On December 10, 2006, in An Open Letter to the New York Times, entitled, Smearing Jimmy Carter, Hugh Sansom took the New York Times to task:
The New York Times has now joined the slander campaign against President Jimmy Carter following the release of his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. (The paper gets the title wrong — there’s a colon.)
Just how ignorant does the Times think its readers are? All of the “critics” cited — Kenneth Stein, Alan Dershowitz, David Makovsky and the Wiesenthal Center — are unqualified apologists for Israel and its occupation.
The paper claims that Stein’s “criticism is the latest in a growing chorus of academics who have taken issue with the book”. What chorus can the Times have in mind if the only critics it can find just happen to be pro-Israel anti-Arabists?
Stein might be the most moderate — he’s also the most insignificant. One way or another, the Times cites –not one example– of the claimed factual errors or copying, except to convey Stein’s vague (and possibly actionable) assertions about an unnamed source.
Professor Stein, by the way, was also part of a campaign at Emory University to stop Mary Robinson, former Irish President and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, from speaking at Emory’s 2004 commencement — because of her criticism of Israel.
Makovsky is a long-time apologist for Israeli occupation and settlements. He likewise refers to many errors. The Times cites none. Did Makovsky offer none?
The Wiesenthal Center has never offered any criticism of occupation. It does routinely charge –any– critic of Israel with anti-Semitism.
Dershowitz is a vicious apologist not just for Israeli occupation, but for Israeli atrocities. His own book The Case for Israel really has been shown to be riddled with errors and probably plagiarized (from Joan Peters’s debunked From Time Immemorial). Dershowitz plagiarizes ‘fact’ from fiction, but the Times makes no mention of this.
The Times is fond of turning to Dershowitz. It did so when Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival appeared on the best seller lists following a mention before the UN by Hugo Chavez. Then as now, Dershowitz exhibited no experience of or interest in either reading or truth. Yet the Times thinks not only that he’s worth citing, but worth citing repeatedly and without qualification.
It is notable that the Times says nothing at all to suggest that these Carter critics might have an axe to grind. But it shows no comparable hesitation when the critic is one of US or Israeli actions. Chomsky and others like him are routinely identified by their criticism of US and Israeli policy. Why the discrepancy?
The Times provides yet another example of just how right Professors Walt and Mearsheimer are.
More recently, Sansom took Dennis Ross to task for his deceit in the matter of Camp David/Taba negotiations which began in 2000. Ross is a well known Israel shill, who was instrumental in the attempt to get Barak off the hook and blame Arafat for the failure of the Camp David negotiations. In his letter to the NYT’s editor, entitled, Dennis Ross’ curious maps problem, Hugh Sansom goes further concerning the so-called “generous offer.” As is well known, there was an attempt to dupe the American public about who was to blame for the Clinton’s failure at Camp David. In fact, Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster and master of deceit, recommended to The Israel Project, a right wing Israeli propaganda NGO, that it continue talking about the “supposedly generous offer.” Supposedly, indeed.
To the Editor:
Dennis Ross’s [“Don’t Play With Maps,” 9 January 2007, The New York Times] concern over President Carter’s use of maps in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is curious.
The first of the maps on page 148 does indeed resemble an Israeli map — one presented at Eilat in May 2000. The Palestinians rejected it categorically then. Perhaps it was also presented in July 2000 at Camp David. That Israel should have presented it at all shows audacity — and little Israeli interest in peace. That it might have been presented again boggles the mind.
The second map seems a hybrid of one Israel presented in December 2000 and another at Taba in January, 2001. Barak recalled his representatives from the January discussions — arguably because they were going too well for an Israeli leader determined to annex larger sections of the West Bank than he was advertising. Israel’s propagandists, like Ross, prefer to pretend Taba never occurred.
One way or another, the mythology in question is not that of Carter or critics of Israel, but that of Ross and Israel’s supporters.
Ross, understandably for one perpetuating a myth, makes no mention of key features of the “generous” proposal he pretends was offered. That proposal would have annexed a large portion of an East Jerusalem taken from Palestinians. That “currently Jewish” Ross uses casually glosses over the fact of Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from homes in the city.
Ross also fails to mention either Israel’s intention to retain control of many water resources in the West Bank or its plan to annex large blocks of territory — illegally settled — in such a way as to leave a Palestine only barely contiguous, if at all. Small percentages can still be significant — hardly a point lost on Israelis or Americans. After all, if 3 percent (according to Ross alone) is so insignificant, why would Israel be so determined to keep it?
But let us suppose that Ross is entirely honest and accurate. Why should Palestinians be required to surrender land illegally taken, occupied and settled by Israel?
