Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
by Jimmy Carter
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Book Reviews of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
Book Review: President Cartner struck a chord
Summary: 5 Stars
Jimmy Carter struck a chord
All of us suffer from assumptions in our thinking we cannot detect, but whether President Carter's facts are correct and whether his arguments are free of bias, I doubt even he knows for sure. That's not the point. His presentation is clear and his message encouraging. He asks us to engage in a national dialogue. It's long overdue.
Although he doesn't put it this way, I have the sense President Carter believes that we humans fall under some sort of spell or mass sleep (the only logical explanation for the state of human affairs). Since Israel is populated by people, like all nations everywhere, they are no different in that regard. President Carter's book is, in this reader's opinion, as much about human behavior and our generic condition as it is about politics, justice, and the wielding of power.
Honest debate?
Without putting words into a good man's mouth, Americans should wonder why a powerful nuclear-armed nation is routinely positioned as a victim in the U.S. press. We should ask if it's true that Israel bulldozes homes in the middle of the night, fires on kids throwing rocks, engages in abductions and assassinations, builds networks of settlements connected by restricted roads intended to breakup and render useless Palestinian lands. We should ask if Israel really does ignore United Nations resolutions condemning its behavior and why the United State's routinely invokes its veto power to protect Israel from the world's admonitions.
And,
We should question why a small nation of 6.3 million people (less than the population of New York City) wields such incredible power over the largest economy on Earth, and why, despite all arguments to the contrary, virtually all elected and want-to-be elected U.S. officials grant her unconditionally support.
In that regard, citizens should demand to know why our government allows any foreign nation to exert power over our elections, media coverage, and internal decision-making processes, and why our laws allow foreign states to control U.S. based lobbying organizations. We should debate whether Israel's lobby (the largest in the world) is effectively funded by U.S. tax dollars which are then amplified by serving Israel's agenda to affect U.S. actions and policies while ensuring that Israel-borne messaging is kept near the top of editors' topical priorities.
Americans should write their elected representatives, who presumably could enact laws preventing the continual hijacking of the American electorate. We should tell them not to be paralyzed by fear of speaking out even though they may be targeted as holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, or more practically, outspent and out-marketed.
More positively,
Many Americans wonder why a civilized nation of good and truly gifted people cannot find a path to peace by applying the same ingenious minds and leadership skills that accomplished the following:
1) turned a desert into the region's only thriving (and non-oil-based) economy,
2) created the region's only democracy,
3) created the only social infrastructure governed by law and due-process in the region,
4) created the region's only culturally open-minded society (counter-intuitive, but for the majority of Israeli citizens, it's true),...
Obviously, this list is much larger and more impressive.
Many wonder, in admiration, how these community and family-oriented people, surrounded by adversaries wishing and acting for their demise, could with limited resources, manage to accomplish the aforementioned in so short a time (less than 60 years).
For starters, Americans (any everyone else) should ask why we are ridiculously phobic with respect to other people's genes, politics, and religions. If we could get over that, we might be able to honestly consider whether Israel has ever acted as an equal in its long struggle to exist, to be at peace, and to flourish amidst its enemies. If she had been an equal, she would probably be long gone. Perhaps Americans,through honest debate, can ask whether Israel should recognize her superior position and act toward the Palestinians like the leader she is. She should ask if she could harvest the exceptional talent pool she has fostered with the aim of discovering a way to build the bridges that are required, and then lift up the Palestinians to an equal footing. They are just as smart and capable, but need a peaceful generation to secure their chance.
Sometimes the other side is unable to meet halfway. Sometimes it doesn't matter who started a war or how many wrongs and good gestures can be marked on each side.
Perhaps Israel will recognize her role as knowledge agent, infrastructure provider, guide, and benefactor.
Americans should not be afraid to discuss the plight of the Palestinians, who now, seem virtually destroyed, disheartened, and in never-ending anguish. Only Israel can help them by using its considerable strength and imagination to create whatever is needed for positive change. The United States will lend its support (lobby or not) to ensure her great experiment survives despite the odds.
But Americans should debate.
If we do, we can re-become the nation of fair play we once believed in and died for in two world wars.
