Carter’s Break with the White South Over Civil Rights Offers a Model for Jews
Our guest for the Zoom call this Friday, January 3rd, at 1 Eastern, for paid subscribers, will be Paul O’Brien, Executive Director at Amnesty International USA. We’ll discuss Amnesty’s new report accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
My New Book
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28, 2025. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: first, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”
Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.
Sources Cited in this Video
Jimmy Carter’s 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
Anti-Defamation League head Abe Foxman’s claim that Carter was “engaging in antisemitism.”
Deborah Lipstadt’s 2007 Washington Post column, “Jimmy Carter’s Jewish Problem.”
The attacks on Carter by Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton.
The attacks on Carter’s book in The New York Times and Slate.
“Great is repentance, which hastens redemption” from the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yoma (86b).
Kenneth E. Morris’ biography, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist.
Carter’s inaugural addresses as Georgia governor and president.
Carter’s 1977 speech at Notre Dame questioning the Cold War.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Will Alden details how, since October 7, foundations have withdrawn funding from groups that support Palestinian rights.
Alan Dershowitz vs Norman Finkelstein, the musical.
Doris Bittar on Christmas in Lebanon.
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I interviewed two young Israelis who refused their country’s draft.
I’ve written about Jehad Abusalim, a Gaza-born scholar currently based in Washington who is completing a PhD in history, Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University. The warnings he issued about Israel’s response to October 7 have proven prescient and were tragically ignored by American media. He has now launched a newsletter on Substack. Please consider subscribing.
See you on Friday, January 3,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, Jimmy Carter has died. It’s worth going back to the moment in 2006 when he published his book, Peace Not Apartheid, to remember what happened there. Abe Foxman, then the head of the Anti-Defamation League, said that Carter was ‘engaging in antisemitism.’ Deborah Lipstadt, who went on to be appointed by a Democratic president to be the antisemitism czar wrote a column in the Washington Post entitled ‘Jimmy Carter’s Jewish Problem.’ Carter was attacked by Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton. His book was attacked in reviews in the New York Times and Slate in large measure for using the term apartheid, a term which is now been endorsed by Israel’s own leading human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Yesh Din, and by the most prominent human rights organizations in the world, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
A couple of years ago, I did a newsletter actually suggesting that leaders of the organized American Jewish community like Foxman, but also American politicians like Clinton and Pelosi, should offer a public apology to Jimmy Carter. I quoted at that time a line from Tractate Yoma and the Babylonian Talmud, ‘Great is repentance which hastens redemption.’ But I think there are a great number of people who need to do Teshuva, who need to ask for forgiveness for their attacks on Carter for saying things that have been deeply vindicated by the course of events in the years since then, and in fact, if you look back at them, seem extremely tame. Because it’s worth remembering that Carter wasn’t actually accusing Israel of being an apartheid state in 2006. All he was saying was that it risked becoming one, which is also, by the way, something that Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak and numerous Israeli security officials have been saying around that time. And yet, the man was viciously pilloried by people who I think at this point should have the decency to offer their apologies.
But I think there is also something really important to say about Carter and the roots of his position on Palestinian freedom. He was, of all of the American presidents, the one who I think felt the strongest sense of identification with the Palestinian plight. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think there’s a lot to learn from Carter’s own life that can instruct us as we think about Israel and Palestine and that particularly Israelis and other Jews can learn from.
So, Carter’s family story is really remarkable. He grew up not just in the South, but in the deep, deep South. I’m quoting here from a biography of his by Kenneth E. Morris called Jimmy Carter: American Moralist. Morris writes that Carter grew up in rural southwest Georgia, in a place where people spoke a rural dialect that was so thick that many outsiders thought of it as a foreign language altogether. There was a very large Black population. It was a profoundly, viciously racist environment. Morris suggests that Carter’s father, Earl, may indeed have participated in a lynching. He also tells the story that although Carter grew up playing with Black children all the time, that Carter’s father actually ordered the Black children to lose all of the games they played with little Jimmy so he could always come out on top.
And to understand the fact that Carter was the president who took this position on Palestinian freedom—and not a perfect position, but much more progressive than most of the other presidents—you have to understand that it’s an outgrowth of his experience as a White Southerner turning against his own community, his own people to support Civil Rights. In 1953, when Carter was a young businessman, he refused to join the racist Citizens’ Councils that led to a boycott by Whites in the town of his business. He supported school consolidation, which would bring Black and White students together. Also, in the 1950s, which led to a rift with his own cousin, Hugh, that the two men did not speak for more than a decade. You know, some Jews who support Palestinian freedom may identify with these kinds of stories. After a vote on this question of school integration, opponents of desegregation nailed a sign to Carter’s warehouse door saying, ‘Coons and Carters go together.’
Carter’s key political moment in his political career in Georgia was in January 1971, when in his gubernatorial inaugural speech, he denounced segregation. That was when Time magazine put him on the cover and this completely obscure governor began to launch the political career that would allow him to this upset victory in the 1976 presidential campaign. Morris argues it’s impossible to understand Carter’s view of foreign policy without understanding the way it springs from the moralism that came out of the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, his Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, was one of the key Civil Rights leaders in Georgia. That Carter was the only president of the Cold War who explicitly came out against the Cold War framing, very famously in a speech that he gave at Notre Dame, arguing in fact for a kind of an idea of a global community based on cooperation that was very clearly modeled, Morris argues, on Martin Luther King’s notion of the beloved community.
And Carter, in his inaugural address as president, who kind of harkened back to the gubernatorial address he gave as governor of Georgia, spent one third of that address speaking about human rights, which was for him very clearly the kind of international extension of the principle of civil rights that he had fought for, that he indeed had suffered for, that he had alienated himself from his own community for supporting. And then you may know that Young was ultimately forced to be fired under tremendous criticism by the organized American Jewish community. Carter did not stick up for him because Young had committed the sin of meeting with members of the PLO.
It is impossible to understand Carter’s sympathy for Palestinians, Carter’s kind of moral framework, in which he put Israel’s domination of Palestinians, without seeing that connection to his support as a White Southerner for civil rights. And I think one of the things that we should think about as we mourn Jimmy Carter is him as a model for Israeli and other Jews. Carter risked something. He risked the opprobrium of his own community, his own people, to come out for civil rights. And that became the basis of his entire political worldview.
So, it’s not just that Carter has been proven right in his criticism of Israel’s policies for the Palestinians. It’s also that in Carter’s own life, in his own moral courage, we see a model for the moral courage that is necessary by Jews today to be willing to take positions that will alienate us from our community because we believe in the central moral principle to which Carter devoted much of his life: the principle of human equality, the principle of human dignity of all people, irrespective of their religion, their ethnicity, or their race.
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