Eliot Cohen

A friend went to Jimmy Carter's book-signing in Pasadena the other day. 3200 books, all snapped up weeks before, then signed by an aloof former president, who did not shake hands but was flanked by two phalanxes of security. Everyone who came in was X-rayed, or wanded.

My friend tells me Carter had a focused forward expression, he was on a mission. "Do you think someone is going to try and knock him off?"

The concern reflects a couple of realities. At 82, Carter would seem to have found a spiritual model in one of the heroes of his book, Anwar Sadat, who, at Carter's urging, took on the orthodoxies in his own culture to sign a historic peace agreement, and who gave his life to do so. Carter is taking on the orthodoxies in his own culture, with the same sense of all or nothing.

The venom he is encountering on the Jewish right is staggering. Even I'm surprised. Marty Peretz has called him a Jew-hater. Shmuel Rosner, the Haaretz correspondent who not long ago rated American presidential candidates on the degree to which they ignored the Palestinian issue, with obliviousness being a positive, has branded him a likely antisemite. And in doing so, subscribed to the most parochial formulations offered by neoconservative Iraq-warrior Eliot Cohen.

When will the Jewish universalists in American life come forward? That is the great threat Carter poses to the parochial: that others will start to care. And a policy that has been commandeered by a small set of interests will at last become the business of the American people. A bestseller with the word "apartheid" in the title—we're getting closer and closer to the Elian Gonzales moment, the moment when the American people wake up and realize that a fanatical lobby is not representing America's best interest.

Again the real journalistic responsibility here is not to repeat the smears of the Rosners and Peretzes, but to examine the simple question: Is what Carter is saying of the Occupied Territories true? Having been there, I say it is.

The intellectual challenge of the Walt-Mearsheimer paper on the power of the Israel lobby is whether Americans are capable of debating the ideas in it without freaking out. So far the answer is: No.

The paper was rejected by the Atlantic, as too hot for this country to hear. And while it has been favorably received in Israel and England, it continues to be smeared in this country in the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. The latest attack is from Eliot A. Cohen, a Hopkins professor, in the Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/04/AR2006040401282.html

Cohen says the professors are guilty of antisemitism, bigotry and of trading in ideas from the "sewer" in broaching their belief: that the Israel lobby is too powerful.

This is, once again, a fearful response from the rightwing Jewish community, fearful that if the issue is even discussed, Jews in this country will be persecuted. It reminds me of my own relative's comment after 9/11, They're going to blame the Jews. This anxiety has controlled the response to the powerful Harvard paper: If we even discuss it, Jews will be blamed. As for the ideas? Cohen's claim that the lobby is not powerful is based on such weak arguments as, the Cuba lobby is powerful, too, or, People who don't like Israel also supported the war in Iraq. Of course these things are true. They in no way invalidate Walt-Mearsheimer's assertions, that the Israel lobby has had a stranglehold on our policy in the Middle East (which is not to be confused with Cuba) and that it played a central role in the (disastrous) Iraq war planning.

These assertions are important and deserve to be discussed on their merits, without fearful slurring and name-calling.

Suddenly, the debate over invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein has taken a literary turn, w  read more »