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Following his #1 New York Times bestseller Our Endangered Values, the former president, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, offers an assessment of what must be done to bring permanent peace to Israel with dignity and justice to Palestine.
President Carter, who was able to negotiate peace between Israel and Egypt, has remained deeply involved in Middle East affairs since leaving the White House. He has stayed in touch with the major players from all sides in the conflict and has made numerous trips to the Holy Land, most recently as an observer in the Palestinian elections of 2005 and 2006.
In this book President Carter shares his intimate knowledge of the history of the Middle East and his personal experiences with the principal actors, and he addresses sensitive political issues many American officials avoid. Pulling no punches, Carter prescribes steps that must be taken for the two states to share the Holy Land without a system of apartheid or the constant fear of terrorism.
The general parameters of a long-term, two-state agreement are well known, the president writes. There will be no substantive and permanent peace for any peoples in this troubled region as long as Israel is violating key U.N. resolutions, official American policy, and the international road map for peace by occupying Arab lands and oppressing the Palestinians. Except for mutually agreeable negotiated modifications, Israel's official pre-1967 borders must be honored. As were all previous administrations since the founding of Israel, U.S. government leaders must be in the forefront of achieving this long-delayed goal of a just agreement that both sides can honor.
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid is a challenging, provocative, and courageous book.
Review:
"The term 'good-faith' is almost inappropriate when applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a bloody struggle interrupted every so often by negotiations that turn out to be anything but honest. Nonetheless, thirty years after his first trip to the Mideast, former President Jimmy Carter still has hope for a peaceful, comprehensive solution to the region's troubles, delivering this informed and readable chronicle as an offering to the cause. An engineer of the 1978 Camp David Accords and 2002 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Carter would seem to be a perfect emissary in the Middle East, an impartial and uniting diplomatic force in a fractured land. Not entirely so. Throughout his work, Carter assigns ultimate blame to Israel, arguing that the country's leadership has routinely undermined the peace process through its obstinate, aggressive and illegal occupation of territories seized in 1967. He's decidedly less critical of Arab leaders, accepting their concern for the Palestinian cause at face value, and including their anti-Israel rhetoric as a matter of course, without much in the way of counter-argument. Carter's book provides a fine overview for those unfamiliar with the history of the conflict and lays out an internationally accepted blueprint for peace." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"Jimmy Carter tells a strange and revealing story near the beginning of his latest book, the sensationally titled 'Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.' It is a story that suggests that the former president's hostility to Israel is, to borrow a term, faith-based. On his first visit to the Jewish state in the early 1970s, Carter, who was then still the governor of Georgia, met with Prime Minister... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Golda Meir, who asked Carter to share his observations about his visit. Such a mistake she never made. 'With some hesitation,' Carter writes, 'I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government.' Jews, in my experience, tend to become peevish when Christians, their traditional persecutors, lecture them on morality, and Carter reports that Meir was taken aback by his 'temerity.' He is, of course, paying himself a compliment. Temerity is mandatory when you are doing God's work, and Carter makes it clear in this polemical book that, in excoriating Israel for its sins — and he blames Israel almost entirely for perpetuating the hundred-year war between Arab and Jew — he is on a mission from God. Carter's interest in the Middle East is longstanding, of course; he brokered the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1979, and he has been rightly praised for doing so. But other aspects of his record are more bothersome. Carter, not unlike God, has long been disproportionately interested in the sins of the Chosen People. He is famously a partisan of the Palestinians, and in recent months he has offered a notably benign view of Hamas, the Islamist terrorist organization that took power in the Palestinian territories after winning a January round of parliamentary elections. There are differences, however, between Carter's understanding of Jewish sin and God's. God, according to the Jewish Bible, tends to forgive the Jews their sins. And God, unlike Carter, does not manufacture sins