Carter on Israel and Palestine

I have recently finished reading (actually listening to the audio book) on President Jimmy Carter's recent book entitled "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid” (Simon & Schuster, November 2006). As you can see from the sample commentaries below and these web references, this book has been controversial, to say the least.

For a Zionist view of the errors of the Carter book, see:

http://zionism-israel.com/israel_news/2006/12/carters-palestine-israel-book-its-even.html


The Anti-Discrimination League has also checked in to condemn the book:

http://www.adl.org/israel/carter_book_review.asp

The following web address presents Carter's summary chapter:

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Books/story?id=2680021&page=1

Read this (or, preferably, the whole book) and draw your own conclusions. As for me, here are a few thoughts:

1. The title is certainly controversial, perhaps un-necessarily so. On the other hand, this provocative title has probably served to get the book's ideas debated.
2. Presumably, there are many errors of fact and appreciation in Carter's presentation. I am not really competent to judge these. But even if we discount the questionable "facts", Carter's main line of reasoning seems plausible.
3. Carter's prescriptions, summarized in the last chapter of the book, seem evident to me and have seemed so long before I read this book. Israel is simply not promoting its long-term interests by its current policies and practices. Likewise, the United States should encourage a change in Israel's approach, rather than support current erroneous approaches either explicitly or implicitly.

The following web site presents the so-called "Geneva Accord" referred to in the book and its summary chapter:

http://www.bitterlemons.org/docs/geneva.html

[By the way, the Bitterlemons site provides very interesting Israeli and Palestinian opinions on matters important in that region. If you are really interested in this subject, sign up for their free electronic newsletters.]

December 14, 2006, New York Times

Carter View Of Israeli' Apartheid' Stirs Furor

By JULIE BOSMAN

On Tuesday night in Phoenix, after signings and interviews to promote his new book, ''Palestine Peace Not Apartheid,'' President Jimmy Carter made a hastily arranged visit: an hourlong gathering with a group of rabbis.

''We ended up holding hands and circled in prayer,'' Mr. Carter said in a telephone interview from Phoenix, adding that the rabbis requested the meeting to discuss his book.

It was an unusual interruption during an unusually controversial book tour, which began with a few faint complaints last month and has escalated to a full-scale furor, with Mr. Carter being trailed by protesters at book signings, criticized on newspaper op-ed pages and, on the normally sedate ''Book TV'' program on C-Span2, being called a racist and an anti-Semite by an indignant caller.

Such backlash is triggered by Mr. Carter's assertions that pro-Israel lobbyists have stifled debate in the United States over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; that Israelis are guilty of human rights abuses in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories; and that the editorial pages of American newspapers rarely present anything but a pro-Israel viewpoint.

But the bulk of outrage has come from his use of the word apartheid in the title, apparently equating the plight of today's Palestinians to the former victims of government-mandated racial separation in South Africa.

Jewish groups have responded angrily, saying that Mr. Carter's claims are dangerous and anti-Semitic. But Mr. Carter is steadfastly defending the book, saying he believes there is a valid comparison between Israelis and the white South Africans who oppressed blacks.

''It was obviously going to be somewhat provocative,'' Mr. Carter said of the title. ''I could have said 'A New Path to Peace' or something like that.''

But Mr. Carter said he felt apartheid was the most pertinent word he could use, and in retrospect he would not change any of the book's content.

His book details his version of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, beginning with the 19th century. He concludes that Israel is now following a ''system of apartheid,'' in which Israelis are dominant and Palestinians are deprived of basic human rights.

The book was published Nov. 14 by Simon & Schuster. It is at No. 7 on The New York Times's best-seller list, and has sold more than 68,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, which measures 60 to 70 percent of a book's sales.

In the interview Mr. Carter defined apartheid as the ''forced separation of two peoples in the same territory with one of the groups dominating or controlling the other.'' Under that definition, he said, the United States practiced a form of apartheid during its ''separate but equal'' years of segregation.

