Mr. Carter's Unfortunate Book

"Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid"

Incongruous as it may seem, former President Jimmy Carter had a book autographing event this week at the Costco in Glenview.  I would be inclined to this of this spectacle of the former President sitting among piles of cheap jeans and huge shrink packs of toilet paper as humorous were it not for the very serious and difficult problems that are raised by the book itself. The title of President Carter’s latest book is “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” And, as one reviewer put it: “Sometimes it is possible to tell a book by its cover.” Mr. Carter’s book is one-sided and heavily biased against the State of Israel, for reasons that I find difficult to understand.

This is really very unfortunate. Although, by most accounts, Mr. Carter’s presidency was a failed enterprise, he may well be the most successful former president in American history. His many humanitarian efforts, his willingness to forgo the riches of lucrative speaking engagements and to engage in peace making around the world have earned him almost universal admiration, myself included. He has managed to put his person convictions into action over and over again, though the Carter Center which he established, and by his frequent missions around the world.

Mr. Carter is a man of peace. Of that, there can be no dispute. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize, it was much more than a recognition of his successful efforts that brought Egypt and Israel together at Camp David, and resulted in a peace treaty between the two countries. The Nobel Prize in fact turned out to be a prognostication or perhaps an impetus for things yet to come. Only the most die-hard of cynics could fail to admire President Jimmy Carter for all that he has personally done to better the human condition. I can only wish him long life and continued success at what has become his life’s work.

But that is why I am so gravely disappointed that he has chosen to write such an unfair and stinging condemnation of the State of Israel, disguised as a wise and rational approach to peace making. That is not to say that this book is totally false, only that it is deeply flawed and, I must say, prejudiced, and that makes me very sad indeed, and yes, angry too.

Let me digress for a few minutes. As many of you know, before coming to Sinai, I served for a year as rabbi of a congregation in Durban, South Africa. I resided there in 1994, the year when Nelson Mandela was elected president, and multi-racial democracy became a reality. Nevertheless, there was still much evidence of the apartheid era, and I learned first hand the meaning of those appalling laws. Apartheid was a far more brutal form of racism that most people can even imagine. It entailed the total subjugation of 90% of the population by the 10% who were white. It not only deprived black people of basic human rights and economic opportunities; it actually deprived them of their essential humanity. Without going into the sordid and disgusting details, I would put it this way: In the United States, during the dark years of racial segregation, white people in general tended to think of African Americans as inferior people. In South Africa, I believe that whites actually regarded African people as a different and inferior species, sub-human, if you will. Apartheid was just about the most brutal and cruel political systems ever devised, absolutely akin of Nazism only minus genocide.

I am referring to this because President Carter’s use of the term apartheid in the title of his book is loaded and grossly unfair. No one, not even the most right-wing Israelis would deny that Arabs living both in Israel proper and in the occupied territories suffer from their inferior status, but to equate their situation with South African apartheid is just not right.

I would go one step farther: President Carter’s decision to title his new book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” tells it all. His absolutely intentional use of that particular word in the title of the book is a clear indication of where he is coming from.. And it is especially outrageous because he fully realizes just how incorrect the comparison is. Buried near the end of his book, almost as an after-thought is his quiet and almost invisible acknowledgement that what is going on in Israel today [to quote] “is unlike that in South Africa—not racism, but the acquisition of land.” So, if he knows this, why does he make the comparison at all?

The relentless menace of Palestinian terrorism is virtually missing from Carter’s entire historical account, which blames nearly everything on Israel and almost nothing on the Palestinians. And that is really what this book is all about: blaming the Israelis for almost everything and giving the Palestinians a virtual free pass.

There is no mention of the long history of Palestinian terrorism that began long before the current occupation, or of the Munich massacre and others inspired by Arafat.  There is not even a reference to the Karine A, the boatful of terrorist weapons ordered by Arafat in January 2002, from Iran incidentally.

President Carter’s book is simply filled with mistakes of fact and deliberate omissions. And let’s be candid. Mr. Carter is no amateur, nor is he ignorant of the facts. He knew exactly what he was including and what he was excluding as he wrote this book.

