Get Carter

Gstaad

A London friend has sent me a book whose subject caused a few faint complaints in the beginning but has now escalated to a full-scale furore, Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Racist and anti-Semitic have been the operative words used by outraged pundits to describe it, while people such as the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and the director of the Anti-Defamation League Abe Foxman have gone overboard in calling the 39th President of the good old USA not only an anti-Semite but a Christian madman and a pawn of the Arabs.

Let’s take it from the top. Jimmy Carter has dedicated his life to humanitarian causes and is as anti-Semitic as David Ben-Gurion. He was a weak president but always a man of integrity. His book clearly states that the blame for obstacles to a just peace is shared by Israelis, Palestinian and American leaders. He also states that the Israelis are attempting to gain land illegally in the occupied territories, just as some leaders advocate violence and are refusing to accept Israel’s right to exist. So far so good.

What has caused this furious backlash is that Carter also points out that the pro-Israeli lobby in Washington has stifled debate, and that the Israelis are guilty of human rights abuses in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. Talk about shooting the messenger. Is there anyone except the usual suspects who can deny that the editorial pages of American newspapers rarely present anything but pro-Israeli viewpoints? Carter could have used another title, as he himself acknowledges, but he stuck to the ‘apartheid’ word in order to make a point. The apartheid followed by Israel at present, in which Israelis are dominant and Palestinians are deprived of basic human rights, is a milder version of the one used by white South Africans who oppressed blacks.