’t serious about peace, he was 100 percent right, as most people who aren’t members of the Judea-Samaria-Gaza Settlers Fan Club now realize. But again, Israelis don’t have the courage to hear this message, so they take it out on the messenger.
As for saying “F— the Jews!” — he never said it. People who don’t know the story imagine Baker must been sitting in the Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh with his oil sheikh friends, and the heady atmosphere got to him and he lost his inhibitions, stood up and shouted, “F— the Jews!”
What really happened was that Ed Koch, the former New York mayor, wrote a newspaper column in which he quoted an anonymous source who said he was present at a meeting in which Baker proposed some policy regarding Israel.
Someone at the meeting suggested that the policy wouldn’t go down well with the American Jewish community. To which Baker said, “F— em. They don’t vote for us anyway.”
The State Department said the whole story, including the quote, was “garbage.” Koch, for his part, has never named his source.
Doesn’t this all sound a little less sinister than the “F— the Jews!” story about Baker that has since lodged in so many pro-Israel minds? Even if Baker really did say, “F— em. They don’t vote for us anyway,” would that make him an anti-Semite? To my mind, it would only make him a politician.
What’s important about Baker, as far as Israelis should be concerned, is that he got European and Arab countries, including Syria, to join the coalition against Saddam in the first Persian Gulf War.
What’s important is that he got Israel together with the Palestinians, Syrians and Jordanians at the Madrid peace talks, even if those talks didn’t go anywhere until the Yitzhak Rabin-Shimon Peres government, on its own, began talking with the Palestine Liberation Organization, for which Baker deserves neither credit nor blame.
What’s important is that Baker has a keen sense of when to shoot and when to talk, and he understands that now is a time to talk — something the Ehud Olmert government and most Israelis don’t understand and don’t want to hear about.
Israelis don’t like it when American leaders tell them what to do, or criticize the way they treat others. That is why they’re so antagonistic toward Carter, Bush Sr. and Baker.
But if not for them, Israel would still be at war with Egypt and there’s no telling how powerful Saddam would have become.
Larry Derfner writes about Israeli society for U.S. Jewish newspapers and the Jerusalem Post.
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