Jimmy Carter, the middle east and Israel

[jcrew2001]

I haven't followed this Jimmy Carter book situation? What's the scandal behind it?

I'm not jewish, so I'm not very knowledgeable about Israel, but I feel that most of this rise in mid-east terrorism is due to animosity at the Israel/Palestine conflict. I'm concerned that most of the terrorist attacks around the world is collatoral damage fueled by hatred against the west's support for Israel, and this has led to a rise in anti-semitism in Europe.

It also confuses me a bit that although Israel is a Jewish state, are there laws limiting the Muslim population. I'm sure there would be greater peace if there was greater co-operation between the muslim and jewish populations in Israel and this may diffuse the animosity that exists.

[David Dunham]

1. Regrettably, Carter has said a really dumb thing

Carter recently said that the 1000s of rockets that Hezbollah has fired into Israel, killing dozens of civilians, do not amount to terrorism. That is a really dumb thing for him to have said. Firing rockets into civilian cities that kill innocent people is pretty much a terrorist act.

[scarletwoman]

2. Could you provide the actual quote, please? I don't like to make judgements from paraphrases.

Thank you.

[papau]

3. Google will give you a dozen pages of errors that are bias in the book -

but in any case, below are a few:

"This stratagem precipitated the renewed violence that erupted in June when Palestinians dug a tunnel under the barrier that surrounds Gaza and assaulted some Israeli soldiers, killing two and capturing one. They offered to exchange the soldier for the release of 95 women and 313 children who are among almost 10,000 Arabs in Israeli prisons, but this time Israel rejected a swap and attacked Gaza in an attempt to free the soldier and stop rocket fire into Israel."

Why is this a lie? Well, Hamas never offered to exchange Shalit in exchange for ” the release of 95 women and 313 children”. They offered to release information about Shalit in exchange for those women and children under 18. The very minimum that Hamas would ever accept for Shalit was - from the very first moment - all terrorists without blood on their hands.

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On page 97, Carter asserts that “The militant group Hezbollah . . . was formed in Lebanon in 1982 to resist the Israeli occupation.”

Hezbollah’s founding document calls for Islamic rule in Lebanon, an end to Western imperialism and the destruction of the state of Israel. An arm of the Iranian Islamic revolution, Hezbollah’s operatives have been found in France, Spain, Cyprus, Singapore, the “triborder” region of South America and the Philippines, reports Foreign Affairs magazine.

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Carter tells the history of the Six-Day War in 1967 this way: “On June 5, Israel launched preemptive strikes, moving first against Egypt and Syria, then against Jordan.”

While Israel did strike first at Egypt and Syria (waiting to be attacked would have meant national suicide), Israel specifically called upon Jordan to stay out of the fighting. Jordan’s King Hussein, putting faith in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s claim that Egypt was defeating Israel, chose to shell Jerusalem. Israel then turned its full might on Jordan, driving them out of Jerusalem and the West Bank.

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Carter claims that “The Israelis have never granted any appreciable autonomy to the Palestinians.”

In December 2000, pursuant to the Oslo Accords, Israel gave nearly complete autonomy to the Palestinians in the disputed territories and even gave the Palestinian security forces weapons. In return, the Palestinians were supposed to prevent terror attacks against Israel.

The PA fail to prevent terror attacks; indeed, it organized and carried them out.

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Carter's famous nasty anti-Semitic asides:

"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."

Never trust Jews - they can't change - they never change, eh?

The Bible does not record Jesus receiving complaints about holy sites and culture from the Samaritans.

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Carter told CNN in an interview that although Hamas were "so-called terrorists," so far "there have been no complaints of corruption against elected officials." ..."there is an element within Hamas who deny Israel’s right to exist"

But apparently his lack of condemnation of that "no right to exist" in the remainder of the interview must mean that "no right to exist" thing is no big deal to Carter.

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Carter writes that "the area along the Jordan River, which is now planned as the eastern leg of the encirclement of the Palestinians, is one of Palestine's most lucrative and productive agricultural regions." (p. 195) American Jewish Committee Executive Director David Harris has noted that Carter's claim that Israel plans to build an eastern fence in the Jordan Valley to completely surround the Palestinian areas on all sides and turn them into Bantustans is false. The Israeli government never approved the early proposal for an eastern fence. The plan was unceremoniously tossed out some years ago, emerging still-born, as reported widely in the Israeli and international media. Yet Carter pretends that the eastern barrier is an approved and operative Israeli government plan, just like the barrier now going up in the western portion of the West Bank.
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Carter claims that there are 375,000 Palestinians stuck on the "Israeli" side of the "wall." In fact, the modifications to the barrier's route that Israel is currently making as a result of a dozen lawsuits working their way through Israel's High Court will reduce the 20,000 - 40,000 West Bank Palestinians now left on the Israeli side to just 2,500 (according to statements made to me and an Americans for Peace Now delegation by Israel's Justice Minister in June 2006). One must add to that the 175,000 Palestinians with East Jerusalem Israeli resident identity cards; but the total number is significantly less than what Carter claims.

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Carter's two obstacles to peace are as follows:

"1. Some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize
Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of
increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinians; and

2. Some Palestinians react by honoring suicide bombers as martyrs to be
rewarded in heaven and consider the killing of Israelis as victories.