I think President Carter believes that too. He should be applauded for his insights, forgiven for his errors, and commended for his bravery.
Book Review: Flavors of Ancient Wisdom in Carter's Book
Summary: 5 Stars
Cheers and more cheers for President Carter's Book! At last a respected voice is presenting some of the complexities of the situation which both Palestinians and Jews face. I don't think his book completely honors the possibility that solutions to modern problems may be contained in seeds of wisdom still viably preserved from the ancient past, but it does contain a spirit of willingness to honor all sides.
As a Westerner who plays and performs traditional Arabic music, I have crossed many borders in the Middle East and have a familiarity with life on the streets of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, the West Bank of Palestine, Lebanon and, yes, even Baghdad.
I don't think we Westerners, Jimmy Carter included, can easily appreciate that our efforts to impose order and borders on the Middle East frequently end up doing more harm than good. One must read the cultural and military histories of the last several thousand years to finally understand that for the multi-ethnic indigenous people who live there, a large part of current reality still very much includes the legacy of the relatively recent civilization which stretched from India to Spain one thousand years ago!
That civilization has been considered by many to be one of the world's most enlightened! Semitic people engineered large parts of this civilization and share a way of thinking whether they speak Arabic or Aramaic or Hebrew.
This legacy of civilization still strongly survives in spite of the fact that the Semitic world has been ruled for the last 800 years by foreigners from the north: first the Mongols and Turks and now the Europeans and Americans.
It is not easy, without extensive travel and study, for a Westerner to grasp why the imposition of supposedly "modern states" with military checkpoints and other boundaries cannot work in the Middle East, an ancient world where the natural flow of Bedouin tribes from Yemen to Syria has always been a given fact. Tribal allegiances are made, as we can see now in Iraq, at the instigation of respected sheiks, according to ancient codes of honor.
Allegiance to modern Western-style governments is minimal. The people on the streets of Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to mention a few, will tell you that the "presidents" of their "countries" supported by agreements with the West do not represent their interests. People from these places traditionally identify themselves as being "from" particular tribes, clans and towns in certain regions, but they have no "national" identities.
Although Arab tribes will unite to fight off foreign invasions when possible, they have no tradition of maintaining standing armies outside the tribal framework. Nor do they have a tradition of recognizing borders drawn across the countryside or desert. But they do have an ancient code which honors many basic freedoms for all ethnicities.
Although Carter's book does acknowledge Palestinian efforts at honoring these ancient traditions of compromise, it still does not encourage the only real solution to the Jewish presence in Israel: for the Jews and Palestinians alike to acknowledge and honor their own heritage within a common ancient civilization which does contain strong seeds of egalitarianism.
Right now the Middle East is paying a huge price for the legacy of the arrogance of post-World War I European colonialism and especially for the imposition of national boundaries across ancient tribal lands. These borders were drawn in defiance of ancient ways of being.
Although current political theory doesn't take this into account, today's borders can become tomorrow's prisons and it is only by appealing to the ancient wisdom of the Middle East that each tribe can regain its traditional place so that all can work within a common Semitic framework.
Ancient Semitic wisdom does exist and, since more than 90 percent of today's Semitic tribes speak Arabic and only 2 percent Hebrew, it is strange for leaders, including US presidents, not to emphasize capitalizing on this commonality.
As Carter's book makes clear, governments led by ethnocentric zealots who are not willing to compromise are not deserving of US support. Their leadership will prove disastrous time and time again for the people whom they purport to represent but whose collective wisdom they do not, in fact, represent.
The myth that extremists comprise the majorities in Judaic or Christian or Islamic worlds does the most harm by perpetuating a climate of fear and must be exposed as untrue. Anyone who, as I have, walked the streets of the Arab world, discovers that 90 percent of the population advocates a solution containing compassion for all tribes. But it should be pointed out that this compassion for individuals does not extend to the governments and military machines imposed and supported from outside the region. Ancient Middle Eastern wisdom is about eye-to-eye contact and personal trust. This is hard for Americans to appreciate unless they have experienced its inclusive power.