to hang around the necks of Jews when no sins have actually been committed. This is a cynical book, its cynicism embedded in its bait-and-switch title. Much of the book consists of an argument against the barrier that Israel is building to separate Israelis from the Palestinians on the West Bank. The 'imprisonment wall' is an early symptom of Israel's descent into apartheid, according to Carter. But late in the book, he concedes that, 'The driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa — not racism, but the acquisition of land.' In other words, Carter's title notwithstanding, Israel is not actually an apartheid state. True, some Israeli leaders have used the security fence as cover for a land-grab, but Carter does not acknowledge the actual raison d'etre for the fence: to prevent the murder of Jews. The security barrier is a desperate, deeply imperfect and God-willing-temporary attempt to stop Palestinian suicide bombers from detonating themselves amid crowds of Israeli civilians. And it works; many recent attempts to infiltrate bombers into Israel have failed, thanks to the barrier. The murder of Israelis, however, plays little role in Carter's understanding of the conflict. He writes of one Hamas bombing campaign: 'Unfortunately for the peace process, Palestinian terrorists carried out two lethal suicide bombings in March 1996.' That spree of bombings — four, actually — was unfortunate for the peace process, to be sure. It was also unfortunate for the several dozen civilians killed in these attacks. But Israeli deaths seem to be an abstraction for Carter; only the peace process is real, and the peace process would succeed, he claims, if not for Israeli intransigence. Here is Carter's anti-historical understanding of the conflict. He writes: 'There are two interrelated obstacles to permanent peace in the Middle East: '1. 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 '2. Some Palestinians react by honoring suicide bombers as martyrs to be rewarded in heaven and consider the killing of Israelis as victories.' In other words, Palestinian violence is simply an understandable reaction to the building of Israeli settlements. The settlement movement has been a tragedy, of course. Settlements, and the expansionist ideology they represent, have done great damage to the Zionist dream of a Jewish and democratic state; many Palestinians, and many Israelis, have died on the altar of settlement. The good news is that the people of Israel have fallen out of love with the settlers, who themselves now know that they have no future. After all, when Ariel Sharon abandoned the settlement dream — as the former prime minister did when he forcibly removed about 8,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip during Israel's unilateral pullout in July 2005 — even the most myopic among the settlement movement's leaders came to understand that the end is near. Carter does not recognize the fact that Israel, tired of the burdens of occupation, also dearly wants to give up the bulk of its West Bank settlements (the current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was elected on exactly this platform) because to do so would fatally undermine the thesis of his book. 'Palestine Peace Not Apartheid' is being marketed as a work of history, but an honest book would, when assessing the reasons why the conflict festers, blame not only the settlements but also take substantial note of the fact that the Arabs who surround Israel have launched numerous wars against it, all meant to snuff it out of existence. Why is Carter so hard on Israeli settlements and so easy on Arab aggression and Palestinian terror? Because a specific agenda appears to be at work here. Carter seems to mean for this book to convince American evangelicals to reconsider their support for Israel. Evangelical Christians have become bedrock supporters of Israel lately, and Carter marshals many arguments, most of them specious, to scare them out of their position. Hence the Golda Meir story, meant to show that Israel is not the God-fearing nation that religious Christians believe it to be. And then there are the accusations, unsupported by actual evidence, that Israel persecutes its Christian citizens. On his fateful first visit to Israel, Carter takes a tour of the Galilee and writes, 'It was especially interesting to visit with some of the few surviving Samaritans, who complained to us that their holy sites and culture were not being respected by Israeli authorities — the same complaint heard by Jesus and his disciples almost two thousand years earlier.' There are, of course, no references to 'Israeli authorities' in the Christian Bible. Only a man who sees Israel as a lineal descendant of the Pharisees could write such a sentence. But then again, the security fence itself is a crime against Christianity, according to Carter; it 'ravages many places along its devious route that are important to Christians.' He goes on, 'In addition to enclosing Bethlehem in one of its most notable intrusions, an especially heartbreaking division is on the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, a favorite place for Jesus and his disciples.' One