In turn Israel responds with retribution and oppression, and militant
Palestinians refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Israel and vow to destroy the nation."


Carter pretends he does not know: Palestinian rejectionism preceded Israel's occupation and is an independent cause of the conflict. Palestinian rejectionism will not evaporate when the occupation ends.

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The loaded word "apartheid":

The analogy to the hated policies of South Africa, despite the book actually saying that what is going on in Israel today "is unlike that in South Africa - not racism, but the acquisition of land."
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Presenting both sides:

He never presents the possibility that Israel's motivation for holding on to land it captured in a defensive war is the prevention of terrorism. Israel has tried, on several occasions, to exchange land for peace, and what it got instead was terrorism, rockets, and kidnappings launched from the returned land.
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Carter has no problem with Arab - the Islamic world - negotiating under the rules that what is mine is mine, and what is yours we will discuss - accepting at face value the Islamic concept of "dar al-Islam" in which any land that was under Muslim rule is always Muslim property.


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[Violet_Crumble]

7. Where's the quote?

I didn't see it in there....

[newyorican]

9. There is no quote...

...just more paraphrasing dipshittery someone is trying to pass off as an actual quote from Pres. Carter.

[Violet_Crumble]

10. Yeah, I figured as much..

It's fun sometimes to send people off on fruitless searches. I figure that's why the poster who made the original claim that Carter had said it hasn't returned to the thread...they're still busy searching :)

[Tom Joad]

4. Best thing to do is just get the book. But check out this post.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=124&topic_id=162586&mesg_id=162586

Israel does oppress the Palestinian population in many ways. From its founding, when over 700,000 Palestinians were forced to flee and become refugees, till today, when their land is being taken, many roads are closed to Palestinians (in the West Bank, taken by military force), land is being taken by settlers, a wall is being built in their land (not along the international recognized border, but often deep within the West Bank) that seperates Palestinians from their jobs, medical care, crops, other Palestnian communities.

US support for Israeli policies does really hurt US prestige in much of the world. The US was the only nation, for example, that did not press Israel to agree to a ceasefire, but encouraged it to "finish the job" in Lebanon.

there is a terrible humanitarian crisis in Gaza... Israel has bombed out the power plant, closed the borders, and made life miserable for the many who live there. Hard to say the US is about "peace" and "democracy" when stuff like this is in plain view. Of course its not in plain view of many americans, who are not paying attention.

[Tom Joad]

5. Check out this site too...

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=788


When the talk gets too serious, Send in the clown (Carter, the media and Dershowitz: Reflections by Finkelstein)



12.28.2006 | CounterPunch.org
By Norman G. Finkelstein

As Jimmy Carter's new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid<1> climbs the bestseller list, the reaction of Israel's apologists scales new peaks of lunacy. I will examine a pair of typical examples and then look at the latest weapon to silence Carter.

Apartheid Analogy

No aspect of Carter's book has evoked more outrage than its identification of Israeli policy in the Occupied Palestinian Territory with apartheid. Michael Kinsley in the Washington Post called it "foolish and unfair," the Boston Globe editorialized that it was "irresponsibly provocative," while the New York Times reported that Jewish groups condemned it as "dangerous and anti-Semitic."<2>

In fact the comparison is a commonplace among informed commentators.

From its initial encounter with Palestine the Zionist movement confronted a seemingly intractable dilemma: How to create a Jewish state in a territory that was overwhelmingly non-Jewish? Israeli historian Benny Morris observes that Zionists could choose from only two options: "the way of South Africa" -- i.e., "the establishment of an apartheid state, with a settler minority lording it over a large, exploited native majority" -- or "the way of transfer" -- i.e., "you could create a homogeneous Jewish state or at least a state with an overwhelming Jewish majority by moving or transferring all or most of the Arabs out."<3>

During the British Mandate period (1917-1947) Zionist settlers labored on both fronts, laying the foundations of an apartheid-like regime in Palestine while exploring the prospect of expelling the indigenous population. Norman Bentwich, a Jewish officer in the Mandatory government who later taught at the Hebrew University, recalled in his memoir that, "One of the causes of resentment between Arabs and Jews was the determined policy of the Jewish public bodies to employ only Jewish workers....This policy of 'economic apartheid' was bound to strengthen the resistance of Arabs to Jewish immigration."<4>

[Behind the Aegis]

6. Simply...

The book is presented as fair, when it is in fact biased and anti-Israeli. There are several glaring omissions, and some mistakes. Since the release of the book, he has gone on a tour. During the course of the tour, he has placed his foot in his mouth a few times. There are a number of threads here in I/P that you can explore on the topic.

Your last paragraph is incorrect. Muslims and Arabs in Israel share the same laws. The only one that they do not share is that Jewish people can zip through the citizen process. There is, of course, discrimination and bigotry in Israel, as there is in all nations.

[Violet_Crumble]

8. Link to an article by Jimmy Carter himself...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/17/AR2007011701712.html

[Lithos]

11. Was going to leave this open

But in reviewing the comments, most appear to be sour grapes resulting from two views of the same elephant. The only difference is there are more "quotes" out in the press to pull from. Nothing new there.

Lithos
DU Moderator

[Lithos]

12. Locking per I/P guidelines

Not based on a recent news or op-ed article.

Lithos
DU Moderator