Professor Alan Dershowitz has written a thorough critique of Carter’s book. Notwithstanding Dershowitz’s well-deserved reputation for hyperbole and his sometimes over-zealous endorsement of anything and everything Israeli, his detailed criticism is worth noting and I will now draw extensively from his observations:

Mr. Carter emphasizes that “Christian and Muslim Arabs had continued to live in this same land since Roman times,” but he ignores the fact that Jews have lived in Hebron, Safed, Jerusalem, and other cities for even longer.  Nor does he even bother to mention the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries since 1948.

He repeatedly claims that the Palestinians have long supported a two-state solution and the Israelis have always opposed it. Yet he barely mentions Israel’s acceptance, and the Palestinian rejection, of the U.N.’s division of the mandate in 1948, which could have resolved the entire conflict nearly 60 years ago. 

He claims that in 1967 Israel launched a preemptive attack against Jordan. The fact is that Jordan attacked Israel first, Israel tried desperately to persuade Jordan to remain out of the war, and Israel counterattacked only after the Jordanian army surrounded Jerusalem, firing missiles into the center of the city.  Only then did Israel capture the West Bank, which it was willing to return in exchange for peace and recognition from Jordan.

Mr. Carter repeatedly mentions Security Council Resolution 242, which called for return of captured territories in exchange for peace, recognition and secure boundaries, but he ignores the fact that Israel accepted and all the Arab nations and the Palestinians rejected this resolution. The Arabs met in Khartum and issued their three famous “no’s”: “No peace, no recognition, no negotiation” but you wouldn’t know that from reading the history according to Jimmy Carter.

President Carter faults Israel for its “air strike that destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor” without mentioning that Iraq had threatened to attack Israel with nuclear weapons if they succeeded in building a bomb.

Carter faults Israel for its administration of Christian and Muslim religious sites, when in fact Israel is scrupulous about ensuring every religion the right to worship as they please—consistent, of course, with Israel’s security needs.  He fails to mention that between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Jordanians destroyed and desecrated Jewish religious sites and even prevented Jews from praying at the Western Wall.

 

Carter blames Israel, and exonerates Arafat, for the Palestinian refusal to accept statehood on 95% of the West Bank and all of Gaza pursuant to the Clinton-Barak offers of Camp David and Taba in 2000-2001. And in so doing, he rejects the eye-witness accounts of both President Clinton and Ambassador Dennis Ross and ignores Saudi Prince Bandar’s accusation that Arafat’s rejection of the proposal was “a crime” and that Arafat’s account of what happened at Camp David “was not truthful”—except, apparently, to Carter. The fact that Carter chooses to believe Yassir Arafat over President Bill Clinton speaks volumes.

Carter’s description of the recent Lebanon war also is misleading. He begins by saying that Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers.  The soldiers were not captured; they were kidnapped, and have not been heard from—not even so much as a sign of life. The rocket attacks that preceded Israel’s invasion are largely ignored by Mr. Carter, as is the fact that Hezbollah fired its rockets from civilian population centers.

In writing about Israel’s purported injustice towards accused Palestinians, he gives virtually no credit to Israel’s eminently fair legal system, falsely claiming (without any facts to back his accusation) that “confessions extracted through torture are admissible in Israeli courts,” that prisoners are “executed” and that the “accusers” act “as judges.”  Even Israel’s most severe critics acknowledge the fairness of the Israeli Supreme Court, but not Carter.

Finally, as Professor Dershowitz observes: “it’s not just the facts; it’s the tone as well.  It’s obvious that Carter just doesn’t like Israel or Israelis. He admits that he did not like Menachem Begin. He has little good to say about any Israelis—except those few who agree with him. But he apparently got along swimmingly with the Syrian mass-murderer Hafez al-Assad. Mr. Carter and his wife Rosalynn also had a lovely time with Yassir Arafat—a man who has the blood of hundreds of Americans and Israelis on his hands:

This book is so biased that I can only wonder what would motivate a decent man like Jimmy Carter to write such an indecent book. Whatever his motives may be, his authorship of this historically inaccurate, one-sided and simplistic diatribe against Israel disqualifies him from playing any positive role in resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.  That is a tragedy because the Carter Center, which has done much good in the world, could have been a force for peace if Jimmy Carter was only as generous in spirit to the Israelis as he is to the Palestinians.