His last book was entitled, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” His forthcoming book has - at least on the surface - a more anodyne title.
AP reports:
ATLANTA (AP) — Former President Jimmy Carter has written a new book on the Middle East with a title he hopes will not be as controversial as the last one, which was called, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”
Carter said Wednesday night that “We Can Bring Peace to the Holy Land” will be published in January, just after the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama.
“I was going to call it, ‘Yes, We Can.’ My wife talked me out of it,” Carter joked toward the end of a panel discussion on human rights at The Carter Center. He offered no further details on the new text, to be published by Simon & Schuster.
As president, Carter brokered peace between Israel and Egypt. But Jewish groups and some fellow Democrats strongly objected to his book published two years ago because it compared Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories with former racial oppression in South Africa.
During the panel discussion at the conclusion of a two-day forum of international human rights activists, Carter said the “persecution of Palestinians” and lack of U.S. commitment to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict remains one of the most volatile issues in the Muslim world.
He said when he took office in 1977, there had been four wars and Arab oil embargoes, and he saw a need to begin tackling Middle East peace in the first year of his administration. Those efforts led to the 1979 Camp David Accords.
“We’ve had very few efforts since then to bring about a comprehensive peace,” Carter said.
Carter, 84, has been a prolific author since leaving the White House, in 1981. His many best sellers include “An Hour Before Daylight” and “Our Endangered Values.”
It’s certainly true that this title is not as eye-catching as the last one. What I’m wondering is whether Carter will now invert the focus on the word “apartheid.” In his last book, the word was emblazoned in the title, but the text signally failed to draw a meaningful comparison with South Africa’s legally enshrined racial discrimination - although it did lead to the resignation of one of his most knowledgeable and respected advisers. Will he now, forgetting about the title, try to make a substantive case for the apartheid analogy?
Obviously, we will have to wait for the book for a definitive answer. Even so, I doubt that I’m going out on a limb in predicting that the new book will hardly amount to a reversal of his previous position.
Since the publication of “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” Carter has, if anything, become more entrenched in his hostility towards Israel. Back in May, for example, he complimented Hamas for its moderation, and chastised Israel for apparently blocking a ceasefire.
Examine his statements in the AP report above. This is a man who advances the dubious thesis that the question of Israel lies at the heart of Islamist enmity towards the west. Less than a week after the terrorist atrocities in Mumbai, during which the Jews murdered alongside nearly 200 others were categorically not asked if they were Israelis, and on a day when Israeli soldiers are forcibly evicting settler extremists from Hebron, the former President still insists that Israel’s control of Palestinian territories is the main grievance.
If this is what we can expect in his new book, why the superficially folksy title, with its reference to “The Holy Land”? In his review of the earlier book with the incendiary title, Jeffrey Goldberg may have inadvertently provided an answer which suggests something deeper and more troubling:
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, seemingly 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.
Perhaps there are worse things than being caricatured as an “apartheid state.” At any rate, we’ll soon find out.
Jimmy Carter, in my opinion, is a religious zealot. Here is where Carter’s faith takes him, as reported in Goldberg’s review of his book in 2006:
“On his first visit to the Jewish state… Carter writes…” 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.”
Here’s Hitchens on same:
“Here is a man who, in his latest book on theIsrael-Palestine crisis, has found the elusive key to the problem. The mistakeof Israel, he tells us (and tells us that he told the Israeli leadership) is to have moved away from God and the prophets and toward secularism. If you ever feel like a good laugh, just tell yourself that things would improve if only theIsraeli government would be more Orthodox. Jimmy Carter will then turn hisvacantly pious glare on you, as if to say that you just don’t understand what it is to have a personal savior.”
And even Chomsky agrees with this prognosis, from an aposite angle, of course:
“… Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born again Christian.”
I think Carter’s view of Jews and Israel is basically similar to that of TS Eliot. The great poet did not mind the identifiable religious Jews who were preoccupied with their religious observances and lifestyle. It was “any large number of free-thinking Jews” that was “undesirable,”.
I’m wondering if that’s why Carter finds favour with Hamas and Hizzbala: they are so tightly religious, and far from free-thinking. Will he still support Palestinians if they become as secular as Israelis?