Finally, Ross’s “generous” claim that he is not concerned with “what appeared to be … misappropriation” is fortunate. His book was first published in 2004. The Foundation for Middle East Peace published far more detailed maps of Barak, Clinton and other proposals in 2001. Where did Ross get his maps?
Sincerely,
Hugh Sansom
Brooklyn, NY
Where did Ross get his maps? It was well known that during the Camp David/Taba negotiations, Israel distinctly avoided drawing any maps of their proposals. In fact, Israel insisted that negotiations be entirely verbal, that nothing at all be set in writing. The reason is obvious in the maps Ross published: they clearly support a Bantustan solution, which would have condemned Palestinians to the “separatist” fate of Blacks in South Africa under the White Afrikaaner government.
The laughable aspect of Dennis Ross’ Israel propaganda is that it has now got him into hot water to explain himself.
At least Barak has since come clean (in this video).
As a guest on the Charlie Rose Show, January 25, 2005, when asked about Sharon’s disengagement plan, Barak stated, “I proposed this disengagement (Sharon’s concept) and couldn’t even get the support of Labor (his own party).” As everyone knows, the Bantustans offered to Arafat were to retain the Israeli only settlements, roughly 150 of them ranging in size from villages to cities, and the roads and highways interconnecting them with Israel, and presumably the necessary military forces to protect them. It is also interesting that while these negotiations were going on, Israeli settlers were pouring into the West Bank as its highest rate ever.
Asked by Rose if he ever accept Taba (Taba was where the newest resurrection of “generous offer” claim originates), Barak stated, “there was no agreement.”
Asked to describe the difference between Camp David and Taba, Barak stated, “Taba? There was no negotiation, never. No meetings, no teams, no authority for the teams to negotiate anything. No Americans in the room, no record, nothing. Unofficial contact between senior Israelis….” As is known, Barak finally abruptly pulled his negotiators out.
In essence, Barak refuted the legitimacy of Taba and stated that it did not have any significance in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. To date, the Israel government, while continuing to colonize the West Bank, has never offered the Palestinian people a sovereign state in any sense of the term. The Barak admission also suggests that he entered Camp David with no intent, indeed, no capacity to offer Arafat an independent sovereign Palestinian state.
That truth of course will not stop Dennis Ross from continuing to shill for Israel’s right wing and continue to propose that Arafat refused a “generous offer.” In fact, it is now possible to find resurrections of the generous offer, negating the myth everyone knows it to be. “The myth of the myth of the generous offer” is its most recent rebirth. Some people just can’t help taking Frank Luntz seriously when he obviously couldn’t take himself seriously. “Supposedly,” indeed.
Shergald recycles discredited calumnies
Where to begin?
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines “shill” as “an accomplice of a hawker, gambler, or swindler who acts as an enthusiastic customer to entice others.”
Shergald, as it happens, is a self-admitted shill:
Apart from invective, however,Shergald has no evidence with which to convict Dennis Ross of being a shill. Specifically regarding the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from Camp David through the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Bill Clinton endorsed Ross’s book, The Missing Peace, as
Reviewing Ross’s book for The New York Review of Books, Rob Malley called it a “meticulous narrative” Although Malley disagrees with some of Ross’s interpretations, Malley also recognizes that “Ross attended every significant meeting; he has a prodigious memory and his note-taking was legendary. All of which makes his book important to read, his factual account difficult to dispute . . .”
Regarding the Carter controversy, Bill Clinton also has written:
I’ve already diaried extensively about The Myth of the “Myth of the Generous Offer”. Suffice it to say here that crunch time came at the turn of 2000/2001, when President Clinton put forward his Peace Parameters. The Israeli government accepted the Clinton Peace Parameters. See, e.g., Yossi Beilin, The Path to Geneva: The Quest for a Permanent Agreement, 1996-2004 , p. 223. (Jimmy Carter on Beilin’s book: “”Beilin’s recollections should be required reading for anyone interested in the search for peace in the Middle East.”)
According to Rob Malley, Arafat had the best deal he could ever get.
Unfortunately, Arafat and the Palestinians rejected it. See, e.g., Palestinians reject peace plan:
Were the Clinton Peace Parameters something the Palestinians really could not accept? Yasir Arafat did not think so. Eighteen months after he rejected them, unfortunately helping elect Ariel Sharon prime minister of Israel, Arafat belatedly tried to accept them. As Ha’aretz reported on June 21, 2002:
The unhappy conclusion is, in the words of Shlomo Ben-Ami, that
I’ll close with Shergald’s account of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak’s January 2005 interview with Charlie Rose. Here’s what I heard, with my timings from the video.