I sincerely hope that Americans will travel and listen and learn, as Jimmy Carter has done. But this travel and study must be done even more adventuresomely with dialogue open toward people of all social classes. Ancient egalitarian values can be nurtured with the help of wisdom from all three majority Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. After all, as I understand it, the basic mission prescribed by Abraham is to further the egalitarian brother/sisterhood on planet earth so that greater harmony can be achieved.
Book Review: A strange book written by a strange man
Summary: 1 Stars
"Apartheid not Peace" is notable more for its sins of omission than its sins of commission. One of the most notable omissions or "absences" of historical fact occurs in the Historical Chronology with which the book begins: a detailed history that jumps, almost effortlessly, from 1939 and the beginning of World War II to 1947, the year the British decided to grant full sovereignty of a portion of Palestine to the Jews living there, as well as the Jews seeking a safe heaven from their persecutors in Europe, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. With this mandate, the Jews won the argument for self-determination as a soveriegn nation and government possessing full control over its own affairs within the territorial or geographical area or limit provided them.
It would be incorrect to characterize Jimmy Carter's attack on this notion of Isreal's sovereignty as "systematic," since Carter's book is far from systematic. Instead of sustained argument, Carter has strung together an odd array of personal anecdotes, Biblical allusions, tourist trips with Rosalynn, visits to Arab heads of state, interpretations of UN resolutions, international laws, and statistics measuring "world opinion," to undermine the notion of Israel's right to govern itself as a sovereign nation.
Beyond that, what is most suprising and most strange about this book is to observe how Jimmy Carter's opinions on the Middle East are shaped by personal antipathy to Israel's leaders and personal sympathy with the Arab and Palestinian leaders. One needs only to compare Carter's reaction to Golda Meir, whom he chides for not running Israel more like a theocracy as in the days of Kings David and Solomon, and his encounter with Yasir Arafat, whose PLO "mission statement" he commends because of the many times it employs the word "national" (p.63). It almost goes without saying that the PLO's propaganda pamphlet does not use the word, "national," in the same sentence as "Israel."
And, so Israeli leaders are criticized as being bad actors in the peace process due to their interpretation of UN Resolution 242 as a definition of Israel's borders, while Arab leaders are praised for their insistence on beginning all peace negotiations on their interpretation of 242, even though this interpretation has morphed over the years into a mythical "right of return," which it never intended. Thus, the "formula" for Middle East peace, which the dust jacket of Carter's book alludes to, is not a magical formula, which no one else has discovered (except for the prescient Jimmy Carter), but the rather mundane, not to mention cynical, equation of "land for peace." Of course, 30 years has taught us one thing: land has never equated to more peace, instead, land has equated to more "talks," while suicide bombers ply their trade in the pizzerias of Tel Aviv and the buses of Jerusalem.
Carter's crowning achievement was the Camp David accords of the late 1970's. But, Carter is especially tiresome in beating his reader over the head with this achievement. The more he trumpets this meeting between Sadat and Begin as the "key" to all past and future peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, the more one realizes that Carter misunderstands the historical context of Camp David. The primary context being that Anwar Sadat was a giant among Arab leaders, and Israel has not had an equal partner at the negotiation table since. Yasir Arafat's perfidy was obvious during the Camp David talks of the late Clinton years, during which Clinton campaigned for his Peace Prize by offering Arafat everything under the sun, if only he would accept's Israel's offers of land. But, the most amusing anecdote is Carter's somewhat contrived insistence in Chapter 5 that Abdullah II of Jordan, a couple of Saudi princes, and - gasp! - Bashir Assad of Syria could equal the greatness of Sadat and together could form an able representative for the Palestinian cause at the negotiating table. This suggestion is made laughable by Carter's passive-aggressive swipe at the current Bush administration for not seeing the wisdom of a Middle East peace conference that would include the young opthamologist whom he knew personally since he was a university student in the U.S. and whom he believes is an honest man.
The best thing that supporters of Israel should do with this book is not give it undue attention: it is a strange book written by a strange man looking for relevance and struggling with denial about his own impact on history.
Finally, let's look at that impact on history: during 1979, when Carter most complains in this book about the Israelis not carrying out all the Camp David agreements, what, we should ask, was happening in the world?