gets the impression that Carter believes that Israelis — in their deviousness — somehow mean to keep Jesus from fulfilling the demands of His ministry. There is another approach to Arab-Israeli peacemaking, of course — one perfected by another Southern Baptist who became a Democratic president. Bill Clinton's Middle East achievements are enormous, especially when considering the particular difficulties posed by his primary Arab interlocutor. Jimmy Carter was blessed with Anwar Sadat as a partner for peace; Bill Clinton was cursed with Yasser Arafat. In his one-sided explication of the 1990s peace process, Carter systematically downplays Clinton's efforts to bring a conclusion to the conflict, with a secure Israel and an independent Palestine living side by side, and repeatedly defends the indefensible Arafat. Carter doesn't dare include Clinton's own recollections of his efforts at the abortive Camp David summit in 2000 because to do so would be to acknowledge that the then-Israeli prime minister, the flawed but courageous Ehud Barak, did, in fact, try to bring about a lasting peace — and that Arafat balked. In a short chapter on the Clinton years, Carter blames the Israelis for the failures at Camp David. But I put more stock in the views of the president who was there than in those of the president who wasn't. 'On the ninth day, I gave Arafat my best shot again,' Clinton writes in 'My Life.' 'Again he said no. Israel had gone much further than he had, and he wouldn't even embrace their moves as the basis for future negotiations.' Clinton applied himself heroically over the next six months to extract even better offers from Israel, all of which Arafat wouldn't accept. 'I still didn't believe Arafat would make such a colossal mistake,' Clinton remembers, with regret. According to Carter, however, Arafat made no mistakes. The failure was Israel's — and by extension, Clinton's. Carter succeeded at his Camp David summit in 1978, while Clinton failed at his in 2000. But Clinton's achievement was in some ways greater because he did something no American president has done before (or since): He won the trust of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. He could do this because he seemed to believe that neither side was wholly villainous nor wholly innocent. He saw the Israeli-Palestinian crisis for what it is: a tragic collision between right and right, a story of two peoples who both deserved his sympathy. In other words, he took the Christian approach to making peace. Jeffrey Goldberg is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of 'Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide.'" Reviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Review:
"The former president's ideas are expressed with perfect clarity; his book, of course, represents a personal point of view, but one that is certainly grounded in both knowledge and wisdom." Booklist
Synopsis:
Following his #1 New York Times bestseller Our Endangered Values, the former president and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize offers a courageous assessment of what must be done to bring permanent peace to Israel with dignity and justice to Palestine.
Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia, and served as thirty-ninth President of the United States. He and his wife, Rosalynn, founded The Carter Center, a nonprofit organization that prevents and resolves conflicts, enhances freedom and democracy, and improves health around the world. He is the author of numerous books, including An Hour Before Daylight, called "an American classic," and the #1 New York Times bestseller Our Endangered Values.
Peter Miller, February 7, 2007 (view all comments by Peter Miller)
President Jimmy Carter has done a great service to this country in blowing open the taboo against talking about Israel's Apartheid system in the occupied territories. It is sad to see such a humane and earnest and hardworking peacemaker be so maligned by his critics.
How easily supporters of Israel forget that Carter was the American president that successfully forged peace between Egypt and Israel by having Israel return the land it stole from Egypt in 1967. He was the only American president to forge such an important and long lasting peace treaty for Israel. Israel will have to give back the rest of the lands it took in 1967 (from Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians) in exchange for peace with its neighbors. Most reasonable people, including Israelis, will acknowledge this.
Unfortunately, Israel continues to colonize the West Bank and Golan Heights and keeps the residents of Gaza on a starvation diet. The international community considers all of Israel's settlements past the pre-1967 border (the green line) as illegal colonies and serious war crimes, but even under Israel's own internal laws, it was recently revealed, 40% of these exclusive, Jewish-only settlements are built illegally on land stolen from Palestinian civilians. As the chance for a viable Palestinian state slips away because of Israel's walls, fences, Jewish only colonies and Jewish only roads, the chance for Israel to find the security it desires also wanes.