* At about 29:00, Barak talks about having proposed a wider disengagement than Sharon and not having been able to get the support of Labor. But Barak doesn’t say when he made this proposal or what it contained. While Prime Minister? There is no evidence of any such proposal. As part of his (as of January 2005) unsuccessful campaign for a political comeback? If so, it’s not clear whether the lack of support was for him personally or for his proposal.
* Starting at about 31:20, Barak says that neither he nor, he believes, any Israeli leader will accept a single Palestinian refugee “based on a political right of return,” as distinguished from accepting refugees as a matter of Israel’s free will “based on humanitarian considerations.”
* Beginning at about 36:30, Barak says there was no agreement at Taba. Barak also says that, were he again Prime Minister, he would again accept the Camp David proposal of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and about 93% of the West Bank.
* At about 37:20, Barak says that Israel should be willing to resume negotiations with the Palestinians at the point they had reached “the day before the Palestinians turned to terror.”
* Beginning at about 37:30, Barak denies the existence of “official,” rather than unofficial, negotiations at Taba. Perhaps Shergald always believes Barak. I choose to believe the Israelis who were there, starting with the delegation leader, then Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, but also including Yossi Beilin, Yossi Sarid, and Gilead Sher, who all testify to the fact of their negotiations with a Palestinian delegation. Ben-Ami writes, beginning at page 271 of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, that
Ben-Ami also cites Barak as having both (1) authorized him “to open, in Taba, a secret channel with Abu-Ala in order to explore freely the possibility of bridging the gaps and come to a last-moment breakthrough”; and (2) having “made a radical shift in his position and virtually agreed to the concept of equal swaps of land.”
Dennis Ross’ greatest shill and propagandist. This guy speaks for Barak, the Israeli PM during Camp David/Taba. Wait, Barak was drunk during the Charlie Rose interview. That’s it. He was delerious.
They never give up, Luntz. You taught them well.
amounts to sherglad saying, “I’m right; you’re wrong.” Whether as conversation or argument, it leaves something to be desired.
Don’t be a jerk. Give Barak’s entire sermon.
Yes he would give 93% but this time, BUT this time, HE WOULD REMOVE THE SETTLEMENTS, AND EVACUATE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF ISRAELIS BEHIND THE BORDER. What he stated was that it was not possible in 2000 or at Taba, which he diminishes to a trivial exercise.
THAT’S YOUR HOAX. YOUR TALK ABOUT PERCENTAGES, BUT SILENCE ABOUT THE SETTLEMENTS THAT WOULD HAVE STAYED, ALL OF THEM. AND THE HIGHWAYS. AND THE IDF. AND SO ON AND SO FORTH.
THE BULLSHIT CONTINUES. YOU’RE A PROPAGANDIST FOR THE RIGHT WING LIKUD. YOU EVEN CONTENDED THAT ISRAEL OR THE PALESTINE JEWS OFFERED THE PALESTINIAN ARABS A STATE IN 1937 AND 1948. HOW GENEROUS OF THEM TO OFFER A PEOPLE A STATE IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY. THE END OF ALL OF CHUTZPAH. NO NOT THE END ALL. THE END ALL WAS EXPECTING 400,000 PALESTINIAN ARABS TRAPPED IN THE JEWISH PARTITION IN 1948 TO LEAVE THEIR HOMES, LANDS, AND VILLAGES, THEIR TOWNS AND CITIES, THEIR SCHOOL SYSTEMS AND GOVERNMENTS, THEIR BUSINESSES, FRAMLANDS, AND ORCHARDS, THEIR VERY LIVES FOR GENERATIONS OVER A MILLENIUM, AND MOVE INTO TENTS IN REFUGEE CAMPS. NOW THAT IS CHUTZPAH. NO THAT WAS NOT THE END ALL. THE END ALL WAS BLAMING THEM WHEN THEY DIDN’T TAKE THIS VERY FIRST “GENEROUS OFFER.”
DON’T WORRY. THESE GUYS DON’T GIVE UP. THEY WILL BE BACK REPEATING THE SAME.
Dennis Ross works for an aipac think tank and falsely perpetuates the notion that Israel is close to getting nukes.
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070423&s=ross042307
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Dennis_Ross
The more you find out about Ross, the more you begin to understand that clinton’s peace process was doomed from the beginning. clinton was no where close to securing anything like what Carter secured between Egypt in Israel.
correction: Ross falsely promotes the notion Iran is close to getting nukes.