Shutting Up Jimmy Carter


Dateline: Washington D.C.
January 2007


Jimmy Carter’s new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid continues to create ripples in America’s foreign policy establishment, with the announcement January 11th that fourteen member’s of the advisory board of the Carter Center, including a former Carter Ambassador to the Bahamas and the former Carter-Mondale campaign’s national finance chairman, have resigned from the Center because they “could not longer endorse” Carter’s “strident and uncompromising position”.
In the book, former President Carter criticizes Israel’s policies regarding Palestine and its treatment of Palestinians and further criticizes Israel’s supporters in the United States for attempting to stifle media and public debate here on the issue. I wonder what their wish for Carter is in resigning? To stop debate on the book?

The critics go on to say Carter has “abandoned” his “historic role of honest broker and mediator between warring parties.” Carter’s sin, it seems, is he pointed out, firmly and with ample documentation, the sins of one side of the “war”—the repeated and multiple violations of international law and the ignoring of United Nation’s resolutions by the Israeli government through their continued illegal military occupation of the West Bank and their periodic military incursions into Gaza.
Carter goes on as well to mention the multiple violations of the Oslo Agreement that end up squeezing the Palestinian economy through curfews and closures and fences and military checkpoints which create broken up urban sections of Israeli-controlled “settlements” and Palestinian controlled “Bantus” on the West Bank, and which completely disrupt Palestinian life and commerce, especially Israel’s withholding of $55 million dollars each month in tax payments owed to the Palestinian Authority.

The principle taken by critics such as these within the foreign policy establishment has remained consistent—the Palestinians must end all of their quite natural resistance to the illegal military occupation of their land by Israel before any talks will be held on how to solve the problems between the two. And heaven forbid in the meantime that they should freely elect the Party of their choice to conduct those negotiations if that Party’s policies differ from those of Israel and the United States.

The obvious bugaboo here is violence. The Palestinians should stop theirs, the Israelis say, and the American foreign policy establishment goes along. The Palestinians are the bad guys for firing home-made rockets into Israel, sending suicide bombers to blow up buses and discos and pizza stands, or for defending themselves against armed Israeli settlers who live on formerly Palestinian land, land generally taken away without due process.
For that resistance, such Palestinians are labeled terrorists. And so are considered equals in the equation of warring factions that Jimmy Carter should be an honest broker between. And the violence perpetrated by the vastly superior Israeli forces—the firing of rockets into Palestinian civilian neighborhoods by American-manufactured Israeli helicopters, the bull-dozing of Palestinian homes and orchards and agricultural fields, the raids into Palestinian homes by Israeli Defense Force patrols—is considered defensive in nature, and so okay (what if we had supported Germany’s invasion of Poland, or France? Wouldn’t the German’s have called the French Resistance a bunch of “terrorists”?)

And don’t forget, Carter’s other sin is pointing out that Israel’s supporters in the United States would rather we not debate such information in the media or in public here, such as on the floors of Congress where the $3 billion or so in foreign and military aid we send to Israel (which has one of the strongest economies in the world) every year is appropriated. We instead should accept the Israeli and American point of view (there is little difference in the two) as to how we view the conflict and negotiations for the proper road to peace. When was the last time anybody ever talked about the Palestinian point of view?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and not do what everybody else always does at this point in the essay. I think the Palestinian’s violence is a natural response to the situation they find themselves in. I think it is completely understandable. I think they think they are defending themselves, but they would like to see the violence come to an end.
Carter describes in his book a meeting right after the 2006 elections with Hamas legislative secretary and spokesperson Dr. Mahmoud Ramahi, who when pressed on whether Hamas would renounce violence and recognize Israel, responded that Hamas had enforced a cease-fire for 18 months prior to the elections, and “would gladly enforce a cease-fire for ‘two, ten or fifty years’ if Israel would reciprocate by refraining from attacks on Palestinians.”
Neither has happened. But this sentiment was repeatedly and excitedly proclaimed to me personally by Hamas leaders and other Palestinians I met in Gaza and in the West Bank shortly after the beginning of the second and current Intifada. And why exactly is it we always call such people Palestinian militants? They think of themselves as, to borrow a term from Ronald Reagan, freedom fighters. Not terrorists.

So essentially, the foreign policy establishment wants to Carter to shut up about conditions which might argue against the one-sided Vision of the World the United States tries to paint for the American public.