Since the Post can’t seem to either find a balanced approach to discussing Jimmy Carter’s book, “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid” or actually locate someone able to critique in detail the aleged factual errors its writers claim await to spring from between its covers, one is left wondering what the problem is. We’ve seen Post pundits go after the word Apartheid and Jimmy’s religion. I’m still waiting for them to actually get to talking about the book. It seems that to bring up UN resolutions, the occupation, settlement expansion and any solution that doesn’t involve calling Jordan “Palestine” is to be anti-israel to the Post.

Another open letter to the editor:

Deborah Lipstadt writes in her pithy screed against Jimmy Carter that he doesn’t focus enough on the Holocaust in his critique of the current situation in Israel and Palestine. She writes that the Holocaust “sealed in the minds of almost all the world’s people then the need for the Jewish people to have a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland.” Another way of looking at is that, yes, even after the deaths of six million in an attempted genocide, Europe sought to expel Jews gone from its midst.

But that moves the debate over Israel’s right to exist, something Carter does not challenge. It seems the critics of “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid” can’t muster a decent argument that engages the actual content of the book.

If Carter doesn’t raise the issue of the Holocaust enough for Lipstadt’s standards, maybe it’s because the situation facing the Palestinians and the systematic murder of millions of people using gas chambers and concentration camps is not quite symmetrical. The comparisons with Apartheid South Africa are on a far more even scale, and why inflate things?

But there are some specific comparisons that the Palestinians can find in common with Jewish history in Europe, such as ghettos, property confiscation, fences, laws and rules and Identification based on ethnic identity rather than equality, and the constant harassment by soldiers and citizenry.

It took a several decades of propaganda and persecution before Europe could build up to the Nazi campaigns. What’s happening to the Palestinians would be more similar to the earlier years of the 20th century, as the hate machine was gaining momentum. For these comparisons, Lipstadt need look no further than Yosef Lapid, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s largest Holocaust memorial. In response to recent Israeli coverage of settlers in Hebron, Lapid said, “I was afraid to go to school, because of the little anti-Semites who used to lay in ambush on the way and beat us up. How is that different from a Palestinian child in Hebron?”

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