Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
by

Jimmy Carter

Carter's account of his involvement in the Middle East crisis is influenced by multiple effects, which explain his daring deviation from mainstream American politics: 1- Christian beliefs: - Carter's devout Christian beliefs underline his incessant drive to defend the Christian right to the Holy land, in equal footage with Jewish and Islamic claims. He starts his book with scripts from the Bible, condemning the blood shed of the sons of Abraham. In his frequent visits to Palestine, Carter went to every place where he thought Jesus had lived, walked, or breached. He even dived into the Dead Sea to experience the baptism of early Christianity. - Carter was unsettled with the alteration of the places of Christ's birth and wished to see them the way they were when Christ lived. Such unreal wishful expectation is genuinely expressed by an exnuclear engineer and prominent leader of a super power. - His Christian beliefs made the Israeli leaders distrust and even fool him. After Carter's retiring from presidency, Menachem Begin reneged on his promises in Camp David and humiliated him for requesting an explanation for such lack of honor. Begin fulfilled his obligation to Egypt, yet slaughtered, imprisoned, and robbed the Palestinians. All Israeli figures, which Carter has praised, never honored their promises to him. - On the Arab side, Hafez Assad expressed to Carter his sworn intent never to visit America and his faith in Saladin's doctrine of freeing the Middle East from invaders. Carter admired the pristine thinking, eloquent expression, and honest confrontation of Assad. He also touched on the criminal and persecutory history of Begin. He goes further to claim that Jews were treated better under Islamic rulers than under Christian rulers and attributes that to the recognition by Muhammad of the two prior religions. A strength in Islam that is unmatched by others. - Carter questions the secular nature of the Jewish government and distinguishes between the two Israels; the biblical Israel, which Americans attach to the state of Israel, and the real Israel that perpetrates apartheid. He graphically describes Golda Meir's smoking habit while addressing the issue of secularism. 2- Political experience: - Carter praises every Israeli leader he met even with the realization that they all played the game of grabbing land from the Palestinians and treating the Palestinians as subhuman. His calm and probing attitude enabled him to establish that persistent and ingrained hatred of Israelis to non-Israelis. Even when he details the long and constant violation of Israelis to human rights, Carter attempts to balance his views by blaming the Palestinians for violence. He even accuses them by being tunnel visioned in dreaming with the impossible and compromising their options for peace. - Apartheid, he claims, is on grabbing land, not on racism. [If land is being grabbed by one race of people and from another race, and the latter is imprisoned and oppressed, wouldn't that be racism?] Carter coined the word ''incompatible", to describe the Arab and Israeli relationship, after an Israeli politician. Yet, Carter never questioned the incompatibility of those who escaped the persecution in East Europe with their persecutors. He thus accepted the plausible term of "incompatibility" as a substitute for "racism". - Carter explains that the American superpower cannot do what others expect it to, in reaching peace in the Middle East. Yet, he admits to the $10 million daily support paid to Israel by America and the military support that enables Israel to oppress its captive population of Palestinians. How has America been willing to demolish the state of Iraq, causing hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, while failing to curtail the Israeli apartheid? Carter blames the democratic system for such lack of logical, focused, or consistent course of history: the Congress and the Knesset decide, the president or prime minister proposes. 3- Racial past: - Carter likens the Palestinians extermination by Israel with the native Indians extermination by the white European from his home, Georgia. He also cites the failure of apartheid South Africa from the mouth of Rabin, after the latter's return form a visit to it. He further reminds the reader with the persecution of Christ by the same people of Israel. - During a morning jog in Jerusalem, an Israeli soldier escort belligerently hits a harmless Arab bystander, when Carter requested the Israeli escort to leave his company. Carter repeatedly elaborates on such dark side of the powerful and arrogant occupiers and the helplessness of the Palestinians. - Carter explains the difference between the various Jewish denominations of Israel and traces their persecution in Eastern Europe to their current victimization of the Palestinians. He does not go as far as George Soros by claiming that the perpetrator-victim cycle has been implanted in the psyche of Jewish immigrants by their Christian abusers. 4- American make-up: - The free mindedness of southern, well-educated, religious, and prominent American is contrasted by the close minded, victimized, and obsessed Israelis and Arabs. Such contrast enables Carter to see what the two adversaries could not. Carter looks for opportunities to compromise and change in rigid beliefs in hope to obtain concessions. Sadat was his best friend and subject for willingness to change. Assad was diagonally the opposite. The Israelis were yielding only to material forces. - The remoteness of American culture to the theater of conflict and the passion of Christianity hindered Carter's understanding of the deep motives of the conflicting parties. The Israelis sense the inevitable long term threat of their opponents in view of historic facts and admitted beliefs. The Palestinians never gave up on their rights. Amidst such historic conflict, Carter exercises the pragmatic American reasoning for resolving disputes. - Carter's latest and daring punch to apartheid might have been uninhibited sense of Americanism, yarning for human equality. That breached his restrained political reservation. Empowered by presidency, faith, education, Nobel Prize, and activism, Carter gathered his courage and equated Zionism with apartheid. In contravention, George W. Bush appoints John Bolton to the UN in reward to his sanitizing of Zionism. The book is written as a documentary account in 16 chapters and 7 appendices. The appendices are handy source of information on the subject matter. Except for the errors that Egypt's population was 47 millions and the myth of direct descent of King Abdullah of Jordan from Prophet Muhammad, the book is fairly accurate on the development between WWI to date.

By

Mohamed F. El-Hewie