Sovereign nations around the world were being overrun by foreign aggressors, Islamic revolutionaries, and Marxist dictators thanks to the feckless and "compassionate" foreign policy of the Carter administration: Russia invaded Afaghanistan, the Persian Shah was overthrown (and U.S. diplomats taken hostage), and the Sandinistas took over Nicaragua.
If Begin didn't "see" things Carter's way in 1979, maybe he had good reason to believe that Carter was willing to jettison Israel in favor of the "greater good" of Middle East peace.
Thanks to this book, we know Carter's true opinion of the notion of Israel's right to sovereignty. A peace plan that undermines this sovereignty -- and what's worse, characterizes it as "apartheid" -- would be a recipe for disaster for Israel.
Book Review: A Blow to Oppression,Injustice, and Zionism
Summary: 5 Stars
Jimmy Carter says that Israeli troops should leave the West Bank and he is thereby an Anti-Semite by the standards of the Israeli Webster Dictionary. A person who can say what they think is right, regardless of the publics opinion or the status quo, should be respected. Martin Luther King was called very bad names and was killed in his protest for civil rights. Nelson Mandela was called a communist and a terrorist, and he became a figure of hatred among many South African whites in his struggle against apartheid. Carter is in a different position. He is not black and his people are not the ones oppressed. He is taking the unpopular position of criticizing Israel and its policies and The Jewish Lobby has dispatched an army of people online and in the media to ridicule, humiliate, and slander Carter. I suspect that some of the people who keep commenting on reviews like D__D or Jill Malters are part of that army, but I'm not sure. They have rebuttals for every positive review and it amazes me how dedicated they are. Keep it going guys.
Why are government officials afraid to speak negatively about Israel? Why does every member of Congress always take Israel's side, even when its army intentionally kills Americans as it did in the six day war when it killed 34 U.S. servicemen and wounded at least 173? Even the Stern and Irgun gangs were notorious for bombing buildings and killing British troops and civilians in their fight for statehood. They are called Jewish underground freedom fighters but not terrorists. Even when a Jewish settler in 1994 went into a mosque and murdered 29 Palestinian Muslims and wounded 170, the media and President Clinton called it a terrible tragedy but if a Palestinian would have gone into a synagogue and just punched one Israeli, he would most definitely be called the t word. Can we all agree that the U.S. has been pro-Israel in its stance? Can we all agree that Israel has been given lots of money (more than 80 billion dollars in grants/loans since 1949 which is more aid than to Africa, Asia, and Latin America combined and costs US taxpayers $134,791,507.00). And can we agree that Palestinians do not have the same rights as Israelis and have no real economic opportunities nor do they have the same freedom to just move around the country as Israelis do? Since a Palestinian can never become an Israeli citizen (thanks a lot Zionism) Israel must do 1 of 2 things to solve the problem. It must kill all the 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank with a final solution type of deal, or it must leave the West Bank and take the settlers back to Israel proper.
The true end to the conflict is embodied in UN Resolutions 242 and 338, which was accepted by both sides at the Madrid Summit in 1991 and later in the Oslo Accords of 1993, which cost the life of Yitzhak Rabin for agreeing to those Accords. Carter acknowledges that these talks have failed and brings up the Geneva Initiative which will also fail because of the unwillingness of Israel to dismantle the illegal settlements. It is also worth noting that the Jews that were in Gaza were just moved to the West Bank so it wasn't a real move towards peace. If you want another controversial book that bares it all, read: The Power of Israel in the United States. by James Petras.,The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe.
I leave you with these quotes:
"My position is that the foreign policy of the United States says we do not believe there should be new settlements in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem. President George H.W. Bush, press conference -March 3, 1990
"The Israeli people also must understand. . . the settlement enterprise and building bypass roads in the heart of what they already know will one day be part of a Palestinian state is inconsistent with the Oslo commitment." President Clinton's farewell address to the Middle East -- January 7, 2001
"I am a black South African, and if I were to change the names, a description of what is happening now in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank could easily describe events in South Africa." Archbishop Desmond Tuto, observed during visit to Jerusalem, December 25, 1989. Israeli daily Ha'aretz.
