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Carter Breaks It Down and Says It Like It Is

By M. Kay Siblani
The Arab American News
Posted on Tuesday December 5, 2006

Don’t expect to find a detailed historical analysis of Zionism and why he supports it in former President Jimmy Carter’s latest book, “Israel: Peace Not Apartheid.” Carter proceeds from the premise that Zionism is legitimate. That’s enough right there to prevent many from investigating his argument. But neither is the deeply religious, Christian, former president a wild-eyed evangelical praying for Armageddon to rapture believers into the sky.

Instead, Carter takes the situation at hand, some of it enshrined in international law and some of it beyond the pale of human decency, and puts forth what he believes can bring a resolution to the Arab Israeli conflict in the violent, unsettled here and now.

Carter essentially blames Israel and the United States – or more correctly, President George Bush – for the lack of progress in peace negotiations over the past six years. Again, some will have to swallow hard and ignore the fact that Carter believes progress was made before that. There are those who believe otherwise, who believe that all negotiations conducted thus far, going all the way back to Camp David in 1978, have only benefitted the Israelis and delayed and detracted from anything positive for the Palestinians.

But Carter points proudly to his sheparding of the now-assassinated Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat and the now-assassinated Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin through the original Camp David Accords and the subsequent Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai. He cites the success of the signing of the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt as proof that it can, indeed, be done again. In the next breath, he admits that Israel did not keep its part of the bargain, that little thing about withdrawing from territories occupied during war.

While singling Israel and the U.S. out for their culpability in the current mess, Carter denies taking sides in this conflict. Over and over in the book and in interviews promoting the book, Carter says that the the majority of Arabs and Israelis want peace between them and that is the reason he believes peace can be had. “In times of greatest discouragement, ultimate hope has rested on the fact that, overwhelmingly, the people in the region – even those Syrians, Israelis, Lebanese and Palestinians who are most distrusted by their adversaries – want the peace efforts to succeed” (p. 13). It is this majority Carter is siding with.

Carter first gives a simplistic (and sometimes erroneous) review of the history of the region in ten pages of double-spaced, highly indented, 12 font type. You skip from 1900 B.C. to month before last in ten minutes. While this would be a fault in some circumstances, Carter’s mission with this book is to present the situation as something anyone could get their mind around. One thing Israel-firsters have always relied on is that most Americans think the situation is so complex they give up on it before trying even to understand it, to say nothing of lobbying their representatives in government to stand up and demand fairness for the Palestinians. The Israel lobby has made the subject so taboo in mainstream circles – something Carter assails in the media interviews he’s giving – that those of us interested in peace with justice are often guilty of overcompensating and doing the same thing. I once spent half an hour explaining the Mideast crisis to my hapless father who, upon my stopping to take a breath said: “Now the Palestinians are the Arabs, right?” I applaud Carter for making the whole thing accessible to the uninitiated.

Carter follows the historical chronology with brief and easily read chapters on his personal introduction to Israel as Governor of Georgia, his years in the White House and Camp David, the key players in the region, his personal experiences with Palestinians and the conflict under Presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Carter spends some time on the Oslo agreements, acknowledging with documentation from Prime Minister Rabin that Israel achieved much more in the negotiations than did the Palestinians. “We ourselves obtained this concession from the Palestinians – from those with whom one should make such deals – without any American promises as in the Camp David agreements. Jewish settlements will be placed under an exclusive Israeli jurisdiction; the (Palestinian) Autonomy Council will have no authority over them. The forces of the Israeli army will be redeployed in locations determined only by us, unlike the Camp David agreements which mandated a withdrawal of the Israeli army forces. In the agreement we reached we didn’t consent to use the formula “withdrawal of Israeli army forces” except when it applied to the Gaza Strip. In application to all other places the only term used is “redeployment.” I prefer that the Palestinians cope with the problem of enforcing order in Gaza. The Palestinians will be better at it because they will allow no appeals to the Supreme Court and will prevent the (Israeli) Association for Civil Rights from criticizing the conditions there by denying it access to the area. They will rule there by their own methods, freeing – and this is most important – the Israeli army soldiers from having to do what they will do” (p 136-137).

Following Oslo, the 1995 assassination of Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish Israeli terrorist, and the 1996 Palestinian elections which gave Yasser Arafat and Fatah a mandate for leadership in the peace process, Carter seems to finally become disenchanted with the Israelis. “Even after the Labor Party’s Ehud Barak was elected as prime minister in May 1999, there was a sustained commitment by Israel’s government to avoid full compliance with the Oslo Agreement or with key U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, while Palestinians were reluctant to abandon any of them as the basis for permanent peace.” (p 149)

The Arab peace initiative led by Saudi Arabia in 2002 is highlighted to show that indeed the Arabs have recognized Israel’s right to exist. It is Israel which refuses to move ahead.

Carter then assails Israel’s holding of 9,000 Arab prisoners, the illegal Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories and the separation barrier Israel is building as illegal, immoral and the real reason peace has not been obtained. He is explicit and unforgiving as he describes why.

When summarizing, Carter puts the first onus for the lack of peace on the Israelis: “Some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinians; and (S)ome Palestinians react (italics mine) by honoring suicide bombers as martyrs to be rewarded in heaven and consider the killing of Israelis as victories.”

Maps and appendices cover relevant themes.

Carter’s book is a first. First of its genre to be written by such a high level former official, first to unashamedly use the name Palestine, first by a mainstream author to call Israel’s current control of Arab land and people by the name it deserves: apartheid.

Arab Americans and those desiring peace with justice in the Middle East will love this book. It grinds the complex situation down to digestible size for use in educating others. But most importantly, the book and the author have paved the way for discussion and debate of the Middle East conflict in realistic terms on a national level.