It is understandable why Carter limited his focus and his criticism to Israel's Apartheid colonization of the West Bank. After all, he knew full well the fire storm that would ensue from even that limited, if critical, analysis of Israel's policies. However, his book only covers part of the story. First, there really is a strong racist component that is found amongst the zealous Israel firsters (both Jewish and Christian) which Carter seems to deny or gloss over. Second, the Palestinian citizens of Israel are denied important rights and are treated third class citizens. Their position within Israel is tenuous as they are viewed as potential enemies of the state by Israel's right wing and calls for their ethnic cleansing from Israel are often heard, even by important figures within the government, most recently Avigdor Lieberman, the Deputy-Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs.
All in all, President Carter has written a landmark book: buy one and give it to one of your local, State, or Federal representatives: they need to learn the other side of the story.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (22 of 37 readers found this comment helpful)
peaceNpalestine, January 28, 2007 (view all comments by peaceNpalestine)
The immense criticism of this book compelled me to read it. What could this peaceful ex-president have written to trigger all this: charges of antisemitism, wholesale resignations from the Carter Center Board, charges of accepting money from terrorist organizations, even protests over the factual nature of the work. The bloggers and editorials seemed to protest far too much.
Indeed, the clamor seems to be aimed at closing any discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As if it is in our best interest to maintain the current status quo- apartheid perpetuated by the US's "closest ally"?!!!
No side in this conflict can claim the moral high ground and the violence can no longer be traced back to it's beginnings so that one party can rightfully demand the other party to submit first. Carter correctly maintains that many agreements and resolutions exist to guide the reconciliation and the US needs to play an even handed role in the conflict.
Start by equalizing the aid we give to the Israelis and Palestinians. Oh sure, that will happen. Just an open discussion of the financial support we provide to the region would raise some eyebrows, don't you think? We in the US cannot ignore the violations of 242 and it is immoral for us to stand by and watch walls being built and checkpoints used as weapons.
Peace not Apartheid is a compelling book. Not as well written or powerful as it could have been, but a good starting point for discussion- if it is "allowed"
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (22 of 37 readers found this comment helpful)
sanders_d2, December 20, 2006 (view all comments by sanders_d2)
Scott Rose please get your facts in order, your comment of "It should also be noted that when Israel was attacked by its neighbors in 1967"
History states that it was Israel who launced a preemptive attack on Egypt,Syria,Iraq & Jordan. Not the otherway around, nice try!
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (32 of 53 readers found this comment helpful)
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
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Jimmy Carter
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Product details
288 pages
Simon & Schuster -
English9780743285025
Reviews:
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"The term 'good-faith' is almost inappropriate when applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a bloody struggle interrupted every so often by negotiations that turn out to be anything but honest. Nonetheless, thirty years after his first trip to the Mideast, former President Jimmy Carter still has hope for a peaceful, comprehensive solution to the region's troubles, delivering this informed and readable chronicle as an offering to the cause. An engineer of the 1978 Camp David Accords and 2002 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Carter would seem to be a perfect emissary in the Middle East, an impartial and uniting diplomatic force in a fractured land. Not entirely so. Throughout his work, Carter assigns ultimate blame to Israel, arguing that the country's leadership has routinely undermined the peace process through its obstinate, aggressive and illegal occupation of territories seized in 1967. He's decidedly less critical of Arab leaders, accepting their concern for the Palestinian cause at face value, and including their anti-Israel rhetoric as a matter of course, without much in the way of counter-argument. Carter's book provides a fine overview for those unfamiliar with the history of the conflict and lays out an internationally accepted blueprint for peace." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Review"
by Booklist,
"The former president's ideas are expressed with perfect clarity; his book, of course, represents a personal point of view, but one that is certainly grounded in both knowledge and wisdom."
"Synopsis"
by Ingram,
Following his #1 New York Times bestseller Our Endangered Values, the former president and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize offers a courageous assessment of what must be done to bring permanent peace to Israel with dignity and justice to Palestine.
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