Opposition to the book has appeared widely on newspaper editorial pages, including in The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In an essay titled ''It's Not Apartheid,'' Michael Kinsley lambasted the book in The Washington Post on Tuesday. ''It's not clear what he means by using the loaded word 'apartheid,' since the book makes no attempt to explain it, but the only reasonable interpretation is that Carter is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa,'' Mr. Kinsley wrote.

In The Jerusalem Post, David A. Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, called the book ''outlandishly titled.''

Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said: ''The title is to de-legitimize Israel, because if Israel is like South Africa, it doesn't really deserve to be a democratic state. He's provoking, he's outrageous, and he's bigoted.''

This week the Anti-Defamation League began running ads criticizing Mr. Carter in major newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Mr. Carter has also fought off charges that he misappropriated material in a book by Dennis Ross, a former envoy to the Middle East who is now a foreign affairs analyst for Fox News.

And Kenneth W. Stein, an adviser to Mr. Carter, resigned last week from the Carter Center after calling the book ''replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments.''

Mr. Carter contradicted those claims, saying he had never read Mr. Ross's book ''The Missing Peace.'' ''I wrote every word myself,'' he said. ''I didn't plagiarize anything.''

Mr. Carter has a longstanding interest in the Middle East conflict. When he won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the prize committee cited his role in the 1978 Camp David accord between Israel and Egypt.

Mr. Carter wrote in an essay in The Los Angeles Times on Friday that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's lobbying efforts have produced a reluctance to criticize the politics of the Israeli government. The editorial boards of major American newspapers and magazines, he continued, have exercised self-restraint on the subject of Israel and the Palestinians.

A vocal pro-Palestinian viewpoint, he said, is ''nonexistent in this country to any detectable degree.''

Which is the claim that Mr. Foxman said he found most offensive. ''The reason he gives for why he wrote this book is this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media,'' he said. ''What makes this serious is that he's not just another pundit, and he's not just another analyst. He is a former president of the United States.''




A president remembers

The Carter version

Dec 13th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid By Jimmy Carter Simon & Schuster; 264 pages; $27. To be published in Britain by Simon & Schuster in February Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

JIMMY CARTER won a Nobel peace prize for bringing peace between Israel and Egypt at Camp David in 1978. Since then he has devoted his career to good causes, mainly through the Carter Centre, which helps to monitor elections and resolve conflicts around the world. Now he has stepped forthrightly back into the Middle East with a book promising to address “many sensitive political issues many American officials avoid”.

How daring. The book has certainly prompted a reaction. A former director of the Carter Centre resigned as one of the centre's fellows in protest at its inaccuracies. Harvard's Alan Dershowitz called the book so biased against the Jewish state as to be “indecent”. A luminary from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy was “saddened” by all the former president's historical errors.

Since some of these critics are what some would call the usual (pro-Israeli) suspects, pro-Palestinian readers may hope that Mr Carter takes on the fabled power of America's Jewish lobby. He does describe the misery of the occupied lands, calls for Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders and offers a few risqué paragraphs about a White House and Congress which the former president says have been “submissive” in the face of Israel's expansionism.

This may pass as daring in America. But tweaking the pro-Israel lobby is not the same thing as writing a good book. And this is a weak one, simplistic and one-sided as charged. Israeli expansionism gets the drubbing it deserves; Arab rejectionism gets off much too lightly.

Why? Perhaps because Mr Carter was had at Camp David. Egypt and Israel made the peace they craved by offering the Palestinians not much more than autonomy—and future talks. As Mr Carter now ruefully admits, Israel's Menachem Begin saw peace with Egypt as the main prize and intended to “finesse or deliberately violate” the undertaking to the Palestinians. What the former president does not dwell on enough is the extent to which the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and indeed most of the Arab world apart from Egypt, made Begin's job easy. They rejected the Camp David accords, and not until 1988—a full decade after Camp David—did Yasser Arafat grudgingly accept Israel's right to exist. By then it was a different Israel.

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
By Jimmy Carter.
Simon & Schuster; 264 pages; $27. To be published in Britain by Simon & Schuster in February