PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Counterpunch
Friday, January 12, 2007
Jimmy Carter, probably the most decent man to occupy the White
House, received a lot of grief during his term in office, most
of it undeserved. His latest book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid
has brought him even more grief, none of it deserved.
My own appreciation of Jimmy Carter is new found. It began with
his previous book, Our Endangered Values, in which Carter criticized
the direction in which George W. Bush was taking America with
his assaults on the Constitution and international law. His latest
book, currently a best seller, shows that Carter has the courage
to match his decency and commitment to peace in the Middle East.
A case can be made that while other US presidents focused on
the Soviet or communist threat, Carter perceived that the greater
threat to world peace and US interests was in the Middle East.
With America's backing Israel was a rising military power whose
policies and existence were viewed as a threat by Arab countries.
After Israel's military successes and Carter's success in arranging
peace between Egypt and Israel, new Arab-Israeli tensions arose
from Israel's refusal to leave occupied Palestine and return to
its own borders.
Over time the occupied lands have been appropriated by Israeli
settlements and now by a massive wall and special roads on which
no Palestinian can travel. Palestinian villages have been cut
off from water, from their fields and groves, from schools and
hospitals, and from one another. Essentially, what was once Palestine
has become isolated ghettos in which the Palestinian inhabitants
cannot enter or depart without Israeli permission.
Israel's policy is to turn Palestinians into refugees and to
incorporate the West Bank into Israel. Slowly over time the policy
has been implemented in the name of fighting terrorism and protecting
Israel. Had Israel tried to achieve this all at once, opposition
would have been great and the crime too large for the world to
accept. Today Israel's gradual destruction of Palestine has become
part of the fabric of everyday affairs.
Many people, including intelligent Israelis, believe that peace
in the Middle East cannot be achieved through military coercion
and that peace requires Israel to abandon its policy of stealing
Palestine from Palestinians. Jimmy Carter, whose long involvement
with the issue makes him very knowledgeable and credible, is one
of these people.
The reason that Israel has been able to appropriate Palestine
unto itself with American aid and support is that Israel controls
the explanation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At least
90% of Americans, if they know anything at all of the issue, know
only the Israeli propaganda line. Israel has been able to control
the explanation, because the powerful Israel Lobby brands every
critic of Israeli policy as an anti-semite who favors a second
holocaust of the Jews.
In Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter takes the risk
of speaking truth to propaganda. Predictably, the Israel Lobby
and its shills ranging from the "conservative" National
Review to "liberal" media and commentators have attempted
to banish Carter by labeling him an "anti-semite."
We must not let the Israel Lobby get away with demonizing an
American president who dares to stand up to their lies.
Carter's book is a readable and factual history of the Israeli-Palestinian
issue and its various turnings. The most powerful chapter is the
penultimate, "The Wall as a Prison."
Carter makes clear that the wall has little to do with Israeli
security and a lot to do with dispossession of the Palestinians.
Carter writes:
"It is obvious that the Palestinians will be left with no
territory in which to establish a viable state, but completely
enclosed within the barrier and the occupied Jordan River valley.
The Palestinians will have a future impossible for them or any
responsible portion of the international community to accept,
and Israel's permanent status will be increasingly troubled and
uncertain as deprived people fight oppression and the relative
number of Jewish citizens decreases demographically (compared
to Arabs) both within Israel and in Palestine. This prospect is
clear to most Israelis, who also view it as a distortion of their
values. Recent events involving Gaza and Lebanon demonstrate the
inevitable escalation in tension and violence within Palestine
and stronger resentment and animosity from the world community
against both Israel and America."
Most Zionists and American neoconservatives could care less about
what the world community thinks. They are concerned only with
Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. They realize that this goal
can only be obtained with military coercion and have discarded
any reliance on negotiation and compromise. Bush, for example,
has refused the unanimous recommendation of the Iraq Study Group
to talk with Iran and Syria. The US and Israeli electorates have
proven to be powerless, while a handful of neoconservatives and
Zionist settlers drive Middle East policy.
Carter is well aware that the "Roadmap for Peace" has
been turned into a propaganda device. Carter writes that Israel
uses the roadmap "as a delaying tactic with an endless series
of preconditions that can never be met while proceeding with plans
to implement its unilateral goals," and that the US uses
it "to give the impression of positive engagement in a 'peace
process,' which President Bush has announced will not be fulfilled
during his time in office."
The Israel Lobby and its bought-and-paid-for minions tried to
demonize Carter for using the word "apartheid" to describe
the Palestinian ghettos that Israel has created. The word calls
to mind the former South African government's policy of racial
separation, which was mild compared to the restrictions and dispossessions
Israel has imposed on Palestinians. A number of commentators have
come to Carter's defense, including Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein
(CounterPunch, Dec. 28, 2006) and former Israeli Minister of Education
Shulamit Aloni (Yediot Acharonot, Israel's largest circulating
newspaper). They point out that within Israel itself Israel's
policy is commonly called apartheid.
If Americans could read the frank discussion in the Israeli press
about Israel's inhuman treatment of Palestinians they would wonder
how they, as Americans with a "free press," became so
totally brainwashed.
In an act of honest statesmanship that is rarely witnessed, Carter
concludes his book:
"The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and
the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to
comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with
official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its
own citizens--and honor its own previous commitments--by accepting
its legal borders. All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel's
right to live in peace under these conditions. The United States
is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying
global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting
the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories.
It will be a tragedy--for the Israelis, the Palestinians, and
the world--if peace is rejected and a system of oppression, apartheid
and sustained violence is permitted to prevail."
One can add to Carter's bottom line that the Bush administration,
American neoconservatives, and the Olmert Israeli government believe
that the solution lies in the use of military force to smash Iraq,
Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah and to inflict cultural genocide on
Muslims by deracinating Islam. This is the path on which Bush
with deceit and treachery is leading America.
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