David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel.; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country.
Quoted by Nahum Goldmann (The Jewish Paradox), pp. 121
"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."
Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.
If you have any questions, my email is marvel451@aol.com.
Book Review: Carter's compromised statesmanship
Summary: 1 Stars
By David A. Harris
Whatever else one might have said about the presidency of Jimmy Carter, he was a statesman. As much as any international figure before or since, he took advantage of the opportunity of the day to advance peace between Israel and her neighbors.
Early in his new book President Carter shares his account of the fateful negotiations in 1979. In describing Camp David I and its aftermath, Carter makes clear that he had a warmer relationship with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat than Prime Minister Menachem Begin. For this he can be forgiven.
But it is Carter himself who constantly reminds us in his outlandishly titled book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, of the necessity of being an honest broker in advancing peace. It thus is startling that a former president who prides himself on his ongoing contribution to world peace would write a crude polemic that compromises any pretense to objectivity and fairness.
The book's inflammatory title is a case of false advertising, conjuring up comparisons between Israel and Apartheid South Africa, a comparison Carter never makes. South Africa's policies were racial in nature and deprived black subjects of basic rights in their own country. The only just solution was to give blacks full rights in the same state.
Carter never claims that Israel is engaging in racially-motivated policies and rightly argues for a two-state solution to the conflict. His use of the word "apartheid" is misleading, referring instead to his view that Israel's security fence and the "honeycomb" of settlements and roads behind it constitute a permanent Israeli control regime over Palestinian life. He neglects to mention that Israel's planned re-deployment from the West Bank would effectively remove such controls. That is precisely what happened in Gaza.
Carter leaves out what any reasonable observer, even those that share his basic views of the conflict, would consider obvious facts, but does include stunning distortions. I'll cite just two of the numerous examples of such mendacity.
First, discussing President Bill Clinton's peacemaking efforts, Carter discounts well-established claims that Israel accepted and Arafat rejected a generous offer to create a Palestinian state. "The fact is that no final offer was ever made," Carter asserts. To prove his point, he disingenuously cites a quote of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak that there were "no negotiations" but "non-binding contacts" at the later stage talks in Taba. Barak made this statement in order to cut his political losses during an election, and to preclude the Palestinians from pocketing yet more concessions for future negotiations.
Moreover, anyone who read Clinton's account of the post-Camp David negotiations knows that he offered final "parameters" that substantially sweetened the pot for the Palestinians and met Carter's own stated standards for a fair settlement.
"I brought the Palestinian and Israeli teams into the cabinet room and read them my 'parameters' for negotiations," wrote Clinton. "In December the parties had met at Bolling Airforce Base for talks that didn't succeed because Arafat wouldn't accept the parameters that were hard for him." Carter must have known this history. But he conveniently ignores it in his book, leaving the reader to think that Barak's quote was the final commentary on the matter.
In another manifest distortion, Carter states that Israel plans to build a security fence "along the Jordan River, which is now planned as the eastern leg of the encirclement of the Palestinians."
Once again, any informed observer knows that Israel has modified the projected route of the security fence on numerous occasions (the current route roughly tracks the parameters that Clinton advanced to the parties in negotiations) and that there is no plan to hem the Palestinians in on the eastern border. Again, Carter overlooks these well-known developments, leaving readers to think that a route that was once contemplated in proposed maps but never adopted or acted upon represents current reality.
The extent that Carter goes in propping up an extreme version of the Palestinian narrative, and in burying and devaluing any trace of the Israeli and American versions of events, is deeply disappointing. In accepting the Palestinian narrative, Carter has conveniently revised history, excused the Palestinians for their tragic failure to come to terms with Israel each time the chance presented itself, and blithely ignored Israel's very legitimate security concerns.
Many Israelis, including those that once greatly admired his role in fostering peace with Egypt, may never again trust Carter's diplomacy, including his vaunted role as an election monitor.
He can no longer claim to be an honest broker.
This book will not help the cause of peace, and, with its publication, the world has lost a statesman at a time when one is most needed.